Political sign language

The Labour billboard generator will attract more mickey-takers than stalwarts. But it's all publicity

Trevor Mallard is chuffed with the response to the NZ Labour party’s Billboard Generator. He writes at Red Alert:

The new billboard generator site had over 100k page views in under 24 hours. Over 5k unique viewers. If you haven’t looked yet go here for fun. The stats show the three top referral sources as unknown, Facebook and Whaleoil.

Of course, Mallard is directing something of a wink at Whale Oil, whose referring post reads:

Labour has another social media campaign. This time to help them design some billboards. After the failure of their Stop Signs campaign because they were illegal. Clearly they are more broke than a third generation welfare beneficiary on the Monday after a Lotto jackpot draw.

Indeed, Mr Oil has helpfully set up a gallery of piss-taking billboards, “since they are likely to shut this down faster than a freezing works on a rainy day”. The quality therein varies. A lot.

There are, undoubtedly, dangers in embarking on a campaign such as this – the detractors tend to be more numerous and, it has to be said, wittier, than the stalwarts.

The PSA effort at its own mock-billboard campaign last month, playing on the government’s rather ill-advised “Nice to have” coinage, quickly hit turbulence as users “gamed” it, as KiwiBlog cheerfully documented. It is no longer with us.

None of this is new. A flurry of billboard-based efforts hit Britain ahead of last year’s election. Labour invited its supporters to design their own efforts pillorying the Tories in an effort to leap aboard the online bandwagon of sites such as this and this.

The best billboard campaign that never was, however, was Gordon Brown’s visual assault on David Cameron. Here’s a slideshow (nb date).