Well I’ll never forget VE Day 75. But for all the wrong reasons. It, and the new government messaging which followed, is a communications car crash.
by Darren Caveney
Remember the date: Thursday 7 May 2020. It’s the day that the front pages of the best-selling national newspapers announced - in joyous fashion - the end of lockdown. It was celebrated like a world cup win.
But drill even just a tiny bit deeper and it is clear that this ‘uniformity of front cover headlines’ wasn’t just a freak coincidence. They’d had word from someone.
What happened next…
You’ll all have seen images of the conga in Warrington and the picnics in London Fields which followed.
The usual ruck then ensues on social media about whether the images are even real. We all have to double check and establish fact from fiction these days, after all.
Word spread on my street’s WhatsApp group of some undefined celebrations now taking place in the street. It went from 0-60 in no time and before you could properly scratch your befuddled head the streets had been blocked both ends with vans. Party!
I looked outside, through my own front window, and can tell you that normally good and decent people took to said street for a VE Day drinks session, whilst children played, with bats, balls and bikes. It went on for 5-6 hours. I was genuinely astonished.
I’m the very last person to be a killjoy but this wasn’t right.
Some of these people actually work for the NHS. I bet they don’t tell their colleagues back at work what they did.
The street had observed lockdown to the absolute letter up until VE Day, the day after those newspaper headlines.
Now don’t get me wrong, they didn’t behave badly – in normal times. But we’re not in normal times.
Unofficially blocking the street off was pretty silly and selfish. When the almost inevitable incident happened later that evening and an ambulance was called it wasn’t able to get down the street for 10 minutes or so.
Normally good people had gone off the rails. And whilst I was angry at what I saw, I was more angry with the people who had created this dangerous dismantling of lockdown. Social distancing was gone for the day. I later learned that similar breakouts took place on surrounding streets.
Will we see a spike in new cases in the coming weeks as a result of VE Day celebrations?
The ambulance incident
Now I could be dramatic and say that this delay in the ambulance’s call-out could have seen someone die. It didn’t. But this is what confusing messaging risks.
When it’s the most important public campaign of our generation it’s hugely important to get the comms right.
The latest ‘slogan’
The Government has the elite of the UK’s creative industry on tap to help. Would you ask them to help?
And there are many talented communicators working in Government departments. They’ve clearly not been involved, or not listened to on this.
UK Government comms famously works to the tried and tested OASIS planning model. Has this new slogan been through OASIS I wonder.
We can critique the clarity and call to action of the new alert slogan really simply.
It doesn’t work.
It’s open to interpretation, doesn’t make it clear what has changed/not changed.
The hurried ‘slogan explanation’ that was released by Government on Sunday afternoon illustrates there is a major problem here - a simple slogan, by actual definition, should be easily understood. This isn’t.
The PM’s briefing to the nation
13 minutes to explain the roadmap and such impactful changes to so many people lives and livelihoods.
I’m the first to love a simple plan, a plan on a page, an easy read but there are so many questions left hanging after the PM’s address.
I was left feeling unclear. More detail will be revealed I’m sure but what did it mean for workers, commuters, parents first thing Monday morning?
What is key to delivering national campaigns?
Many of you will have done this so you’ll know just as well as I do that there are communications fundamentals in ensuring an effective national campaign.
One of them is to understand who is needed to help deliver that message. Get them in a room, virtual or not, and brief them on the campaign – the what, where, when, why and how – it’s been around for donkey’s, it’s standard practice. We all know it.
Those people then, if briefed well and given the tools to do the job, go off and help you deliver the message and the campaign.
I did it years ago for a national recruitment campaign. No where near comparable to COVID-19, of course. The success of the campaign hinged upon colleagues around the country playing their part to support and deliver a clear, consistent set of messages and creatives. They did and it all went swimmingly.
Had we not collaborated in this way the whole campaign would have fallen flat.
This is basics. Absolute basics.
So when your see Nicola Sturgeon confirming that the first she knew about the new ‘stay alert’ slogan was in the Sunday Telegraph there is something wrong with the way this policy is being developed and then communicated.
I’m sure that Scotland’s first minister might crop up fairly early on in any stakeholder mapping exercise for this one.
And, again, why share the slogan artwork with a journalist on a national newspaper the day before the national address so we find out first there via Twitter?
The fallout from the WhatsApp group street party…
The day after VE Day, WhatsApp residents were in denial. Back to chatting about hostas and homemade bread. And people chatted in the street, socially distanced. They knew.
I left the group.
All poxy storm in a teacup stuff, of course, when compared to the personal heartbreak some people have been managing these past few weeks.
But it’s a fascinating insight into the division being created through mixed messaging. This street level division hadn’t existed the day before VE Day and that’s a real shame.
That division is much, much broader now, though - we have the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland responding on Sunday by confirming that the ‘stay home’ message absolutely hasn’t changed so now as a block we are out of kilter.
And finally…
So post the PM’s Sunday nationwide address nothing too much has changed, really.
So, why the change and resultant confusion? Broadly speaking, ‘stay home’ was understood and was working.
So why change the slogan instead of retaining but adding to the stay home message?
I send love, respect and good luck to those brilliant in-house communicators across the sectors who have to work with this confusion this policy has created in the week ahead.
You deserve so much better. We all do.
Darren Caveney is creator of comms2point0 and owner of creative communicators ltd
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Image via Andrew Malone
