Evolution of a political web 'brand'

This is the new campaign site for Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd. When I saw it I thought Howard Dean's children should sue.

Hits all the buttons in mostly the right places (grey images set a depressing tone when you're talking'topics'). Very good, but that, it seems, was the old template - video upfront - parodied as:

Hi, my name is INSERT NAME HERE.

Come watch videos of me on INSERT NAME HERE TV.

Join my team!

Read my blog, even though I never write on it!

I'm one of you! Look! I even have a Facebook page that I have yet to update!

Both Obama's and Hillary's sites (one is spending hugely online over the other, guess which?) are now doing something else - could this be new, more 'mainstream' audience effect?




It's Obama's - and it shows. It's polished 'till it shines.

The Tories campaign site StandUpSpeakUp has also dropped upfront video.

The rapidity and ubiquity of this evolution does place something like StandUpSpeakUp in a new context - yet more online consultation, there's nothing actually special about it and it already looks old to me.

Kevin 07 is ocker (in a good way) but it adds humour - proven virally but sorely lacking elsewhere. It's also broken, design wise. Doesn't really matter - they knicked a brilliant template.

Looking again StandUpSpeakUp fails on some basic marketing levels ('I'm not quite convinced, convince me' > click away) as well as a rather catastrophic usability error in unclickable images — click insanely on the top's calls-to-action.