Your chance to choose from the final four

We are now at the final stage in the battle to become PB Poster of 2008. There are now just four people left in the contest:-

Voting will be by email to this address. Simply give your email the title – “My Vote” followed by the name of your choice as it appears. Thus “My vote SallyC” does it. Do not write any body text in your email because these will not be opened.

Please vote just once in the manner set out which has been designed to make it easy at my end. Voting starts immediately and will continue until 2359 on New Year’s Eve. The result will be announced the following evening.

You will appreciate that it will be difficult for me to enter into any correspondence about the election and my decision has to be final final. I am sure that none of us want this to be affected by voting irregularities.

Today’s cartoon by Marf is her final one of the year. Her website is LondonSketchbook.com.

But what happens if optimism begins to wane?

One of the great things about Ipsos-MORI is that it has been around for a long time and in many cases has been asking the same questions in the same way for getting on for three decades.

One of those questions has been the firm’s “Economic Optimism Index” where polling respondents are asked “Do you think that the general economic condition of the country will improve, stay the same, or get worse over the next 12 months?” The pollster then subtracts the “get worse” figure” from the “improve” figures to produce its Economic Optimism Index. Recent trends are shown in the chart above.

Back in July the index reached minus 64 – the worst number recorded since the firm started this back in 1979. Since then there has been something of a recovery and the December “EOI” is now at minus 48 – still bad but not on the same scale as in the summer.

July, of course, saw some of the worst voting intention figures for Labour across a range of pollsters. Since then, and particularly following the banking bailout, there has been an improvement in the EOI and, at the same time, the general election voting intention numbers have got better for the party.

Anthony Wells, in a brilliant piece of analysis on UK Polling Report just before Christmas, argues that the perception that Labour has bucked the trend of governments normally losing popularity when the economy turns is wrong. “..Labour’s position completely tanked in the months after the budget, at the same time as economic confidence really began to fall through the floor. The recent recovery in Labour’s position in the polls dates from the bank rescue in October 2008, which has also seen a recovery in economic confidence…”

So what happens if confidence starts to wane again in 2009 with the massive retail closures, the increasing number of job losses and continuing economic bad news?

If the Wells thesis is correct then those who have continued to back the Tories to secure an overall majority on the spread betting markets might have got this right after all. The latest prices from Sporting Index suggest a Tory total of 337 seats or enough for an overall majority of 24 seats.

Movieposter.com

What does this say about public opinion?

There’s an amusing piece by George Grant and Roger Waite in the Sunday Times about how Gordon has become the butt of some of the humour in this year’s pantomimes.

“..The scene is a basement in the City. Cinderella, a redundant investment banker, is sobbing because she has been forced to take on a cleaning job. Suddenly, after a blinding flash, Gordon Brown is standing before her.

“Don’t be afraid, Cinderella,” he says, holding a magic wand aloft. “For I am your fairy godfather.”

“Oh, fairy godfather,” says Cinderella. “Please will you wave your magic wand and help me to escape from this life of drudgery?”

So Gordon waves his magic wand . . . and absolutely nothing happens.

“But everything’s still the same,” sobs Cinders.

“Oh no, it isn’t,” says Gordon.

“Oh yes it is,” cries the audience.

That’s a taste of what panto lovers have been enjoying this season as Gordon Brown and his ministers assume the role of traditional stage villains. In productions from Aladdin to Mother Goose, the government is mercilessly pilloried…”

I think that this does have a political point. If audiences are really are reacting in the way the Sunday Times describes it then that it says something, surely, about public opinion?

Mike Smithson

What do we think of the Indy on Sunday’s mock ads?

There’s a great piece in the Indy on Sunday about how a 2009 general election might look in terms of the ads that will be appearing on poster sites up and down the country.

The paper asked half a dozen top advertising agencies to come up with some ideas and reproduced above are just three of the twelve that are featured in the article.

I’m not sure how the Thatcher-linked Labour creation produced by the Green-consultancy might appeal. Certainly it would go down well with Labour activists – but many Tories would be delighted to see their man compared with the Baroness.

ACQA’s creation for the Lib Dems “The Borrowers” using the movie ad notion is a powerful way of getting over Labour’s current strategy – but wouldn’t this work better as a Tory ad?

The one I think is most effective and could conceivably be used is the Tory poster from 360 Degrees Advertising – a simple message which juxtaposes Labour’s brand colour with the reminder, the Tories would hope, about who got us here

Labour, surely, are going to do what’s worked in the last three campaigns – to try to scare voters about the consequences of the inevitable Tory spending cuts.

What makes this exercise interesting is to see how a range of highly creative communication experts perceive the weaknesses of the parties their ads are against and how they would seek to exploit them. Here the simple image and message can pay dividends reinforcing what voters watch on TV and read in the papers.

Seeing the way the debt issue is portrayed in several of the ads suggests that Labour has a big challenge. For the response has to be much more complex than the attack and is not as easy to get over.

In any case this is a great way for the IoS to be looking forward to the election on a very light news weekend in the middle of the holiday season.

Mike Smithson