Last week Gordon Brown announced the UK General election is to be held on May 6th. It’s battle stations for all the political parties.

We at glue are handling the Green Party’s 2010 offering with the aim of getting their first ever MP elected to the UK Parliament. This article gives insight to our approach.

To gain maximum cut through our campaign focuses on two main objectives:
a) Position the party as a credible alternative to Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats
b) Convey their range of policies (i.e. more than just the environment)

We observed that although all three parties are talking about “change”, the vast majority of voters we spoke to told us they saw the parties as indecipherable from one another.

Our communications strategy positions the Green Party as the only real alternative to the cosy political establishment. After all, one more Tory, Labour or Lib Dem MP really isn’t going to make much difference.

We also realised that without the financial clout and media coverage of the main parties, it’s essential the Green Party campaign is noticed by both the electorate and the media, and stands out among the cacophony of news stories and political advertising between now and May 6th.

In order to stretch this limited budget, and with an awareness that some minds can’t be won, we identified and focussed in on 2 audience segments which we feel we stand the best chance of swinging votes:

Disillusioned Labour are the 2.4 million key-workers who feel they’ve been let down over the years by the current government.

What we found was although this audience aren’t Stephen Fry, they are digitally active, especially using the web and email, and they are using the phone for beyond just calls.

Disillusioned Labour are complemented by the Green Party Heartland segment, made up by the more affluent who’s opinions are shared with the Green Party, but whose votes are needed. This segment differs to the last in that they’re much more digitally active. They’re high users of the web, their mobile use is sophisticated, they’re socially active and interestingly can be seen to create and share content.

These 2 sets of insight in combination were used to plan out the core campaign elements, where they exist, how people find them and how they’re shared.

However, simply talking to the electorate in a different way to the other parties isn’t enough. It’s imperative we behave in a very different way too.

Rather than only rely on the usual media channels, we’re putting politics in the pocket of the electorate and allowing the public to decide when, where and how they interact with the Green Party, be it via TV, web or mobile:

Before we go through each of those campaign elements individually, it’s worth first mentioning the visual treatment. At a time when the electorate is being bombarded by personal attacks and political mudslinging, we wanted to take a fresh approach. We used the colours associated with the different parties to create a striking graphic campaign that focused solely on Green Party policies. This treatment is carried across the campaign:

The new 3 minute Party Election Broadcast and Billboard Posters are the antithesis of the usual political advertising – no airbrushed faces, no politicians kissing babies, no fist pumping or hysterics – just differentiated policies, simply put.

It will go out on TV 10 times over the duration of the campaign and was created by Duck Eye.

The Election Broadcast is supported by 6 Billboard Posters, each messaging a core policy. They go out across 50 sites, 10 in each of the core constituencies and the rest nationally.

Banks / bonuses:

Housing:

NHS:

Pensions:

Living wage:

Each poster contains a text short code linking to mobile internet site where other policies can be viewed. Each policy also contains the ability to view the associated policy video.

The Election Broadcast, posters and mobile site all push people towards the campaign hub OnlyGreen.org.uk, where a range of functionality exists including the ability to view the Election Broadcast:

The site also offers the ability for supporters to create and send a Personalised Election Broadcast to a friend - a world-first for a political party.

By filling in a few simple details about a friend or relative this tool will send them a bespoke personal video from you, tailored to the issues most concerning them and highlighting the Green Party policies that are relevant.

Along with the ability to read all policies in detail, people can take a Policy Matchmaker test. This interactive quiz helps potential voters see how closely their views match with those of the Green Party. This is done by answering 10 simple questions on a range of issues. Once completed you receive a score that tells you how closely your views match with the Green Party.

Most people are surprised to find they think like The Green Party on a wide range of issues. People are encouraged to share this surprise with friends by posting their result to their Facebook news feed, to a friend as an email or via SMS.

Sending it by SMS links to a mobile version of the Policy Matchmaker which allows people to take the test on the move. It’s been created using some pretty unique technology from Grapple where technically speaking you build once and publish across devices (around 400 handsets including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia etc.)

If you text ‘green’ to 83040 you’ll get a link to it.

The Obama campaign in the US, and Green success in Local and European elections, taught us that the web is as much a battleground as the high street, and managing and responding to conversations will be key for all parties. We’ll be working closely with the Green Party to ensure this happens, and we’ll kick start activities by encouraging the existing 50,000 people on the Green Party’s email list, the 12,000 members of their Facebook pages, the 8,000 Twitter followers and the 600 YouTube followers to get involved with the cause and send it to friends.

Other campaign elements include:

A Twibbon that people can apply to their Facebook and Twitter profile pics.

