Political advertising on election day

Written By: - Date published: 11:59 am, September 20th, 2014 - 3 comments
Categories: election 2014, electoral commission, Media - Tags: , ,

I’m getting scattered reports and images of political advertising popping up on various websites. They seem to look like accidents more than a deliberate strategy.

For instance

At 8:58am, I have an image off the Stuff mobile website main page of a election advertisement for a major party.

And

I noticed that the Met service is still showing the TV3 leaders debate banner ad (not on the main page, but when you click through to a town):

http://www.metservice.com/towns-cities/dunedin

For one thing, this is really out of date. More seriously, the colours [deleted] & names of leaders [deleted] may serve to increase voting for those party’s (recency effect) and thus quash votes for minor parties.

The NZH[erald] politics page had the same banner ad earlier on (around 8am), but it seems to be gone now (replaced by Newspix & Qantas ads).

Just looks like the advertising agencies and major newspaper websites need to be quite a lot better at making sure that they clean up their advertising programs.

In both cases, the pages had fixed themselves by the time I got to look at them.

13:10. The NZ Herald really need to look at their mobile site. They are still popping up National adverts periodically.  I’ve had two reports of that happening and one image.

14:30: Some moron young Nat has been boasting on facebook about voting multiple times. Apparently, a complaint with screenshots has been sent to the Electoral Commission.

I suspect the fool isn’t going to like the attention that he now gets.

15:50: I think that Quinovic Mt Eden needs a complaint with a mass email today that is pretty clearly election advertising targeting property investors. “Barry Adkins and the team at Quinovic Mt Eden” have pumped out a email that starts with

It will be election day when this newsletter arrives in your inbox, and we will be on the verge of knowing who will lead the country through the next three years.

So clearly they knew it would arrive on election day. They then explicitly describe and link to a chart from Property magazine that rates all of the political parties based on how good they are for property investors. That is something you can do before and after election day. But not on election day. Barry Adkins is a chump…

 

The weather in Auckland is bight and sunny with occasional downpours – our classic changeable spring weather. It is still threatening rain, so I’d suggest that people get out and vote before it gets miserable.

Click to get the full impact cheesy grin…

 

Scott at ImperatorFish has been skirting the edge of the law with his series of posts bemoaning his inability to do political posts on election day. I did enjoy his selfie.
Election Day Post #1
Election Day Post #2
Election Day Post #3
Election Day Post #4
Election Day Post #5

3 comments on “Political advertising on election day ”

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  1. Weepus beard 1
    20 September 2014 at 7:28 pm

    Our house got a call at 10:12am saying, “This is a recorded message from the Maungakiekie National party…” at which point my wife hung up.

    I called the Electoral Commission and spoke to three people; the first put me through to the Electoral Commission proper where someone else took my statement and phone number. I was called back within 5 minutes by a lawyer at the Electoral commission who again listened to my statement. It was the very same lawyer who replied to me after my complaint about the recent Rugby News cover. He’s pleasant and professional.

    He explained that there were certain messages and actions on polling day that they had approved and the National Party message which my wife didn’t finish listening to was most likely one of these. He said he was 99% sure that the massage was asking if the householder was having trouble getting to a polling booth then the National Party would support them.

    I asked whether it was the Electoral commissions view that this was not influencing voters on Election day, and he said Labour have door knockers doing the same thing which is also approved by the Electoral Commission.

    I was over it by this stage but I suppose I could have asked whether the Labour volunteers would be allowed to wear Labour T-shirts while doing this door knocking.

    I suspect not.

    Second gripe was Stuff or Yahoo (can’t remember which) with a picture via RadioLive showing Winston voting in Ponsonby. Hello? No photos allowed in the voting stations!

    Then, even worse was a picture of Jong Ki and wifey and the little man/boy at the ballot box in Parnell. How nice, the smiling family unit voting together and the image plastered all over cyberspace right in the middle of election day. No fucking photos in the fucking voting stations!

    There’s going to be Letters to the Editor on this!!!

  2. NZJester 2
    20 September 2014 at 8:34 pm

    Some could be due to caching used by some ISP or servers with their clocks not set correctly.
    My Father however did say he saw a blue coloured political sign still up on a property in Havelock North, Hastings as he drove through today.
    This was after the polls had opened.