From Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. In twenty nineteen, Scott Morrison managed to narrowly win a third term despite Pole's placing the Coalition behind Labor for almost three years. At the heart of the victory was a change in the way they campaigned, bringing in a pair of young strategists armed with a new weapon, low
quality memes. The duo, called Topp and Gearen have become a go to agency for conservative parties and have been hired by Peter Dutton ahead of the next federal election. But they're more controversial. Methods including deep fakes and disinformation are raising questions about the ethics of political campaigning in the digital age. Today special correspondent for the Saturday Paper, Jason kotsukus on the rise of Topp and Geeren and the political power of bad memes. It's Tuesday, December tenth.
So you've been looking into this digital creative agency, top em Gearen. Who are they.
Well, top em gearan or TG as they sometimes refer to themselves as an advertising company, you might call it a boutique marketing agency. It was formed in New Zealand in twenty sixteen by two young wiz kids, Sean Topham and Ben Gearen, and they've grown pretty quickly since then. They've now got offices in London and Sydney as well as their headquarters in Auckland, and they've really in that short amount of time established themselves as a very disruptive
force in the world of political communications. They're pretty a student pumping out a lot of content very quickly, that's very emotionally charged.
Okay, So it was formed by these two young fellows in New Zealand. Tell me about some of the campaigns that worked on well.
That kind of breakthrough moment was actually in twenty seventeen
the New Zealand general election. They ran the digital comps for that campaign and the New Zealand Nationals won the most seats, but they weren't able to form a government, so it wasn't a huge victory, but they still did pretty well, well enough so that the Liberal Party here in Australia hired them to run the advertising for Scott Morrison's re election campaign in twenty nineteen, and when Morrison won so unexpectedly even he described it as a miracle.
And not long after that win, Ben Gearan spoke at a right wing conference called the Freedman Conference to discuss pr strategy really interesting.
You've got to surprise people, you've got to shock people, you've got to unlock and arouse on emotion in people, right.
And this is really one of the first times where we saw Ben Gearon talking about where they really found success and the key to it was using social media to engage older Australians with his kind of purposefully low quality memes. Ben Geron described this as the Boomer memes strategy.
And the peak point during the campaign we were posting thirty posts a day and more than two hundred or two and fifty a week. That means you have to generate and publish a new piece of content every twenty minutes. That's how you get what we call the boomer memes because you had to crank stuff out quickly. You couldn't spend too long doing it perfectly created, like artisanally perfect graphic.
You're gonna slap some calibri font on a shitty, you know, reused meme and you're gonna publish it, and then you get onto the next one, and you know what that content is going to do better than the thing that your poor graphic designer spent a week on.
In the same presentation, Ben Grin also referred to a Bill shot in Game of Thrones meme which labeled Bill Shot and the tax King.
Are we taking it for granted that everyone knows that Bill is all about text? We're moving one step on from that. What happens when you know that everything's about text with Bill? Oh, well, you know you've got the bad joke meme. You've got the fact that he's been compared to nearest Tigerian. I think that's a compliment. Actually, I think she's she wonders in the Game of Thrones.
And he admits that it's not a particularly sophisticated or even well made meme.
The point is here that we were sort of unlocking different ways of talking about the issue. But every single thing that we're doing is relevant to the key message.
He also spoke about how they would whack short messages about tax next to pictures of cute dogs, and they really figured out how to weaponize these boomer memes.
That it was very effective, really targeting the grandparents with that one.
Jace absolutely, and I guess achieving mastery on Facebook was really call to their strategy. I also worked on the twenty nineteen general election campaign in the UK, which catapulted
them onto the global stage. Top them created an advertisement for the Conservative Party which featured Boris Johnson doing a parody of that famous scene from the film Love Actually, where Kira Knightley's secret admirer turns up on the doorstep of her house and holds up a series of cards that declare his love for her.
Oh Hi, what is it?
It's Karle Sayers give And in the Conservative Party video entitled Brexit Actually, it's Boris Johnson with the cards and instead of declaring his love for the woman standing in the door, he's encouraging her to vote Conservative. And the key message in that ad was let the Tory government finally get Brexit done.
Enough enough, Let's get this done.
They were also widely condemned because during one of the Leader's debates, which was Boris Johnson versus Jeremy Corbyn, Topham Gearan changed the name of the Conservative Party's Twitter account to fact check UK.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was an independent fact checking site, but the indication they're saying it was from CHQ, and that's what has people talking.
People believed it was misleading, and they were accused of e roating public trust in digital platforms and you know, blurring those lines between genuine fact checking and partisan propaganda.
So they've kind of pushed some ethical boundaries there in relation to digital campaigning. But is it against the law, is it against the rules or anything like that.
No, it's not against the rules or any regulation. And Sean Topham himself has defended it in an interview with The Spectator earlier this year.
Look, we were there to be playful and create some noise to get attention and eyeballs on the conservative edges. Controversy sometimes a good thing on social media.
A little bit of controversy can be a good thing on social media, and it's about making sure that that controversy relates back to an important message.
But it's also far from the only controversial thing that top Gearan has done. They were hired to do the advertising for the Queensland Liberal National Party in the state election there in October and they created four hundred and sixty five custom video ads during the campaign and TJ also revealed that using artificial intelligence had been a really important part of helping them turn these videos around very quickly.
It looks like a video of the premiere, but it's not. This clip, posted on the Liberal National Party's tektok account, has been created using artificial intelligence.
You know.
One of the videos that created had a bit of controversy during that Queensland election was a deep fake video of then Queensland Premier Stephen Miles dancing, and I think by itself it was pretty harmless, but it did raise some eyebrows about is this the beginning of deep fakes
being a standard go to thing during election campaigns? And Steven Miles himself said it represented a pretty dangerous turning point, and so experts that I spoke to pose the question that is this really the sort of thing that's in line with the ethical norms of being a professional communicator.
