Mark Pack discusses the ways in which technologies are changing campaigning techniques.
Taking part in one of the panels at the excellent Parties, People and Elections: Political Communication since 1900 conference a few weeks ago, I heard Nottingham’s Phil Cowley once again push his “Cowley’s Law of Campaigning” (not to be confused with Cowley’s Syndrome). Phil’s a charming man and he insisted he would keep on mentioning the law until his mother got the pleasure of seeing someone put it into print, so who am I to disappoint him…?
Aside from the virtues of pleasing his mother, the law deserves a wider airing in its own right:
“There is an inverse relationship between the importance of any election campaign technique and the amount of media coverage devoted to it”.
It encapsulates and broadens an experience I often had when working for the Liberal Democrats and running the party’s 2001 and 2005 general election campaigns. Email was consistently the most important tool, but (back in those pre-social media days) websites were what the media most consistently asked about. As I often said at the time, if I had to face a choice between a catastrophic IT failure breaking the party’s website for the duration of the election or one that wiped out the party’s email system, I would have picked the former without any hesitation.
Part of the reason for this mismatch between importance and attention is that email is much harder for the outside world to track, especially when you start thinking about targeted emails and varying messages to different audiences based on where they live or what they have done.
Even after the Obama 2008 campaign made talking about email fashionable, tracking emails is still a very difficult art – partly because the advancing sophistication of message variation has meant improved reporting and attention is still struggling to keep up with the medium.
But this is not just a point about email. For the 2010 election, the Financial Times’s James Crabtree coined the excellent phrase “the unseen technology”. His predictions were not quite perfect – “[the TV leader debates] are unlikely to move the polls” – but his central point was spot on. It is the unseen technologies; the databases, the emails and other ‘hidden’ channels, which are shaping political campaigning.
Cowley’s Law was originally coined with techniques such as direct mail in mind. Millions of pounds are spent on it by political parties, but it is little studied. (Here’s a simple pop quiz question to demonstrate the point: what significant change in political party direct mail happened at the 2005 general election?)
Crabtree’s unseen technology means changing campaign techniques are not weakening Cowley’s Law, they are strengthening it.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
Dr Mark Pack is Head of Digital at MHP Communications and author of 101 Ways To Win An Election. He regularly blogs about political campaign techniques.
Am sure lots of people reading this are wondering who this ‘charming’ Philip Cowley is, but never mind…. My life’s ambition is now complete – thanks Mark!
Charlie makes a good point, but I think he’s only half-right. For sure, some of the obsession with new stuff is because it’s new, but the extent to which the parties utilised direct mail in the last election was also new, and yet it was not covered. Journalists are disproportionately interested in certain types of shiny new things, and ignore others almost completely. My advice: do like Deep Throat, follow the money. Look where the parties are spending money — and last time it was direct mail.
And I should add that I don’t think the criticism is only of journalists. Academics are just as guilty. I can’t think of a single published paper talking about parties and their use of direct mail s a campaign tool. Yet you could easily drown under ones talking about the internet…
Great piece Mark. I guess the explanation for Cowley’s Law is that we in the media and, indeed, media studies, are always attracted by what is shiny and new. That is how journalism works. Hence the term ‘the news’. But sarcasm aside, I think there is a point here that extends to similar attention paid to personalities, policies and campaigning itself. With the possible exception of the last election in the UK, most elections are decided months before and rarely shift votes to any significant degree. (Though they become marginally more important if we are in for permanent coalition politics). Likewise, we highlight issues such as immigration (‘that bigoted woman’) while we all know that economics drives real voting decisions. Personalities are also said to be important in the media age, and yet it seems that one of the least attractive characters in British political history managed to do better than expected at the last GE. So perhaps we should apply Cowley’s Law across politics and campaigning as a whole, rather than just campaign techniques and the media?
cheers
Charlie