Jonathan Milne: It’s what the political campaign slogans leave unsaid, innit

Comment

As the political machines bring in their copywriters and campaign strategists, erect their billboards and pump up their marketing campaigns, voters may well be left asking: What’s in it for me?

Analysis: Mark Easterbrook tells me there are no new ideas in advertising. He should know: he was the copywriter who came up with the award-winning slogan “We’re in it for you” – 10 years ago, for Genesis Energy.

The chances are high of brainstorming a positioning line, then finding a previous wordsmith who has already coined it. “I’ve done it myself,” he says. “I think we found out at the time that someone else had used it.”

At that time, Genesis told investors it was placing its customers and communities at the center of its business; now, Labour is using the same phrase to show it “understands the challenges” New Zealanders face.

Yesterday, when leader Chris Hipkins announced the party’s 2023 election slogan “In it for you”, it sparked memories of other marketing campaigns. Labor activist Greg Presland, the chair of the Waitakere Ranges local board, doubtfully likened it to Robert Muldoon’s 1975 “individualistic” campaign slogan, “New Zealand the way you want it”.

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Similarly, National’s “back on track” has been used by various pro-rail environmental movements around the world – perhaps a somewhat ironic conjunction, given National’s campaign promises to upgrade roads.

Canada’s left-liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected on a platform of “Real change”, the same slogan now embraced by New Zealand’s right-liberal Act Party.

The Greens’ slogan, “The time is now”, is reminiscent of the 1972 campaign for US President Richard Nixon: “Now, more than ever,” his bumper stickers read.

Both Green co-leaders are fond of this language. Last week, Marama Davidson told supporters at the party AGM, “I know Aotearoa needs our solutions more than ever”.

The same weekend, I was watching the Marvel movie Black Panther with the kids. The slogan has become so clichéd that the superhero leader T’Challa makes a speech to the United Nations promising to build bridges between nations: “Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence,” he declares.

As Alex Caton writes in the Washington Post, “Now more than ever” is a catchy distillation of civic angst that adds gravity to a sales pitch or protest.

It re-emerged in the aftermath of the terror attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

“In the autumn of 2001 and for some time afterward, politicians and opinionators alike used the gravity of ‘now’ to back up prescriptive claims, some more logical than others. Among things needed then more than ever were the Fourth Amendment, Amtrak, the Olympics, lower taxes, and proven leadership for New Jerseyans, and orchestras.”

Opponents of the Donald Trump presidency have embraced the phrase, too, but there’s a danger in rebranding laudable, but ultimately routine, civic engagement – like voting – as a next-level resistance.

“Now” can’t last forever, Caton adds. “The political moment is ripe for ‘outrage fatigue’.”

There is nothing new under the sun

Easterbrook quotes U2’s Bono, who was in turn paraphrasing someone else: “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief.”

“There are over a dozen songs on Apple Music called ‘I believe in you’,” Easterbrook says. “There’s a TV show and a movie both out at the moment called Poker Face. Creative professionals are constantly reusing, recycling, or rediscovering something that already exists.”

Like any positioning line, the proof is in what you deliver – or what Easterbrook would call the brand experience. “If Labour can demonstrate through policy and actions that they are ‘in it for me/us’, then it’s a good line.”

The deeper message of a political slogan is often in what it leaves unsaid.

“Back on track” suggests New Zealand has gone off the rails. “Real change” implies the change offered by National and Labour is superficial. “The time is now” is explicit about the urgency of climate decisions, but implicitly it suggests they mattered less when we voted three years ago, and will have become meaningless by the time the 2026 election rolls around.

Voters could perhaps infer from “In It for You” that Labour will deliver to the hip pocket of its support base in a way the opposition parties will not. So does it convey a regrettable appeal to individualism, as Presland fears?

Easterbrook doesn’t think so: “The fact that ‘you’ can be singular or plural is a smart decision — it can mean Labour are in it for individual voters, for communities, for workers, for farmers, whoever.”

Yet as the political machines bring in their copywriters and campaign strategists, erect their billboards and pump up their TV and social media marketing campaigns, voters may well be left asking: What’s in it for me?