People talk about the Obama election as the first major political campaign to be fought substantially online. But many of the techniques pioneered then were about money and turn-out - data collection and activation - rather than using the internet to communicate and persuade. Obviously smart uses of the tools, but not all they can do.
And now, in the UK, we're in a slightly different environment, at a slightly different time, and we're starting to see new, slightly different stuff emerge.
The first, most interesting, development, was how successful the mydavidcameron campaign was. I bet that image, with suitably updated lines, will be around for the duration of the campaign and probably beyond. It's created a platform for people to engage with politics, playfully, but still expressing themselves. It feels like some power and voice as been re-appropriated from a well-funded media machine.
The second, really welcome development is that the lessons from that campaign have been shared - not squirreled away in a private debrief. An open campaign, open learning. And they're smart, thoughtful, usable lessons.
It was fascinating to read how they've danced on the line between total crowd-sourcing and curation. There's definitely a model here for finding resonant messages; rapid, public iteration quickly helps you discover the might tonal territory in a way that hard-thinking behind closed doors might not.
And, since they're smart cookies, it's a lesson that Richard and Saatchi's have taken right on board with their new poster. Which, actually, is clearly more of a platform than a poster - a thought that can be remixed to accommodate all sorts of specific messages. It might lose some of traditional, poster-type instant impact but this is a new, delicate, slightly different art, it's going to be fascinating to watch it emerge.
It's even more satisfying to watch the Tories struggling to construct posters that can't be 'mydavidcameronised'. You can see traditional, monolithic political posters fall apart in real time by watching alternative headlines for this new effort get suggested via the #mytorytombstone hashtag.
This is going to be interesting.
