I hadn’t been planning on doing any blogging on the budget this year, and technically this blog isn’t about the budget graphics so to speak. But I something has caught my eye that I wanted to talk about. Both of the major parties have started to use animated videos as part of their social media. Labour four out in the last 10 days, with National rolled one out today. I have embedded them below.
These make a great change from the previous options of either simple graphics or talking head videos that we have generally been seeing. Animated videos offer the ability to pack more information into a post than a graphic, but are more likely to be interesting and engaging, compared to a talking head video. Which can be seen by the fact that an animated video (left) posted by Labour on 23 May has around 3 times the views and 3 times the likes of a talking head video featuring Grant Robertson that was posted 5 days before.
However despite the advantages and changes that these videos bring, there are a few things that could be improved on, such as the addition of sound to some of Labour’s videos, or less repetitive use of the same basic figure model in the National video. Additionally National’s video runs around 40 seconds longer than any of Labour’s videos (2 min 10 vs 1 min 30), and I found it did drag on a bit. So it will be interesting to see if they continue to use videos of that sort of length, or if there is a shift to shorter videos. However the use of these potentially represent an interesting insight into the sort of content that we can expect to see in the election campaign next year. They are another step in the improvement in the quality and sophistication of the graphics we have been seeing, and along with signs of an increasing influence from US political social media. So I am really looking forward to 2017.
