Real-time polling for the digitized electorate
Jason Goodman, CEO at Albion, on how political advertising’s failure to capture popular sentiment around the coming election led to the creation of the ‘Slapometer’.
The advertising strategies for the general election this year have been no different to any other year, with each party trying their best to outshine one another through damning slogans, mocking imagery on a bevy of ad vans. But you can’t but feel that the Tories and Labour haven’t captured the level of cynicism out there about politics and politicians in general.
It was this ‘popular unhappiness with the status quo’ that led Albion to believe there was a space in the election campaigns to put something out there that people could really interact and engage with to show their true feelings. This was also spurred on by the success we had from a previous political site Slapnickgriffin – we wanted to do something that took the slapping idea into mainstream politics, and there would never be a better time than the election.
In October 2009, as Nick Griffin the BNP leader was sweating it out on Question Time, one of our creatives was building slapnickgriffin.com. The website was exceptional for its simplicity: show what you think of Nick Griffin and the politics of racism by giving him a virtual slap across the face. It captured the mood of a majority, gaining over 20 million slaps in just five days. Sadly, after several threats in our direction from far right forums, the URL was taken down. But the success of slapnickgriffin.com gave us the idea to build on this concept and create a tool that could work during the elections.
When in December 09 the leaders of the three main political parties agreed to a series of live televised debates we thought to ourselves what better time than now to build a ‘real-time’ site that would could be primarily enabled by the digital novelty of this election. And so the ‘Slapometer’ was born.
Slapometer is real-time polling for the digitized electorate: a “watch along” website where you can ‘vote with the back of your hand’. It is a ‘Carry On slap’ in the grand tradition of ridiculous political protest, eg, egging, flanning, etc.
We’ve pushed it out via our own website, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and via our media contacts, and so far it has generated over 60 million slaps with traffic mainly coming from Facebook and Twitter. It’s been in the UK news (the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Star, Channel 4, ITN), on a daily basis, as well as gaining global coverage (Le Post, Speigel and The Wall Street Journal).
Using Woopra, a real time website tracking and analysis application, we’ve been able to pull of accurate statistics during the lead up to and during the live debates. During the first debate our servers momentarily crashed at 8.27pm as over 800 people a second flooded onto the site ready for the start of the debate. Cameron scored over a million slaps in the first 75 minutes, with Brown following in close succession 86 minutes in.
At the end of debate one, Clegg was a clear winner. This sentiment was echoed during the second live debate with an overall of 2,533,558 slaps; Cameron: 1,280,323 slaps (50%), Clegg: 399,486 slaps (16%) and Brown: 853,749 slaps (34%).
With one more live debate to go later this week and eight days until the election on the 6th May, we’re keen to see if the current mood will differ. Will it be a hung parliament? Or will there be one clear winner? We know one thing; we’ll all be watching Slapometer to find out.