Yorkshire councils screen voter turnout TV ads

Nine metropolitan councils in South and West Yorkshire are breaking new ground in electoral publicity with the first ever locally funded voter turnout TV advertising campaign.

Running on Yorkshire ITV1 from Sunday 22 April through to local government election day on Thursday 3 May, the non-political TV commercial encourages registered voters to exercise their mandate, in a bid to help reverse the current nationwide decline in electoral turnout.

The participating metropolitan councils are Barnsley, Bradford, Calderdale, Doncaster, Kirklees, Leeds, Rotherham, Sheffield and Wakefield, which between them represent over 3 million voters.

The May 2007 local election will be the first where there is a new duty imposed on returning officers to promote electoral participation under the terms of The Electoral Administration Act 2006, which also provides ringfenced funding for such promotional activity.

Since all of its neighbouring metropolitan boroughs were scheduled for elections on the same date, last September Kirklees Metropolitan Council invited electoral and marketing counterparts from all South and West Yorkshire authorities to discuss the possibility of a collaborative TV advertising campaign.

Having earlier staged a business forum for new-to-TV advertisers, specialist television buying agency David Gent Creative was invited to put forward costed proposals and creative ideas, to explore the viability of this initiative.

"All the authorities have a common service offering, encounter similar electoral and environmental issues, and address council matters with the same sense of local pride, so could mount a concerted campaign and the decision to go ahead was unanimous," said DGC Media Director, Sam Gent.

"The fact that their joint territory is covered by Yorkshire TV's Emley transmitter allowed us to negotiate favourable local advertiser rates, which means the whole campaign, including airtime and commercial production, will be delivered for an affordable budget per council, while achieving 9 million impacts and being seen four times by the average voter".

The commercial was filmed at architectural award-winning Otley Library, which has also been used as a location for TV's Catherine Tate show, and involved council staff and friends as commercial extras, to constrain costs, as well as professional actors Steve Murphy and Ian McHale.

It was created by DGC and produced by Sheffield studio Watts That Productions.

The script and final edit were scrutinised and approved by advertising clearance authority, the BACC, to ensure a complete absence of political partiality, then vetted by local returning officers and selected election candidates.

The first screening was scheduled during ITV's top-rating hospital drama series The Royal on Sunday 22 April, and the TV campaign is also being referenced in posters, leaflets and press publicity additionally planned by the individual authorities.

The Electoral Commission itself launched the first national TV campaign in the run up to local, European and London Mayoral elections in March 2004, in a bid to involve the public in politics and encourage voter participation.

In its subsequent report 'Election 2005: engaging the public in Great Britain', the Commission revealed that television advertising had indeed had a strong positive effect on the electorate, with 33% of those who saw the campaign claiming to have voted as a result.

Thus, TV was again one of the key elements of its awareness campaign for the 2005 general election and is currently being used to help tackle voter registration ahead of this year's English local authority elections.

These pioneering campaigns paved the way for BACC clearance of South and West Yorkshire's TV commercial.

Similarly seeking to address the decline in voter engagement and participation at elections, and the threat this poses 'to the legitimacy of our public institutions at local, national and European levels', the Electoral Administration Act 2006 established a new power for local electoral officers 'to encourage the participation of electors in the electoral process' and establish appropriate ringfenced funds.

South and West Yorkshire metropolitan councils are among the first to respond to this challenge with a multimedia electoral turnout campaign, featuring heavyweight local TV advertising for the first time, and they will be conducting simultaneous campaign awareness research through established citizens' panels, with the report due out this autumn.

In the meantime, the authorities hope that this enterprising initiative will prompt millions of local voters across the counties to have their say on 3 May.

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