Interview with Verber Strauth: “SPD has the best campaign ever”

Saturday, 4 September 2021

Interview with Weber Strath
“SPD has the best campaign ever”

The election campaign is more exciting than expected, with CDU and SPD fighting face to face initially, now the momentum is with SPD. Is it because of campaigns? Advertiser Thomas Strarath, managing director of MediaMonks, dissects the parties’ messages in the podcast “The Zero Hour.”

Black and white Olaf Scholz on a red background with small messages on it: Secure pension, 12 euro minimum wage, affordable housing. Plus: Scholz deals with it. “Visually a very strong campaign,” says Thomas Strarath. In the podcast “Die Stunden Null,” the advertiser and managing director of MediaMonks analyze the parties’ campaigns – and one thing is clear to them: “SPD has the best campaign ever”. The words “packaged in a way that is easy to understand”, indicate a strong claim to leadership, and so the SPD is able to communicate a clear message. “And that’s what Scholz epitomizes: he doesn’t let himself be bothered.”

It is precisely this focus and clarity that is missing from its two main competitors, the CDU and the Greens. Strauth reaffirmed the CDU campaign’s “lack of focus, increase, brevity”: “You try too hard to accommodate everything – and in the end nothing succeeds,” said von Jung von Mat, the agency’s former director. criticized. “You try not to offer a target,” said one that doesn’t allow for negative demarcation from other parties, said Streuth, who in 2017 was one of the heads of the CDU campaign (“For a country in which we live well and happily”) For the first time ever, in the interview, he also explained how the campaign came to be – and with what slogan he originally started the race.

The Greens are even worse at demarcation, they think. The party could not actually decide between Annalena Berbock and Robert Habeck, and this led to “no claim to leadership”. The design of the posters “looks like a water corpse” and shows “how yellow it looks”. The film, in which the Greens re-set the folk song “No Beautiful Country”, would fulfill all the old stereotypes about the Greens. Strauth’s verdict: “The appearance of green is the worst of all appearances.”

The advertiser is even more critical of the FDP campaign, which set the standard in 2017 and was award-winning. Because she is trying to repeat the campaign from four years ago. He also focuses on Christian Lindner, showing her “little diversity” and “society”. Strath, on the other hand, finds AfD’s campaign surprisingly successful. “Germany but normal” is from an advertising standpoint – if one summarizes the opinion about this party – astonishing and “excellent” because it “comes from the target group as a whole”.

Listen in the new episode of “The Zero Hour”:

• Why posters still play an essential role for parties.
• How campaigns work on social media and microtargeting.
• The origins of the 2017 campaign “For a Country We Live Well and Happily” are all episodes you can find directly through Audio Now, Apple, or Spotify or Google.