The new Voice ad will swing voters where Farnsey couldn’t

As the Voice referendum campaign begins in earnest, there is no doubt the Yes vote is behind. But having worked on more than 25 election campaigns, I know that disengaged voters don’t really tune in until the campaign proper begins. So while a Yes victory is difficult, it’s not impossible.

The No campaign has a far easier task. Campaigns against things are easier to run than campaigns for them. We’re hardwired to notice negative information and we store negative information for longer than positive information. Most importantly, we are twice as persuaded by loss as we are by gain. This is why swinging voters are more likely to vote against things than for them, and why election campaigns do so many negative ads. Everyone says they hate them, but they work.

The other difficulty is the sheer magnitude of the task. In a normal election campaign, the advertising is really designed to work only on swinging voters in marginal seats so the messaging and content can be reasonably consistent along political lines. But a referendum is bipartisan and nationwide, requiring different messages to work on different people. The Yes still needs a cohesive narrative to work, whereas the No benefits from the confusion.

The No won the pre-campaign with their simple and memorable line: “If you don’t know, vote no.” But that strategy carries longer-term risk. The effectiveness of that line will be hard to sustain because after six weeks of campaign material, people will actually know more.

And the recent reveal that the No field campaign (the phone and door knockers) were told to deliberately promote misinformation will also work against them – people don’t like being overtly manipulated.

Which brings us to the Yes camp. The John Farnham ad gave the campaign a chance to reset. After a slew of negative news stories, and some fairly grim polls, keeping people feeling positive about the campaign was incredibly important. It helped ensure that funds kept coming in and volunteers kept turning up. Resourcing a nationwide battle plan isn’t easy, but it’s vital. Pew research showed that in an election campaign you can swing a vote for every six doors you knock on.

But the John Farnham ad was not designed to be a vote swinger. Disengaged voters are unlikely to sit through a three-minute commercial. The new ad “Will I be heard?” is about shifting votes and will be effective because it reminds people of the Why. Too much of the debate has been bogged down in the weeds of the What, which benefits the No. Anyone who has worked in advertising knows you have to sell the Why before you can sell the What.

Criticism of the new ad might suggest the Why is not new information – that people already knew the facts about Indigenous outcomes. While that is true, the reality is that facts on their own are remarkably unpersuasive. If facts worked to change opinions, we wouldn’t have been having a climate change “debate” for the past decade.

This ad takes the facts people knew intellectually and presents them emotively. That’s smart because all purchases are made emotionally – and choosing to support a cause or vote yes or no in a referendum is a purchasing decision. As the old advertising saying goes, if you can make people feel, you can make them do.

The Walk for Yes in Sydney on Sunday.Credit: Steven Siewert

The new ad also cleverly straddles the negative and the positive. It reminds people of current outcomes but not in a way that makes them feel guilty because that’s not effective. Rather, the ad empowers the viewer. Questions are powerful because they invite people to think for themselves, instead of telling them what to think. And this question implicitly reminds the viewer that the answer to “Will I?” rests with them and their vote.

Using a child in a TV ad is smart because parents instinctively listen when they hear a child’s voice – so it cuts through. But it also inoculates against the accusation that the Voice is really about a bunch of adults in Canberra. Again, Why not What.

The end line is particularly powerful. People inherently don’t like change, so when you’re advocating for change, you have to make the risk in not changing bigger than the risk in changing. “Yes makes it possible” is not an overpromise. It’s not saying all things will be solved. But most importantly, it highlights the risk in not voting Yes, which is, if you vote no, change for the better simply isn’t possible.

The other reason this is a good ad is from a purely practical media-buy perspective. The hero piece matters but it also cuts down well into sharegraphics and shorter videos – the ability to layer a campaign is important. People need to see an ad six times for it to work, and in the old days of broadcast TV ads, that was pretty easy. A big enough media buy would do it. But now, with an increasingly fragmented target market, many of whom don’t even watch broadcast TV, campaign content that can be served up in different ways via different mediums is important.

The Yes campaign has some catch-up to do. But this feels like a good start.

Dee Madigan has been Labor’s advertising creative director for 25 election campaigns, including the 2022 federal election. She runs Campaign Edge, is a panelist on ABC’s Gruen and the author of The Hard Sell, as well as a contributing author on Mothermorphosis and Perspectives on Change.

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