Third time lucky for Tory poster campaign? Probably not…

After two failed attempts at trying to produce a decent campaign poster, and two lots of brilliant parodies, the Tories have desperately regrouped in an attempt to produce a poster that imaginative internet users cannot make a mockery of in photoshop, spending God knows how much in the process (it’s OK though, they have the ££££££ to keep wasting) and have now come up with these (tad nauseating) efforts complete with super modern video campaign featuring fresh first time Tory voters, eager to let us know why they are joining Dave’s gang.

This is hardly a revolutionary campaign effort, every party has first time voters they could whip out and use in the media, it’s a ‘play it very safe’ campaign – the main aim simply seems to be ’let’s make a poster that they can’t make fun of this time’. Whilst it’s OK to photoshop around with Cameron’s face (he does it himself after all) and make fun of the Tory message everyone can see it would be bad form to do the same to their poster voters. Making fun of another parties voters is hardly going to win you any friends and no doubt the Tories are eagerly awaiting the parodies this time, ready to jump up and down in protest, “how dare they mock these voters on our posters, it’s not on”. Indeed it isn’t really but I think they have vastly underestimated the intelligence and imagination of would-be cyber parodiers (that’s probably not a real word) who will easily find their way around this issue and indeed already have. Barely five minutes had passed since the shiny new posters began doing their rounds on the web when this appeared -the tweet is in response to the hash-tag #ivenevervotedtory / #inevervotedtory  - which appeared almost immediately to lead the cyber backlash. As you can see the quickly created new parody poster easily manages to avoid any offence towards the first time voter in the original, face changed, text changed – where’s the problem?

Not only have the Tories failed to produce a set of posters that cannot be mocked they have also failed to produce a set of posters with any sort of effective message. The two claiming ‘we need to sort out the economy’ and ‘but I like their plans to help families’ are words any party could have used about their own policies on the issues. Once again the Tories offer no policy and no substance. Just ubiquitous messages. Even a BNP voter could claim ‘I like their plans to help families’ about their party without any back-up. As far as ‘their plans to help families’ are concerned the main policy that springs to mind is the highly contentious marriage tax breaks plan. Hardly comforting. As for the economy, wasn’t it the Conservatives that got every plan wrong during the recession? Cuts, cuts, cuts! God knows where their cuts would leave us if they got into Government, not in a great state I would confidently predict. The economy is not safe in their hands.

As for the ‘I’ve never voted Tory before but we’ve got to mend our broken society’ well that’s simply laughable today after it emerged that the Tories had got their figures wrong yet again, claiming that 54% of teenage girls under 18 in the poorest areas got pregnant – so hell bent they are on believing this ‘broken Britain’ rhetoric that nobody obviously thought to question that this figure could be wrong. In the Tories minds over 50% of teenage girls are getting pregnant (which would mean we would all be knee deep in babies by now) and teenage boys seem to be portrayed as something akin to Lord of the Flies. Out of touch with the people they wish to represent? Surely not! Even the Daily Mail seemed disgusted (which is really saying something).

Aside from all this the fact that we are now onto our third round of posters since the New Year is starting to reek with desperation. Maybe try knocking on doors? Plenty of babies and young children to meet by the sounds of it…

- As I’ve been writing this these templates have already popped up for you to spoof on http://www.mydavidcameron.com