Guerin and bare IT

In one of a series of articles explaining how Johnson and Cummings have corrupted the governance of Britain, Byline Times details the meteoric rise of political strategy firm Topham Guerin. Sam Bright charts the progress of the New Zealand start-up linked to libertarian and neo-conservative movements. The whole article is worth reading for an exposition of yet a further step on the way in which this government is breaking down the "Chinese walls" between personal or party interest and that of the nation.

What interested me in particular was the Topham Guerin methodology.

On 29 May 2019, Topham Guerin co-founder Ben Guerin appeared as a special guest at the Friedman Conference, a right-wing event hosted by the Australian Libertarian Society (ALS) and the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance (ATA).

A week before, his bootstrap firm had played a major role in propelling the right-wing Liberal Party, headed by Scott Morrison, to victory in the Australian Federal Election.

Reflecting on the social media strategy he deployed during the election, Guerin describes a campaign of highly repetitive messaging – what he calls “water dripping on a stone” – to convince voters that the opposition Labor Party would hike-up taxes. Guerin boasts an especially high-performing piece of content was an image of a dog accompanied by the message ‘tax is bad’.

In this spirit, the social media spin doctor goes on to explain how “crude,” poorly-produced memes attracted more engagement than slick, formulaic graphics.

“You’ve got to surprise people. You’ve got to shock people. Unlock and arouse an emotion in people,” he recommends, to his right-wing audience.

[...]

Emotive content was pumped out relentlessly by the Morrison campaign, says Guerin, and the professionalism of that content literally didn’t matter.

“That’s how you get what we call the ‘boomer memes’. Because you have to crank stuff out quickly. You couldn’t spend too long doing an artisanally perfect graphic. You’re going to slap some Calibri font on a shitty, reused meme and you’re going to publish it, and then get on to the next one. And you know what: that content is going to do better than the thing your poor graphic designer spent a week on.”

This tactic, Guerin claims, resulted in Morrison and the Liberal Party receiving twice as much engagement on social media than their Labor opponents.

“And when most of that is concentrated in marginal seats, that’s how you win an election that no-one thinks you’re going to win,” he opined, with just a hint of smugness.

Following the model of the Australian election, Topham Guerin deployed all their expertise in shitty fonts – notably when they posted a graphic on the Conservative Party’s official social media channels, using Comic Sans.

This meme generated so much attention that ‘Comic Sans’ trended on Twitter and the internet flooded with news articles from click-hungry media outlets. This undoubtedly spread the Tory message to millions more people than would have seen a predictable, corporate illustration.

One thinks back to the Roneoed and Gestetnered leaflets of variable quality with necessarily minimal graphics put out by local Liberals in the 1950s and '60s. They may have lacked the gloss of the occasional printed leaflets from the big parties, but they had an immediacy and an authenticity which was taken away by the people who led us in coalition.