Fine Gael's Attack Video: Áras25 in Content
By burying the lede and handing over airtime, have Fine Gael committed an own goal?
This week I am doing a series with daily posts on notable content from #Aras25. And this, landing in our feeds last night, is certainly notable.
I'd like to argue that it is bad - bad content, and bad strategy.
Bear with me.
The video
The official Fine Gael accounts launched versions of an "attack video" on Sunday evening across X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
It ranges from 30 seconds on TkTok to just under 3 minutes on X, and has clips of Connolly - some of them long excerpts of her Dail speeches - interspersed with B-roll footage of the financial crash, and some shaky video of Connolly being confronted on the street.
It is soundtracked with dramatic violin music, and a voice over asking about Connolly's work representing banks as a barrister, calling attention to her advocacy for tenant rights and against vulture funds, and calling this "hypocracy".
Looking at it purely as political content, this piece has so many problems. Let me pick three.
(1) It gives Connolly uninterrupted airtime talking about Fine Gael's weakest point
The longer version of the video gives more than 1 minute of their audience's attention over to showing Connolly make quite articulate speeches criticising the Government that Fine Gael are part of, on an issue that is their weak point. From 45 second in until 1:48 it is all Catherine's own words, unmediated and uninterrupted, and the foreboding music fits as a sound track to the housing crisis she is describing.
(2) It doesn't really work on mobile
The video is produced in landscape and the lettering is tiny.
Though edits were made for different platforms - Meta's Facebook and Instagram got the 1 minute version, TikTok the 30 second version - landscape videos don't work on TikTok or Instagram reels - the algorithms hate it as it only uses a small section of the screen.
The video includes subtitles, which in theory is good - but these are so tiny as to be meaningless on a small screen (see screenshot below).
This might explain why on TikTok it has only amassed about 2.5k views.
(3) It buries the lede
Content needs to work with our attention spans, which, right now, are crap.
This is especially true as we have no paid political ads this time, something Fine Gael really relied on for all the election's last year (as I have written about).
Liz Carolan
You probably have about 3 seconds to capture our attention before we scroll on - fail to do that and we will not only see the rest. Not only that, but the algo will learn that people don't stick around, and it will suppress your video.
Lets look at the transcripts to see what people are actually getting in these short windows.
The Twitter version has by far the most views at over 600k this morning (if we believe X's metrics), and this is how it opens:
"Catherine Connolly wants to be President of Ireland. But let's rewind to the 1990s. Long before politics, Catherine Connolly qualified and then practiced as a full time barrister for many years."
That is your first 8 seconds - by now a large proportion of your audience has moved on - possibly thinking this was a video by the Connolly Campaign.
For a campaign that has tried to paint her as a radical left looney, talking about your opponent's well respected credentials is a weird pivot.
You have to linger for 20 seconds to hear the narrator ask - but not answer - if Connolly worked for the banks at this time.
The Meta video edit is a bit more punchy:
"Catherine Connolly made a living as a barrister working for banks in home repossessions"
OK! You've got my attention in 5 seconds. Then:
"This is the normal course for any legal practitioner qualified in that area"
Never mind.
It also doesn't work as strategy
You could probably get away with all of this were it not for two bigger picture factors;
That Irish voters are not used to attack ads, and while yes the presidency might be a brutal campaign, candidates don't usually stand so close to the mud slinging.
And that this doesn't fit with the branding and positioning of the candidate. Heather's (as we are encouraged by her posters to call her) campaign has been aggressively homey, even grandmotherly, so seeing her campaign switch to attack mode doesn't work.
Also; could Sinn Fein have gotten away with a line of attack like this? Possibly.
But Fine Gael attacking another candidate on housing in 2025?
(FWIW - I did predict a messy campaign when it became a 2 horse race)
Liz Carolan
