Greens candidate for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, has taken out an advertisement on Grindr, “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people”.
“You always come first with the Greens,” one reads, and another says: “Spice up Canberra with a third”.
Speaking directly to a specific market – in this case, a younger, LGBTQ+ market – could work, according to Dr Andrew Hughes, a political marketing lecturer at the Australian National University who says for any other party it might come across as “tokenistic”.
“But the Greens are so strong, and have been for a long time, on LGBTQ and non-binary issues,” he says. “They’ve been really outspoken. So Grindr’s OK.”
Hughes is not so convinced by the humour in another Greens advertisement, shared mainly on social media.
In it, Tasmanian senator Nick McKim helms a “crisis meeting” to deal with negative media. He’s scruffy-ish, in jeans and a T-shirt, scribbling on a whiteboard while young staffers read out press headlines to him like this one from The Australian:
“‘I’ll tax the rich to pay for your teeth,’ Adam Bandt says.”
Once the list is written, from a range of critical media articles, it’s a fair summary of Greens’ policies. Fairer welfare, tax the oil and gas corporations, get Medicare to fund dental, and so on. McKim says “that all looks pretty good to me!”.
“Maybe leave humour to the comedians and focus on the politics,” Hughes says, although he adds that the ad is on brand.
“It was low tech, low budget, it’s consistent with what the Greens are … it’s done on a shoestring. Transparent, ethical, all based on facts and evidence.
“Full marks on that. They had a crack.”
The Greens rely heavily, but not solely, on targeted social media advertisements.
They also run television ads with clever graphics and apocalyptic music to tackle the main parties for taking donations from coal and gas companies.
Greens leader, Adam Bandt, appealed for donations for more ads on Wednesday, saying “we need your help to keep these ads running throughout the whole campaign”, pointing to the bigger budgets of other players, such as United Australia Party’s Clive Palmer.
Queensland University of Technology researchers wrote this week that online advertising is “more pervasive than its analogue predecessors, it can cost less (per individual ad), be deployed more rapidly, and can be micro-targeted towards specific audiences”.
They write in The Conversation, that this is playing out on Facebook as a big spend from the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, in the seat of Kooyong where he’s under threat from “teal” independent candidate Monique Ryan. There’s also a “rogues’ gallery” spending up big in Queensland.
The QUT researchers echo Hughes’s comments that Bates’s “tongue-in-cheek” Grindr efforts could only work for certain candidates.
“Unlike other sometimes cringe-worthy attempts by politicians to appeal to specific communities, Bates has leaned into his own identity as an openly gay candidate in selecting this platform and developing ads using Grindr’s platform-specific vernacular,” they write.
While the polls show Labor ahead of the Coalition just over two weeks out from the election, there is also speculation about a parliament in which the Greens and some of those teal independents hold the balance of power.
A third Grindr ad from Bates tells Australians not to fear that situation.
“The best parliaments are hung,” it says.
