Dee Madigan - The Hard Sell: The Tricks of Political Advertising

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

1115 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

First published 2014

Text Dee Madigan, 2014

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Some material in Chapter 11 was originally published by Dee Madigan in an article titled SOCMED = #AUSPOL WIN Y/N?, in The Kings Tribune , 2 August 2012.

Some material in Chapter 13 was originally published in Dee Madigan, Tone it down, SBS, 26 September 2013,

Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

POLITICS IS A CONSTANT , restless contest of ideas. It is an endless striving for something greater and better in our lives. Ideas on the big and grand scalethe best way to build a nation, a lasting way to secure peace, the fairest way to temper greed and excess, the best way to live a lifeall bump and churn along with the more mundane, like the fastest way to move traffic or the safest way to treat sewage. Somewhere, someone is thinking about these and thousands of other ideas and theyre getting fired up about them. They are agitated and excited by them and they itch with the need to share them. The more feverish they feel about their ideas, the more they want to convince and cajole others to accept them and believe in them with the same passion and certainty. It is in the convincing of others that ideas can travel the rocky path from thought to reality. In the world of ideas, persuasion is king.

Persuasion is no simple or easy business. To be truly persuasiveto convincingly entice people to change their own ideas or to see something in a new or different lightdemands exactly the right idea, promulgated in exactly the right way, by exactly the right person. It always helps if the idea is a good idea. It is much easier to persuade people of something that is convincingly brilliant. But simply having a good idea is not enough. Even the best ideas can die a swift death in the wrong hands. And the best ideas are not always the most likeable or the most popular. Ideas need to be properly considered and advocated by someone who is trustworthy, interesting and compelling. They need to be explained, simplified and illustrated. At the very basic level, ideas can only sway us if they catch our eye, if we hear of them, know about them, know where they come from and who is promoting them. They will catch our eye more quickly if they can also catch our mind and our heart. Done well, persuasion is a potent cocktail of personality, emotion and intellect, enhanced and amplified by sound and colour and movement.

There was a time in human history when ideas could be shared and understood and accepted or rejected through the simple power of the spoken and written word, when great minds could come together in argument and debate and persuade each other to act. This time has passed. The competition for our attention is now relentless. We are assailed with words and images and sounds in a way never before possible. In this environment, the contest of ideas has become both easier and more difficult. Mass media, telecommunications and social media are democratising knowledge, information and power at an astonishing rate. To put an idea into the public domain is now within the grasp of almost anybody. But promoting an idea and persuading people of it are not the same things.

The contest of ideas is a contest now fought on a field that is crowded with more players, and their kit bags are heavier with more tools of trade. At its heart its still the same game with the same rules of engagement but, like major sporting teams, it now needs more support from highly skilled professionals to make the grade. The challenge for everyone involved is to use all the available tools to expand the promise and power of a great idea, to use new and emerging forms of communication and marketing to help more people to hear and be excited by more ideas, more often, without reducing those ideas to the glib, the trite and forgettable.

Among the many great things about a political life is the chance to meet and work with remarkable people from completely different spheres of experience, training and background. I met Dee Madigan when she joined the technical support team for my 2012 election campaign. Dee was part of the advertising group who had the unenviable job of crafting a campaign in the most difficult of political circumstances. Dee brought many things to that campaign. She brought all the professional and analytical capabilities you would expect from someone with her considerable experience. But, just as importantly, she brought bucket-loads of good cheer, a passionate belief in the democratic process and a wicked sense of humour (accompanied by a vocabulary that would make her Irish Catholic nuns blush!). In the tumultuous fever-pitch of a campaign these are priceless attributes and they are all here again in the pages of The Hard Sell . Dee is a savvy player on the crowded field of the contest of ideas and she shares her understanding here with the intelligence and irreverence of an insider.

In these pages I was reminded again just how profoundly complicated, difficult and exhilarating it is to take an idea and persuade others of it. I felt again the precarious balance of facts, arguments, image and presence in transforming an idea into a reality. When it all comes together its a powerful force and it changes things for all of us. The book has made me thankful for all those who feel the persistent itch of an idea and are compelled to persuade others of it. And grateful for all the talent and commitment of those, like Dee Madigan, who help them do it.

Anna Bligh

Former Premier of Queensland

June 2014

For my fierce, funny and fabulous children, Peter, Thomas and Josie.

And to my husband, Carl, for keeping those damn kids out of my way while I wrote.

LIKE MOST IRISH CATHOLICS in Melbourne in the 1980s, my parents worshipped four things: God, the North Melbourne Kangaroos, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

My father had been a Catholic priest. Obviously not a very good one.