Yes, Brexit is a gamble. And these ads show that’s why Leave won.
Here’s a roarshach test for you about Brexit, written by a London ad guy — me — using an ad made by some other London ad guys — a world that is, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly remain.
Tell me, what do you see?
If, like the London ad guys who created this image, you see three disreputable chancers taking a risk with your livelihood, you probably voted remain.
I’m pretty sure that’s what the guys who made this ad saw. I’m also pretty sure they didn’t see anything else — didn’t even consider it could be interpreted any other way than reckless individuals gambling with your future.
But if you voted leave, you probably saw something else.
You probably saw some guys rolling some dice and thought — my life is shit, I’ve seen my living standards drop through successive Labour, Tory (and even a bit of Lib Dem) governments.
You thought, so to hell with it — let’s roll the dice, I’ve got nothing left to lose. Look at the smiles on those bastards’ faces. They’re winners. Winning because they’re taking the risk.
Casinos offer hope to the hopeless. That’s why they’re so bloody popular in the first place.
By trying to portray Brexit as a reckless gamble these unwitting ad men actually stumbled on why a heck of a lot of people voted to leave.
And to me it’s very telling that the well-paid, London-centric Adlanders didn’t even see this interpretation. Because if they did this ad would never have gone live.
Speaking to you as a gambler now, rather than as an ad man, let me tell you this: when you’re down, what you want is high variance. That is to say, the maximum possible opportunity to win big and change your luck.
Every keen poker player knows that when you’re down to your last couple of chips you take the first chance that comes along to go all in, in the hope that you can double up to stay in the game. When you’re sitting pretty on a huge stack, you play defensively — with the goal of maintaining your position as chip leader. You take fewer risks.
And that’s what it all comes down to. The 52% vs the 48%. Those who have benefited from globalization and those who have not. Those for whom it represents a terrible risk and those for whom it represents the only chance they may ever get to roll the dice and change their luck. Of course their luck may get better rather than worse — remainers think it will, hence the smug “Brexit turkeys just voted for Christmas” meme so many of my liberal metropolitan elite chums scoff as they laugh at Brexit constituencies in the faraway — shudder — North, without an iota of empathy for why those people voted to take one of the biggest gambles in political history.
Nothing explains this divide more clearly to me than that ad. Everything is viewed through this lens.
Either freedom of movement was this wonderful thing that allowed you to work as easily in Berlin or Amsterdam as in London and gave you access to cheap, efficient labour to do up that fantastic fixer-upper in Zone 2 you just bought with your bonus money.
Or it was this terrible thing that over the course of many years meant you were competing against two, three, four times as many people for the same jobs in the dwindling employers in your home town — many of them happy to work for far less than you and live six to a house, sending that money back home rather than contributing to the local economy, exacerbating what you saw as the decline of the place you grew up in, watching as your local support network of pubs and shops closed down, while people no longer spoke the same language as you on the bus, increasing your sense of alienation in your own home.
Do you roll the dice? Do you gamble? Do you stick or twist?
I’m not saying one side is right and the other is wrong — it is not my place to judge. I’m saying you see things differently when the chips are down.
During the referendum campaign I saw this ad on my way back home from my extraordinarily well paid advertising job and thought at the time it beggared belief that this ad made it out. It sent out the wrong message. It was divisive.
For every person who saw Brexit as a horrible risk there would be another who saw it as a necessary gamble, the only chance they had of changing something, anything, the only hope they had of staying in the game.
How you view this ad is a microcosm of the wider division that has stricken the nation and continues to divide us now.
A good friend of mine (a highly intelligent doctoral candidate, not a muppet ad man like me) recently wrote a post trying to get inside the mind of leavers, imagining that they couldn’t stand the insult to their collective psyche that Europe represented — the diminution of British interests, the idea that we are no longer “Great” Britain but rather one partner in 28 equals (with Germany as primus inter pares).
I think that is over-analysing it somewhat. I believe people vote according to their own narrow self interest.
