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Case Study: #Galloway4London Mayoral Campaign
During 2016, Mr. Galloway had thrown his hat in the ring and decided to run for election as the Mayor of London. On this occasion, the designer he had hired had unexpectedly left the team and was unreachable through any means of contact. Subsequently, through a mutual contact between myself and Mr. Galloway, I was brought on board the Marketing team at a time when the campaign was already underway and crucial aspects of Mr. Galloway’s campaign literature were not even completed during the run up to election day.
I immediately spotted from the outset that Mr. Galloway would not only require a campaign leaflet, but also an SEO optimised campaign Website and various online graphics to promote his campaign. However, as the campaign was already underway, we had little time to draft ideas and instead had to make do with what he had and plug in the remaining holes with web templates and plugins I had previously designed for other clients.
With permission from Mr. Galloway and his team, I was given the green light to use a web template to build his website relatively quickly and spend the remaining period of the campaign updating and constantly optimising his website to ensure we were maximising the exposure of the website to potential viewers. In addition to the campaign site, I had to simultaneously oversee the designing and production of his campaign leaflet of which we printed 100, 000 copies overall. With regards to his leaflet, my biggest challenge here was to capture the correct semantics when it came to his policies and how Mr. Galloway wanted to have his policies worded. As we know Politics is a very word sensitive area where poorly considered words can be misconstrued and used to dramatically distort the message of a political campaign. So understandably we had to spend a lot of time diligently and carefully considering our choice of words. Below are images of the campaign leaflet produced.
Labour Party Candidate Sadiq Khan had won the campaign, however, it was widely reported amongst inner political circles that the electorate indulged in what looked like a protest vote and disillusion against the Conservative party which naturally, as a result, placed Mr. Galloway and other outsider candidates at a disadvantage.
My personal contribution to the campaign, however, was a successful one. The core reason and purpose of me being a part of the campaign was to help produce the campaign website and marketing literature for the campaign and I had successfully done so. Mr. Galloway’s campaign leaflet was positively received by members of the public and as was his campaign website.
In fact, I fondly remember an occasion talkRADIO in which radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer remarked to Mr. Galloway that she thought his campaign website was the “most visually appealing in comparison to the other candidate’s campaign websites”. Understandably, I took this as indicative of my work being to a standard worthy of a Citywide Political campaign. In other words, recognition from a prominent TV personality felt great!
In addition to the visual appeal of Mr. Galloway’s website, His website also performed very well online as I constantly ensured that myself and others alongside me kept his website optimised and engaging.
On the right, is a screenshot of the views per second we achieved on the actual day of voting.
