Away with 'Words'

Advertising campaigns rarely swing elections, but did a psychologist's directive to bin a "broken promises" ad change the outcome of our 1993 cliffhanger?

- JOHN SAKER

He arrived at our office one day and parked up in front of the video. He told us Labour Party leader Mike Moore was an old friend who had asked for his help. All afternoon he sat there - paunchy, imperious, unsmiling, chain-smoking - while we did as he asked, showing him the TV commercials we'd so far produced for the party. It was two weeks out from election day in 1993. There was no discussion, though at times he would talk at us in his Belgian accent. He was given to pronouncements like: "When he was a young politician, I said to him, 'Mike Moore, you are like Adolf Hitler. The lower class like you, the upper class think they can control you and work with you, the middle class distrust you.""

Over the next few days, he began to dictate the style and shape of the remainder of the advertising campaign. Some of the changes he called for were major shifts in strategy. The agency team, of which I was creative director, was flabbergasted. Fraser Carson, manager of the ad campaign, went to Moore and protested. "Do what he says," was Moore's response. "I've known him for a long time. I respect him."

This late entrant to Labour's 1993 election effort was Paul Heylen. We all knew the name. The TVNZ Heylen poll was the political poll into which the entire country was tuned at that time, as its results were always first announced on TV One's 6pm news. A revolutionary in the area of market research, Heylen had no direct experience in advertising or the communications business. What he did have was a conviction that he knew best, especially when it came to politics and the national psyche.

Moore desperately wanted to be elected prime minister in 1993. He lost by the slimmest of margins. For the past 30 years, I've never wavered from the belief that if not for Heylen, Moore's dream would have been realised.