"We never ad it so good" - the 1979 election campaign
A deep dive into the 1970s this weekend. Here is a column about the ad campaign of 1979, and tomorrow I will publish a long-read interview with my uncle David Kemp about his impressions from the engine room of UK politics back then,
The general election of 1979 had some parallels with today - dominated as it was by the cost of living, inflation and strikes. The ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi are generally credited with helping the Tories under Margaret Thatcher to get their historic victory.
Back then, before the age of clickbait, databases and algorithms, the ad campaign was almost all about the big picture - what we used to call ‘above the line’. The Saatchi campaign was a heady cocktail that could be enjoyed by pretty much everyone over 18 - a dash of humour, a dash of self-belief and a double measure of vision.
I came across strategy mastermind Tim Bell’s post-election reflections in a book I read recently. They made me wonder - have we forgotten some stuff that we used to know? Does marketing today get a bit stuck in the weeds? Is personalisation - a separate story for every customer segment - slightly bullshit? After all, everyone likes a bargain, right?
And as to the culture war, wedge issue, divide and conquer approach that Rishi Sunak seems to be punting - that stuff is pure poison. Sunak’s advisor Isaac Levido worked for Scott Morrison - the Australian premier who stood on the beach denying climate change while koala bears died screaming in the burning eucalyptus groves behind him. At the moment there is broad consensus about the importance of net zero in the UK - but the Conservatives seem to be hoping to end that.
What about Labour? Keir Starmer’s party is in a good position to take the centre ground in England - but they would probably benefit from some of the excitement and cheery confidence that Sastchi and Sastchi managed to project back then.
“Warm, confident, non-divisive and exciting”
In 1979, the Conservative campaign intentionally reached out to trade unionists, working-class women, and first-time voters, as well as traditional supporters. It also focused on increasing dissatisfaction with the Labour government’s record.
In an essay entitled “The Conservatives Advertising Campaign” in Political Communications, the General Election of 1979’, ad exec Tim Bell recalled the four adjectives the marketing team chose to capture the feelings they were looking for - warm, confident, non-divisive and exciting.
“ ‘Warmth' just meant talking with people instead of to or at them,” he wrote. ‘Confidence', on the other hand, was an attribute we worked to re-create…The Conservative Party had lost its position as the party ranked by the electorate as the most competent and confident. It was, therefore, essential for us to talk in a confident tone as though we knew that Conservative policies would work.
“Non-divisive' because a national appeal does actually reach further and deeper than a party appeal. The one-nation concept is much more powerful than appealing to any particular position on an ideological spectrum, whether it's the left, the left-middle, the right-middle, or the right.
“Exciting because we felt that politics had become unbelievably tedious and boring. Here after all was an election which could result in Britain's first woman Prime Minister. That was rather an exciting thought for the general public and we thought it would not hurt to make the whole approach exciting.”
The emotional associations of a Conservative vote
Advertising in those days saw itself as a blunt instrument, Bell’s team used this to create “emotional associations” - this is where the vision comes in.
“And this, very simply, was that a Conservative vote is a vote for freedom, choice, opportunity, small government and prosperity. The notion was that if you asked people what a vote for the Tories means, they should snap out with an answer which in some ways reflects these associations. We were not talking about incomes policies, or tax cuts, or industrial relations legislation, or public expenditure. We were talking about the emotional meaning of a Conservative vote.”
The campaign set out to reach out across the electorate. There were quizzes in women’s magazines - “Do this quiz to find out if you’re Labour or Conservative” where every sensible answer was C. A series of reverse supermarket ads focused on inflation: “One pinta for the price of two!” “Special offer, up eightpence!” “Cheddar cheese - doubled in price!”. As the 1978/79 winter of discontent - snow and strikes - unfolded and people seemed tired and miserable, the team unveiled a new slogan “Cheer Up! Labour can’t hang on forever”.
A double-page spread in every popular newspaper explained why trade unionists should vote Conservative.