Seeding of policy videos in niche key sector community sites through Unruly Media.

Pay per click search provided by Vizeum to help people find the campaign quickly.

The livery to the campaign tour bus.

Some shop displays within Lush stores.

Some sentiment analysis being produced by Aevolve

And some mobile inventory kindly donated by AdMob

Text short codes kindly set up by Marvellous

It would be false to think everybody will see all elements of this campaign. What we’ve attempted to do is, based on the values the Green Party want to communicate and where their audience live their digital lives, create a campaign mix that has gives the best chance of changing minds.

We strongly feel the Green Party are not only bringing a fresh approach to political advertising, but are also fundamentally changing the terms on which political parties engage with the electorate. By allowing the public to dictate when and where they interact with the party, empowering enthusiasts to send personalised video content to friends, and helping curious voters easily see if they match Green values, the Green Party stand their best ever chance of sending their first MP to Westminster.

It’s been a huge effort for the whole team here and the many partners who’ve helped along the way. Lets hope we contribute towards the first elected Green Party MP.

I managed to get myself over to the Kinetica art fair yesterday, a show curated from artists specialising in kinetic, electronic, robotic, light, sound and time-based works.

The exhibition was a visual extravaganza of electronic wizardry and macabre machines - confirmed by my 5 year old son Robin who for once didn’t moan that he was hungry throughout - although he did want the beer poured from a robotic waiter.

For me this piece, entitled Trace by Balint Bolygo was the stand out. The work consisted of a revolving plaster cast of a person’s head which was slowly deconstructed into a mathematical diagram.

This happened using a mechanical contraption that relayed the changing contours of the heads rotation to a pen connected via a series of metal arms, resulting in these impressive drawings:

Pic courtesy of The Telegraph

Pic courtesy of Chris O’Shea

For other works, also see Pixelsumo’s review who I’m glad to say was in agreement, plus see the Beeb for a vid.

Sport’s Illustrated have produced a nice little demo of the types of content and interfaces that we can expect from devices like the iPad:

In terms of general approach it’s not too far away from Bonnie’s prototype created by Berg.

Beyond the cleverness in interface and content, these devices present a real opportunity to take ad targeting to the next level.

Historical location based targeting has struggled to take off. It’s generally mobile based and plays out as follows: I’m passing Boots and get a Bluetooth coupon giving me 50% off toothpaste. 2 problems. 1. No targeting - it blanket sweeps all passers by. 2. Timing - I might want toothpaste, but I’m on my way elsewhere and don’t have time to stop.

So what’s needed is a system that a) learns what I buy and b) learns when I buy it, or more importantly when I’m thinking about buying it so I can plan for changes.

By using these 2 bits of info in combination brands can gain visibility to the right people at the point of decision, and not just when their physically near a point of sale.

I’ll bring in Dopplr’s rather snazzy diagram at this point to help explain things: (you can read their use of it here)

The bit where the 2 cones converge is the sweet spot. This is the present where the past and the future collide. Now we’ve highlighted that just getting into the present doesn’t necessarily work, it’s the decision making present we want to find. That’s when the What and the When need to be delivered.

And that’s where these devices play their part.

On the whole we’re all creatures of routine. We do the same things on the same days, buy the same brands with the same frequency and generally speaking, patterns emerge.

By interpreting these patterns and tying all these loose ends of learnings together for a single cause, we face the exciting prospect that these devices will enable brands to deliver their messages with maximum efficiency.

See here for further insights.

Photographer Brandon Voges came up with a simple and surprisingly novel idea: photograph portraits of people hanging upside down by their ankles. Then invite your closest friends to do the same. The resulting eerie series “Upside Downey Face” is a collection of unsettling, strange images of people flipped the wrong way up.

Looks a bit like there squeezing one out to me.

Via.

To support a film, unfortunately not UK.

Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) by Gebhard Sengmüller is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.

Via.

An image of the Holy Mother made of Easter eggs has gone on display at the St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. About 15,000 hand-painted eggs were used by Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas to create the piece.

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The ROBOTAGGER, built by Golan Levin, is an industrial robot arm programmed with GML, the new “Graffiti Markup Language” created by Evan Roth and pals at the FAT Lab:

GML is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. What it enables is the transfer of graffiti tags from creator to another destination, via computer. So what that means is your tag could be drawn on the other side of the world from where you are in realtime.

What the Robotagger does is brings this virtualised format back into the real world.

Lets do a collective mural.

More optical illusions inspired by ‘Gallop‘ the childrens book.

It’s amazing how much the work of Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen continues to inspired people. Here’s one of his “Strandbeest” walking mechanisms done in paper.

Such complex movements achieved with paper! Via.