52% thought they stood to gain by rolling the dice. And the rest was history.
But at least my friend is trying to understand. A lot of people still aren’t.
Let me advance my roarshach test thesis one step further.
I believe the utter failure of most remainers to understand how the other side felt was directly responsible for tipping the scales in favour of Brexit.
I do not think the ‘dice men’ ad had a significant impact on the campaign.
I suspect few people other than us ad geeks can even remember it.
But here’s one that everybody remembers:
Now this ad is the polar opposite of the ‘dice men’ ad I began this post with.
I’m fairly sure the people who came up with it were riffing on the iconic imagery of Saatchi’s ‘Labour isn’t working’ ad of 1979.
But most ad folk don’t know much about history. Most of us are dumb chancers, we’re joke-tellers or sketch artists who lucked into a job that pays, over a lifetime, more than a lottery win. I know I am. Every ad person has studied the Saatchi work — far, far fewer have studied Nazi propaganda. So I will give the original creatives the benefit of the doubt.
Knowing these fascist undertones, the ‘breaking point’ ad made me feel a little queasy. But as an adland cynic, I will also say this. I knew immediately it was a good ad. It would be effective.
That’s because I knew how a lot of people would interpret it:
If you interpreted the first ad as “Good point, I really need to roll the dice”, what the ‘breaking point’ ad said to you was ‘I’m shit out of luck and the risk is that, thanks to Angela Merkel, all these people will soon be coming for my job, my hospital appointment, my kids’ school place. We really are at breaking point. I’m barely surviving as it is — I simply can’t afford to to risk losing any more.’
I don’t believe most of the people who responded positively to this ad were racists (a few were, but certainly not all). I believe the vast majority are just globalization’s losers, trying to protect their last few remaining gambling chips. They are people who deserve our help, not our scorn.
Now I don’t believe either of these ads really changed many opinions. In fact, I believe both probably firmed up and reinforced a lot of existing views.
If you were a Brexiteer before, both ads confirmed the necessity of your gamble.
But if you were a remainer, the first ad told you what a risk Brexit was while the second ad reassured you that you were on the side of the good guys.
And that’s why you tweeted it. Shared it. Told the world how disgusted it made you feel. That’s why it made the front pages. That’s why journalists gave it column inch after column inch after column inch.
Only a few of these ads were ever printed. And all Farage had to do was stand beside one and take a photo and you all shared it — making it headline news.
The whole shebang probably cost him less to put together than his average bar tab.
It was the retweeting remainers made sure the ‘breaking point’ ad was a talking point of the campaign, seen by the vast majority of the country. In this respect ‘Breaking Point’ was truly an heir to Saatchi’s 1979 campaign.
At the time I said that anybody who wanted remain to win should starve that ‘breaking point’ ad of oxygen. Shouldn’t retweet it. Should just ignore it, no matter how they felt. Because it was certain that other the other side would interpret it in a different way.
By making it the most talked about ad of the campaign I believe it significantly firmed up ‘leave’ support in terms of likelihood to vote, as well as convincing a proportion of wavering voters along the way— not many, but in a contest where a 2% swing would have resulted in a very different outcome, I believe it could have been enough.
I believe Brexit is happening in part because remainers — either through virtue signalling or like many simply registering their disgust — pushed this ad to the top of the news agenda at a critical point in the last few days of the campaign.
They just couldn’t imagine that anyone could see the world any other way to the way they saw it. But racism, immigration, sovereignty, nationalism, whatever — all these things are just red herrings compared to the question — do you gamble or not?
It was a failure to empathise with how other people see the world that led to the first ad being published — but in the second ad, with a 2% swing required to carry the vote, the failure to empathise led to a far greater mistake: I think it might just have led to Brexit itself.
The lesson?
Take it from this cynical ad man. If you want to get your message across, you can’t afford to simply take the moral high ground. You have to learn how your audience thinks.
I applaud remainers and leavers alike who have taken or are now taking time to do this.
The rest of you — get the hell out of my news feed.