“Although that particular advertisement has since won numerous awards for its copy, it was never expected to be read by everybody. Its function was simply to point out that a great deal can be said in favour of Conservative trade unionists. That’s sometimes how advertising works; that’s how that advertisement worked.”
That’s right - they didn’t expect anyone to read it. Above the line was what counted.
The “Shopping Basket Election”
In fact, the campaign of 1979 had its roots a decade earlier. 1970 was the first time professional advertisers were brought into a UK general election - by the Conservatives. In an essay in the same book, entitled “The Politics of Communication or the Communication of Politics”, ad exec Barry Day recalled plotting that campaign strategy:
“What was that election really all about?...It became clear that what concerned people the most was the cost of living. The diminishing pound in their pockets….We called it ‘the Shopping Basket election’. The media picked it up.”
The campaign team used party political broadcasts as if they were ad slots - images included scissors cutting a piece off a pound note ‘the ten bob pound”, and a frozen wage packet in the family freezer.
The 1970 team also for the first time identified the working-class housewife as a potential new Tory voter - “she had never had it so bad”.
“Even wives of traditional Labour supporters were getting edgy. Was there a chance that for the first time, we could disturb the historical class voting pattern of the working-class family and persuade her to vote differently from her husband?”
The 1970 campaign was successful - research showed many working-class women did vote Conservative for the first time. But, by 1974, Day wrote, the Party “had forgotten the lessons we learnt together the hard way,” and they lost power for five years.
‘We have to learn again to be one nation or one day we shall be no nation'
The Conservative campaign team was expecting an election in autumn 1978 - so they were able to take full advantage of the issues that arose over the winter (of discontent) and use them to ram home their message that the government was failing.
Bell wrote: “Although it's an over-simplification to say that 'governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them, it is true that an opposition must use communication techniques effectively to sharpen public dissatisfaction with the government rather than satisfaction with the opposition. Everything we did was directed towards increasing the salience of this dissatisfaction; towards transforming a vague dislike of the circumstances in which people were living into a burning issue for them. We did, of course, propose as well as oppose but it is patently obvious from our work that we spent more time opposing than we did proposing. In short, oppositions win elections by ensuring that governments lose - and that is the opportunity with which we were presented by the winter of discontent.”
With industrial relations deteriorating, the campaign team pivoted to a change of format. In a party political broadcast on January 17, Margaret Thatcher talked for almost ten minutes, head to camera, about the situation in the country. The ad team did not write the script but advised on tone and style. In a moment Bell thought won her the election, Thatcher sent out a unifying message:
“Technically, this is a party political broadcast... We have to learn again to be one nation or one day we shall be no nation.”
The Opposition acted like the Government
Bell concluded: “Our contribution on its own did not win the campaign. In a sense, the Labour government lost the election by not holding it earlier. In May 1979, the campaign was taking place against the backdrop of the winter of discontent and of Mrs Thatcher's broadcast at that time. Even before the winter of 1979-80, we had discovered that most people wanted an election. Mr Callaghan certainly did himself no favours at all by delaying the election.
“Our summary of the campaign itself is that the government behaved like an opposition and the opposition behaved like the government. That too was a critical factor in determining the result. We were talking about something new, while they were talking about more of the same - and more of the same is not very appealing to people who feel that what they've got is not very good. We were helped, in addition, by an enormous amount of luck. In the build-up, for example, we had written the ‘Cheer up! Labour can't hang on forever’ poster three months before the strikes during the winter of 1979-80. It was pure luck that we had that poster on the boards and ready to run.”
Conclusion
Of course, the politician of recent times who has best learned the lessons of 1979 is Boris Johnson. Johnson is a venal narcissist, unfit to be the minister of dog licences. But he was able to get his message in the 2019 election across with a simple, broad-based pitch. Democrats of all persuasions should take note.
Reading Tim Bell’s essay reminds me that effective political campaigning is not rocket science. Arguably, the more like rocket science it pretends to be, the more bogus it actually maybe is.
The energy for change comes from the gap between where people feel we are today - and the vision of where they believe we could be tomorrow.