Blink Design Studios

Red Vs Blue – war of the spoof sites.

The top sponsored link for the phrase ‘Gordon Brown’ on google currently leaded to the spoof apology website http://www.sorryfromgordon.com/. The page is the Conservative response to Gordon’s recent speech to Congress. The site features a photoshopped image of Brown wearing Elton John style glasses and the phrase ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ and invites visitors to create their own speech on his behalf using drop down menus and then send it to their friends.

I was quite surprised by this webpage. It is designed to look almost like an independent page with the Conservative party’s official involvement kept to a tiny footer mention. The pages design is clean and simple to use – but really could have been so much more. I am not sure if it is designed to look home made and unprofessional or if the page was just rushed out the door as soon as possible since the timing was such a crucial aspect. Not that I am saying it is unpleasant to look at, or hard to use – it just simply has no finesse and very much has the feel of a zero budget home grown page when really it is part of the Conservative marketing machine, which usually produces much slicker sites.

The other worrying factor – is that this suffers from the same flaws as the not particularly as funny as it could have been Labour potshot at Cameron with their spoof webchats… this just isn’t that funny. It heads along the right lines being more interactive than the Labour viral, but I am really not sure how many people are engaged enough with this particular issue to send this on to their friends. I suspect some avid Tory supporters will use it – but this does little to reach out to new members of the public. If anything it makes the Conservatives look quite childish and undoes some of the good work they had done with their website (which for the most part is a very good piece of engaging work).

To some extent politics has always been about cheap shots and name calling – but in this day and age there really are better ways to do so than this. As well as having a viral web page they could have gotten an actor or animator to create a fake apology and used youtube to spread it. They could have made a ‘Brown apology’ Facebook app which mirrored the web page and utilised/exploited the power of social networking to spread the message. And they could have just made that message funnier…. There are so many possibilities, and it seems a shame that are not being used to their full potential.

Links:

This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here

http://www.sorryfromgordon.com/

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