It’s vital for democracy that every eligible voter has the right to participate in elections. But when we started working with the Electoral Commission, a significant number of eligible voters in the UK were still unregistered.  

That needed to change. Our aim was to create a campaign that attracted new applications to the electoral register during the run up to forthcoming key UK and European elections.

But political disenchantment across all age groups was already high, and we had a media budget of less than £1 million.

What’s more, with a series of high-profile elections already in the books - from the EU Referendum to a spate of General Elections - much of the ‘low-hanging fruit’ had already been encouraged to join the electoral register. If you hadn’t felt engaged enough to register then, why would you now? We need to engage people across all General and Local elections, not just 'the big ones'.

This was a campaign that would require a deep understanding of public sentiment, a smart, strong creative idea, and a breadth of specialist thinking that could bring the work to life across channels. 

The traditional, prevailing view was that people who hadn’t registered before avoided doing so because they were disillusioned with politics. It was suggested that a segmented campaign, with different key messages, was required for each underrepresented group – from students to the armed forces.

But by bringing together a joined-up MSQ team of media, data and comms planners, then re-cutting the data using advanced data science techniques, we unearthed the fallacy of this received wisdom.

Instead, our analysis showed that across all groups, the single, almost universal unifying factor for not registering was that the individual in question had moved residence within the past year.

We showed that people don’t register, not because they are disillusioned with politics, but because registration gets lost in the admin of moving house. The action gets pushed down to the bottom of the list, or won’t get added to the list at all because, well, it’s a bit of a faff isn’t it?

Our strategy was to counter this by emphasising how easy it is to register online. It really does only take five minutes to unlock your vote. It’s a simple, hassle-free proposition that we needed to bring to life in a smart, disciplined way.

Our message needed to be punchy. It needed to provide a platform that could run across multiple years and electoral events. It needed versatility to allow for a number of different creative executions. That’s when ‘Got 5?’ was born.

We positioned registration as a simple task that slots into mundane but relatable occasions when people have five minutes to spare – like waiting for the bus, or for a bath to run.  

But how do you make something both mundane and interesting? We produced bright, saturated photography and video of our chosen scenarios, each of which focused on one bold, dominant, non-politicised colour (such as pink and orange). We then added simple idiosyncrasies that lifted everything from the ordinary. Wiggling toes, for instance, or ducks sloshing around in the bath.  

These ‘living photographs’ ran across digital and outdoor media, which we could target geographically and to our target audience. We could also tailor our creative to the environment – for example by creating a ‘Got 5?’ beermat for people at a loose end in pubs, or an execution based on a bus ticket for bus shelters.

It was strong yet accessible. Quirky yet clear. Far removed from most public service communications. 

3.72 million people said they did something as a result of seeing or hearing the advertising – such as registering to vote themselves or suggesting someone else to check whether they were registered too.

This helped the campaign smash the initial target of 364,000 applications, and also helped reduce strain on the electoral website by moving registrations earlier in the campaign period.