The creative verdict on this week’s election ads: Memorable, scary and boring

Each week of the election season we invite creative thinkers to give us their verdict on some of the advertising creative from the campaign. This week, M&C Saatchi’s creative director Andy Flemming critiques some of the latest efforts on the campaign trail. 

I’ve been asked to critique some particularly long and deeply boring election commercials. Full disclosure, I don’t like either of the candidates and find how over the last few weeks they’ve been obviously told to start waving their arms around as if they’re at some odd parliamentary rave. Well, here we go.

The Australian Labor Party, ‘You Lose’

(Ad courtesy of Ebiquity) 

Of all the ads in this, lets be honest, woeful collection, the line ‘If he wins, you lose’ strikes me as the most powerful line. It’s memorable and scary, but the ALP probably should have started with this instead of throwing it out when the polls started looking dicey. It might have caught on, and could have started to make the swinging voters doubt the opposition. Too little too late I’m afraid.