Greens election campaign offers media training lessons

The Green Party deserves congratulations for running a textbook election campaign from a media training perspective. Firstly, they had three key messages they continued to repeat throughout the campaign. These were jobs, rivers and kids. Most media training professionals will tell clients to focus on three simple and clear messages. This is the best way to get their three most important platforms into the minds of their audiences. The Greens did this well. Another media training lesson can be learnt from their handling of the billboard issue. As soon as they found out that the partner of Co-leader Russell Norman's executive secretary was at the centre of the campaign to tamper with National Party billboards, they came clean. If the party had kept quiet about this and the truth came out, as it always does, it could have de-railed their campaign. They would clearly have been implicated. But because they fronted up and controlled the story, this never happened. By doing this, the story only lasted about one day. They would not have lost any votes from this. In fact, they may have gained a few from the professional way they handled it. From a media training perspective, the Greens were the clear winners of the campaign.