And so while these guys have emerged as a go to agency for conservative parties seeking to leverage digital media, I think there are really genuine concerns about disinformation and deep fakes that are used so often by this agency, particularly as we approach the next federal election.
After the break rebranding, Peter Dutton, so Jason, the consultancy group top Gear and have been engaged by the Liberal Party to work on the next federal election campaign. Do you have any sense about what that campaign is going to look like? More Boomer means for one.
Well, a senior Liberal Party source did confirm to me that yes, TG has been hired to work with the Federal coalition and of course Peter Dutton as he heads into the campaign. And as for what that campaign might look like, I guess we could treat the recent Queensland campaign as a bit of a dress rehearsal, so I think we'll see some aggressive use of AI and deep fakes. But one other thing that the agency has done that's been effective has been using video platforms like TikTok to
humanize politicians. We saw this in the New Zealand election last year where they got the New Zealand Nationals leader Chris Luckson, who looks a little bit like Peter Dutton, tall, bald, known for being pretty no nonsense and a lot of people might look at Chris Luxon and think that he's probably never going to work on social media, but according to Sean Topham, they're able to work at revealing Chris Lackson's sense of humor.
A lot of you have said to me, Look, Chris, you're a good looking board man.
How do you keep your skin in such good condition? All of these two tracks?
In my skin care regime, I have a daily moisturizer.
Cara a sirav.
I'm not sure how to say that. It seems to work really well. You only need a little bit of this great daily moisturizer to go a long way. Unlike this government, we don't waste anything, not even the moisturizer and the most important thing.
And I think we could sort of see that as perhaps a bit of a signal as to how the agency is going to try and humanize Peter Dutton.
Yeah, and I understand that Peter Dutton has a TikTok account.
Not only does he have a TikTok account, but he's using it.
I think he's.
Posted around eight videos. It's doing exactly what Chris Luxon did.
I know. My first TikTok is supposed to be something fun and I probably should say something that is or isn't demure.
But he's got a video there about the family dog, the video that I think that's got the most views. As a proposal to ban foreigners and temporary residents from buying existing homes hard.
You stay in while everyone's going out so that you can save a bit more, and you finally have enough to buy your first home, put in a good offer, only to be outbid by someone who doesn't even live in this country. It's a situation.
According to Garin, he was on a podcast earlier this year explaining that the key test is whether or not the content is entertaining, So it's going to be interesting to see how they try to take that further. And of course the other goal is to try and create content that will ultimately get shared.
So after twenty nineteen losing the unlosable election, Labor must have realized they were outmaneuverd by the Liberals online I like gearing up. They have their own twenty four hour meme factory.
Well, they certainly learned the lessons of the defeat in twenty nineteen, and after that they got together and created a new digital unit which they deployed in the twenty two election, and they ran that as a kind of rapid response newsroom so that they were able to push
out content quickly. But as you know, Daniel, this space, the online space, really has tended to be dominated by right wing groups, you know, in the last few years, and we saw that especially during the Voice referendum campaign, where the Yes twenty three campaign was completely outmaneuvered by groups like Advance, especially when it came to a shareable content on platforms like TikTok, where the Yes twenty three
campaign didn't even have a presence. One person I spoke to was Hari Adne Froman She's a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. She's also a political sociologist and she said, in her view, there's a growing network of people who work exclusively for conservative parties and that they are very much in the ascendency. The Voice campaign showed a serious risk for labor to
see TikTok and other platforms. To Peter Dutton, we all know that Anthony Alberzi has yet to set up a TikTok account, then Anthony Alberanzi will absolutely have to compete with him in that space.
And finally, Jason, when you look at how agencies like topgearon and say Advanced in the Voice fresherendum have maybe pushed some ethical boundaries around disinformation in political campaigns, deep fakes and falsehoods so legal and political advertising in this country. Is there any consensus to change that?
Well, first point I should make here is that both the major parties are using deep fakes and AI to create new political ads. The Labor Party's got a deep fake video out there of Peter Dutton also dancing. I mean, it's so obviously a deep fake. I don't get the sense that they're trying to trick me. I don't have too much of a problem with political parties using AI in the way that the rest of society is going to be using AI. Political campaigning does evolve with each election,
and you can't stop change, can you. So we're going to have to be all quite vigilant in making sure that we are policing any attempt to genuinely fool voters into believing this is a real video of Anthony Oberenezi doing X, Y or Z. Then we've got to be vigil about taking that sort of content down. There's not really a consensus around, you know, what the rules are
or what they should be. I think this is going to be one of those things where we know, I guess regulations and laws will evolve as the technology becomes more sophisticated.
Jason, thank you so much for your time.
Daniel, great to chat to you as always.
Also in the news, Prome Minister Anthony Albernezi has announced an AFP Special Operation Task Force to combat anti Semitism. Comes after the attack against the Adas Israel Synagogue on Friday was declared a likely terrorism incident by Victoria Police. The designation means the attack will be investigated by a joint counter terrorism team combining Victoria Police, the AFP and ASO.
And The political fallout from the synagogue attack has continued, with OP positional leader Peter Dutton launched an extraordinary attack on Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, whose electorate is home to the synagogue. Dunton blame Burns for losing his voice and not speaking up against Palestinians flaring Gaza being brought to Australia. Burns whose office has been the subject of anti Semitic attacks. So he works for his community every day and it does not serve the Jewish community to
be arguing against ourselves, he said. I'm Daniel James seven am. We'll be back tomorrow