To say half the internet isjust memes. and political parties, you know, are still and clearly needing to embrace them to disseminate their message. so, yeah. 0k, sorry to interrupt. just tell us how it works, then. you re trying to create, you know, you can t buy your way to prominence on tiktok. so you re trying to create these memes, whatever it might be. what are you doing? sitting around with a young team talking about how to do that? how? just talk us through how you do it. yeah. that s right. look, i think it would be helpful to have a young team at the helm of that. a lot of these are sort of trends or internet subcultures that sort of captured different audiences on tiktok. and when you can find a way to mash your political message in with this trend or aesthetic or content style, that s when you can really start to get viral content going. you know, the cilla black, surprise surprise, is a meme that s been going around on tiktok for a while, and labour were able to latch on to that
Policing this stuff. so, you know, we don t necessarily know, you know, probably the major political parties are not breaking the rules, but we do know that there are influencers who sometimes skirt the line in terms of what they re posting. so that s not to say that, you know, even though there is this ban on political advertising, you may not see content that sort of skirts that a little bit. 0k. well, it s a perfect moment to bring in sean topham from the creative ad agency topham guerin, because sean is known as borisjohnson s social media guru, having worked on his 2019 general election campaign. sean, welcome to the media show. great to be here. great to have you. i think your use of tiktok as a useful election tool actually came later, last year in new zealand. you ran the right wing national party s social media campaign and that party won that election. why then did you focus on tiktok? and presumably you believe it translates into votes? that s right. you know, we saw a huge
Shift in the way people were using social media in new zealand. and the best example i can give you is we were, we know we re working in the office and creating our tiktok videos with the now prime minister and he came in one day and he said, oh, you wouldn t believe what s just happened. i ve just had someone stop me on the street and say they recognised me from tiktok. and that sort of represented, very simplistically, a watershed moment for the platform s ability to have genuine cut through with audiences at scale and with voters. and, you know, to be honest, here in the uk, we ve already seen that the labour party have racked up, you know, ten million views in the last few days on tiktok alone. the conservatives, you know, a few million themselves. now, to pay for those views on other platforms would be extremely expensive and that s all organic. that s all based on the quality, or lack thereof, in the content that they ve been sharing. and, you know, memes are a really effective form of communication. you know, i d go as far
Of security concerns. they did. and i wonder if that s part of the reason that both labour and the tories have been so slow in really getting in on tiktok as a way to campaign or get votes, because if you compare it, we heard about new zealand, but if you look at argentina, if you look even at in america and how the democrats use it, you know, it feels like we re a bit behind also some european countries on that, which might go back to security. i think it s a really interesting medium because in terms of length of time, when you speak to political strategists about how they rank the different social medias, i mean, twitter, ithink is really seen almost as the lowest of the lows, where you put your nastiest attacks and just try and, you know, drive the westminster bubble. perhaps i d be accused of being a member of it, mad for a day on a media row, whereas facebook s much more targeted and there you can do paid targeting, and instagram, i think similarly. linkedln, rishi sunak s team really like, i think perhaps because they think he speaks
With the national service policy to poke fun at the conservatives. so if you ve got a young team who is really well versed with these sorts of subcultures and trends on tiktok, then you can leverage it really hard. but there are other good ways to use, you know, tiktok for content as well, where you can engage with voters and respond to videos. well, we re also joined by sam jeffers, who s the founder of who targets you, an organisation that campaigns for transparency in the way politicians campaign online. sam, what s your reaction to what sean has said? i mean, do you have your suspicions about the online tactics used by political parties? the suspicions, - maybe not so much. i mean, ithink, you know,| one of the things that s sort of been a positive over the last few years hasl been there is now more - transparency at least, right? you can actually see the ads. people are generally running, roughly the audiences they rel trying to reach with those ads. you can see - what they re saying. you know, tiktok, erm, - you know, has an ad archive, again, although there s no political ads there. -