Pete Martin: Desperation of a creatively bankrupt democracy

IT COULD all have been so different. The Saatchi brothers didn't like the "Labour Isn't Working" concept, but its writer, Andrew Rutherford, sneaked it into the presentation to Margaret Thatcher for the 1979 Conservative election campaign.

When she saw the poster, the Iron Lady exclaimed "Wonderful". The ad ran and Thatcher won, and so our society clanked into its post-industrial future.

The famous line wasn't the only reason the Saatchis became the poster boys for the Thatcher revolution. In 1979, the Conservatives outspent Labour on advertising. Advertising lore suggests they also overspent themselves. They couldn't pay Saatchis' bills in the run-up to the election, and the agency was asked to sit on its invoices: if and when the Tories came to power, they would be richly rewarded.

You may be wondering about the legality of buying things you can't pay for, or marvelling at the coincidence by which Saatchis won an account like British Airways after Tory grandee Sir John King took control in 1981, but when ruthless opportunism is regarded as a credo rather than a crime, it's little wonder that the whiff of iniquity lingered around the Thatcher dynasty.

Fast forward three decades. Over the Pond, we've seen how Obama's "Yes We Can" campaign mastered new media and micro-fundraising with verve, charisma and creativity.

With the UK election looming, you might expect a slew of sloganeering and frantic Facebooking from our political leaders. Yet, once more, our politicians may disappoint you.

Poor old Blighty looks set to be blighted by something duller and more dated. Our parties have discovered direct marketing and its offshoot, telemarketing – known to you as junk mail and nuisance calls.

The attraction to politicians is obvious. Direct marketing aims to predict people's behaviour, largely based on postcodes. This allows political parties to focus their marketing on key areas and to target likely supporters more "efficiently".

The theory is very simple. People's lifestyles, buying habits, media choices and attitudes tend to be self-consistent. For example, one person might live in a certain type of house, eat a sausage roll, drink lager and read the Sunday Mail. Another person might live in a different type of house, eat muesli, drink pinot grigio and read Scotland on Sunday. It's a crude example, but you get the idea.

The pseudo-science of direct marketing often appeals to clients. In reality, it's just a mix of common sense, computer power and jargon. UK databases hold 48 million records, covering 25 million homes, with a dozen properties in an average postcode. The big players tend to be heavily involved in credit scoring, so household information is overlaid with financial data. Other lifestyle and attitudinal insights are added through large-scale surveys. This allows the population to be "segmented" into about 15 lifestyle clusters. These are sorted into smaller groups – giving 100 personas – and, yes, you're one of them.

So far, so Orwellian. As always, though, real life is more complex. People's "hearts and minds" are still hard and costly to change. On average, a segment would represent around half a million people – not a particularly fine distinction. Depressing for individualists, it suggests you're just like 499,999 other people. Equally, what clients gain in precision they often lose in economies of scale. Added to which, Britain is not like America: with our historic aversion to "trade", we don't like being sold to.

Should we be surprised that the most unpopular generation of politicians in living memory should be drawn to the most unpopular of 20th-century marketing methods? All of the main political parties use profiling. There's nothing wrong in that. It's an essential part of understanding your audience. However, in the coming election battle, it seems the parties plan to divert their traditional advertising budgets into database marketing. We've already seen public complaints over political telemarketing and the Information Commissioner's concerns over "robocalls" (automated messages, usually from celebrities) and "sugging" (selling under guise of research).

For a living, breathing democratic culture, there's a deeper, more troubling side to the parties' sudden fancy for what is called "below-the-line" marketing.

Over nearly three decades in marketing, I've generally found it's a bad sign when commercial organisations start to believe that cynical "technique" is more important than innovation, commitment and sincerity. "Events, dear boy, events" usually prove them wrong.

The underlying reason is that they've run out of ideas to genuinely communicate with people, or at least lost confidence in their product's competitive edge. I can't see it being any different in an election campaign.

It's not the failure of political marketing that bothers me, though. It's the failure of politics. You imagine the wonks at party HQ discussing the problems facing our society. Public apathy. Economic decline. Peak oil. Religious violence. The rising tide of depression and obesity, and the strain on the national health service. While they're all scratching their heads and wondering what to do, some bright spark jumps up with a "Eureka!" moment: "I know, let's start phoning people at home while their having their tea. We'll save money if we only target people who already agree with us and appeal to their old party loyalties."

That's not an idea, that's desperation. It's evidence of a creative vacuum at the heart of our democracy, an admission that our politicians have nothing to say which will connect with the great mass of people.

Perhaps the real problem is that our political system is so 20th century. The party structure, if not party politics, is still shaped by the old industrial world: the struggle between bosses and workers; the haves and the have-nots; class and regionality; with the middle classes sitting liberally on the fence.

In a highly interdependent world, are these models really relevant any more? Aren't we all middle-class now?

If not, we're at least all in the same boat, unready for the wrenching dislocations which our society is likely to face, even as the greedy few continue to gild their own life-jackets.

So, perhaps it's not just time for a new form of political marketing. Perhaps it's time for a new form of politics.

• Pete Martin is creative director of The Gate Worldwide.