WPP's T&P and WPP Media win the Electoral Commission's Great Britain account, covering voter registration, voter ID and reaching 16 and 17 year olds.
The Electoral Commission has appointed WPP to run its public information campaigns across Great Britain, including the push to register voters and to explain the rules on voter ID. WPP won after a competitive review, pitching its creative agency T&P and WPP Media as a single team, as Decision Marketing reported.
The brief covers strategy, creative and media planning and buying for campaigns in England, Scotland and Wales. A big part of the work will be reaching young people expected to get the vote when the voting age is lowered to 16. ASG Comms remains the commission’s specialist media agency in Northern Ireland, and will work alongside WPP there.
Niki Nixon, the commission’s director of communications and external affairs, said voters are “at the heart of our work”. Tom Kelly, strategy director at T&P, said that to drive real participation, creative ideas and media placement “cannot be stuck in silos”.
Public information campaigns rarely make headlines, but this is one of the more consequential briefs in British advertising. Lowering the voting age will add more than a million potential first-time voters, most of whom have never been asked to register for anything, and voter ID rules have already turned people away from polling stations. Getting those messages right is a direct test of whether advertising can change behaviour at scale.
It is also a sign of how WPP is selling itself after its restructure, with creative and media pitched together rather than as separate agencies. That model is at the centre of a week of holding company news, from Jon Cook leaving VML to the debate over how agencies get paid.
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