Government Falls Fowl Of Poor Comedy At A Time When Nobody Feels Like Laughing

Ask for chicken for lunch at 10 Downing Street at the moment and my guess is you'd be met with a stare that'd curdle your buttermilk. Twice in the space of a few weeks over the summer, the Government fell fowl (sorry) of launching depressingly poor communications efforts relating to the nation's tastiest bird.

Back at the start of September, the Conservative communications machine decided to leap on the back of The Sun’s front page depiction of Jeremy Corbyn as a chicken for going against the Government’s call to fight out the differences over Brexit in a snap election.

After that front page splash, which harked back to the days when humiliating personal attacks – usually against beleaguered England football managers – were considered fair tabloid game, the Conservatives issued their own take with ‘JFC’ depicted in a chicken outfit under the ‘witty’ comment from Conservative HQ: ”Hey KFC, we’ve found an even bigger chicken than you.”

I use the term witty advisedly. Because, frankly, it was a rubbish joke. It doesn’t even make sense. KFC isn’t a chicken, let alone a big one. It just sells the stuff. And when trying to be cutting and clever, you need to also be accurate. This was none of the above.

As our colleagues at W Communications put it on Twitter: ”If this was presented as an idea, even as a whim, in a creative session at W we would know that we had failed ourselves, and shamefully so.” It lacked any sort of guile, nuance or cleverness. Regardless of your politics, even the most hardened of Conservative supporters must’ve looked at that and winced at how wide of the mark it was.

I’ve sat through a thousand creative sessions where someone has an idea that just isn’t the right fit. Comedy and clever wordplay can often be a smart go-to to make a message memorable. But at W, we generally go against the saying that any idea is a good idea. This was a bad idea and desperately needed to be called out as such. Clearly someone high up thought it was hilarious, so it was railroaded through.

Of course, social media had a field day and frustratingly and embarrassingly for the Conservative communications team, they didn’t get the response they may have hoped. Rather than their competition taking the bait, ‘this is just rubbish’ was the predominant response. And it wasn’t the first time they got themselves into a bit of a flap with chickens over the summer.

Just a couple of weeks before that, the Home Office launched their well-intentioned #KnifeFree campaign, by displaying the call to put down your knives, of all places, inside chicken boxes at leading chicken shops like Morley’s, Chicken Cottage and Dixy.

Racist, cynical and badly-targeted were some of the more kind criticisms of a campaign that really deserved to be placed on better tracks than the one it was set on from the off. It’s intentions were good and, trying to find some positives from it, a barrage of better ideas started to permeate the #KnifeFree hashtag online from those at an age who feel most exposed to the threat of knife crime.

It pays to listen to your audience sometimes.