Here, Kate Smither AKA The Tall Planner, wonders whether political advertising has lost the plot.
It was the final week of the 1980 US presidential election when Ronald Reagan posed the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”. Fast forward 44 years, and President Donald Trump used the same question to lead his campaign in the 2024 US Presidential election.
Here in the 2025 Australian Prime Ministerial election, Peter Dutton is posing the very same question…but with a three-year time frame not four. Have we really reached the point where the same political campaign idea and narrative can be picked up and dropped into different cultures, political parties and ideologies? Have we reached a point of a one size fits all solution to political positioning?
Or have political campaigns simply run out of ideas?
The fact that you can pose one question all around the world hints at a global apathy when it comes to politics but it also reflects a cultural blurring of the lines that used to define clear difference between parties and propositions.
“Are you better off?” is certainly no “It’s time” or “Great schlep”. You’re not even getting a “Kevin O7” or “Hope” and that means we are quickly losing the artefacts that capture our cultural history through the lens of politics, change and ultimately what people care about at a certain moment in history. If the parties all stand for the same thing then the vote, becomes less a personal expression of the type of leadership you want and more a something you just have to do.
But just as those famous campaigns and slogans weave their way into our memory, the single question plays with memory too, just in a very different way. Arguably in a way just as effective as cut through creativity.
Like a sort of political short cut, instead of creatively embedding itself into the psyche like a campaign idea or slogan, asking “Are you better off today than you were three years ago?” pulls tightly on the universal “rosy retrospection” or positive memory bias.
This simple concept speaks to our human tendency to remember the past positively. Writing in Memory Bias: How Selective Recall Can Impact Your Memories, Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies what she calls the many faces of memory bias. She identifies 10 different biases directly impacting memory and how we construct or reconstruct it. For the purposes of the questions being asked around the world. Its strength not as a campaign but as a political short cut is that it plays on two biases specifically, The positivity bias (or rosy retrospective ) and also on the fading effect bias .
The positivity bias makes us remember the past more positively whilst the fading effect bias makes the negative emotions of past events fade. Together they double down on making the answer to the question inevitable. Given the consistency and pervasiveness of these biases, the answer to the question has to be “no, I am not better off”. That is despite the fact that in actuality, 3 years ago the world was teetering on the edge of a global pandemic that had changed the world forever. Melbourne, the worlds most locked down city was only just lifting the last of their COVID restrictions at the end of 2022, I would argue given that context, and putting biases aside, we are all at least mildly better off now than then.
The one exception to that would be the group labelled in an ABC report of 28 April as the “most disengaged voters”, the Millennial voters. The ABC noted that “The May 3 federal election will be the first where Gen Z and millennial voters aged under 45 will outnumber baby boomers in every state and territory”.
This is the group who are more likely to say they were better off yesterday than today and to know that the prosperity enjoyed by past generations is simply not in their reach. Many call Millennial and gen Z the “live in the now” generations but writing for the Huffington Post, Michael Hobbes points out that “the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty.”
The uncertainty is the core of this generation, they were born into it, not a time of guarantees.
So, if the biggest group of voters in Australia doesn’t think anything can get them to where their parents were, it doesn’t seem asking them if they “were better off three years ago?” will get you a good answer. They are more worried about where they are at today than where they were and right now they are looking at a future regardless of who wins an election, where they don’t own a home and where all the markers of life and success are different to the past and more uncertain than ever.
They are not waiting for a politician to get them back to where they were, they are looking at what today and tomorrow could be and they are happy to get on with creating it for themselves if no one else will.
They aren’t disengaged with the process of voting, tools such as “build your ballot” designed to help match individual values to parties’ and help navigate the system show us that. But they are disillusioned with the two main parties. Their answer to the question posed around the world is probably “ask me about something relevant” or “ ask me about the things I care about” that is…maybe give me the answers to how you will make tomorrow better than three years ago and don’t leave me hanging.
And that is where the reliance on one question falls flat.
It doesn’t actually build a campaign. Sure it plays on the bias, sure it plays on fear but what it doesn’t do is offer any answers to how a party will make today different and make tomorrow better. When the question is posed, people want to know what you will do differently and why they should support you against the their guys. But instead, this election has give us all we the two main parties mirroring each others policies and a blurring of advertising platforms that has become the dreaded sea of sameness.
At least with a creative approach to political brands and campaigns you give the parties half a chance to leverage what advertising does so well. To be memorable by being different and to stand out by being single minded. Campaigns used to make it clear what the politician and the party stood for but I fear those days are gone. And with a rise in pre polling, the role of campaigns and their ability to use that magical combination of advertising and policy to actually position leadership is disappearing faster than ever.
