Interview with The Drum on strategy, persona and trust in political marketing
I was invited onto The Drum's podcast Politics for Drummies with host Alastair Duncan against the backdrop of the ongoing UK election.
We had a great discussion covering a broad range of topics including:
- Why a political campaign is the ultimate "marketing startup"
- What brands can learn from politicians
- The difference between strategy and tactics in a campaign
- What makes governing more difficult than winning elections
- My advice for the current UK party leaders
You can listen to the podcast at this link, with the full transcript below:
Alastair Duncan (AD): Welcome back to Politics For Drummies. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Ben Guerin, who is a Kiwi.
Ben Guerin (BG): G’day!
AD: A very proud one. And do you want to tell us a little bit about what you've been doing?
BG: Well, great question. What have we been doing? So I'm, you know, one of the co-founders of the creative advertising agency Topham Guerin. In a sign of pure creativity, we named it after ourselves.
AD: Yeah that's original.
BG: It's really original. No one's actually done that in the sector, so we got off to a flying start. The other thing that's been different is, neither my co-founder Sean or myself had ever worked at a creative agency or advertising agency before we started one. We think that gives us an advantage because we've got absolutely no idea what we’re supposed to be doing. So, you know, we just start things from scratch.
It's a really interesting time for us. We worked on a lot of political campaigns over the years. You know, we started in New Zealand, back in 2016 we started the company and worked on the campaign there the next year, 2017. We've done campaigns in Australia and the UK. And I just realised as I was on my way over here that I think you know in pretty much every country that we've worked in, when there's an election on: we've tended to be involved in some way. And that won’t always be the case! So it's just something to come to terms with.
But we're working, you know, alongside corporate clients now which will probably be of sort of interest to The Drum’s listeners to understand what are the lessons for brands out of the political space. We worked on the 2019 Get Brexit Done campaign with Boris Johnson. The Conservatives had a whopping majority on election night and we learned quite a lot about how you craft campaigns under pressure, how you change hearts and minds at a mass scale and in a limited amount of time. And that's really helped us build a portfolio of corporate clients around the world, but particularly here in the UK doing exactly that.
AD: Do you wanna talk about that a little bit? So you know, what got you into political campaigning in the first place?
BG: Well, look, in New Zealand, everybody knows everybody, and at uni, I was studying science. I thought I was gonna go down that route but ended up not finishing my degree. But I was sort of hacking together websites for money for my friends. They knew that I could use a computer.
I was also interested in politics and in New Zealand if you're interested in student politics, you'll end up, you know, having a pint with the Prime Minister within a couple of weeks. You know, it's a pretty small place. So you build great relationships. In fact, you know, a lot of my regular drinking buddies at Uni then went on to become MPs in New Zealand now on all sides of politics, which is great.
And so in New Zealand because I was someone that was interested in politics and knew how to use a laptop and could hold a camera, that was sufficient qualifications to take up a role working with former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key as a sort of digital person - which didn't really have a job description. It involved everything from coding a website through to writing tweets, writing some press releases, holding your camera up to do live streams and designing graphics and things using a bootleg copy of InDesign.
AD: Yeah, let’s keep the bootleg bit quiet! I think it's a classic journey of some digital campaigners: that they have multiple skills and just end up falling into things, and they get asked to do more and more and more.
BG: I think that's exactly right, and that's really the story of how TG started.
AD: You've been involved in quite a few political campaigns, I think, of interest. There are two I would like to talk about. One is the Boris Johnson campaign or several of them. But I think the Get Brexit Done campaign, which a lot of people are very familiar with. And he's ended up with a sort of tarnished person or with a tarnished reputation, but I think he did actually win a lot of campaigns for the Conservatives. What went wrong?
BG: Well, Boris is a brilliant campaigner. He always has been. 2019 was a campaign where, you know, we saw that. You know, he had a really clear message. He's a phenomenal communicator. He's charismatic. And what he had to say really resonated with a lot of people.
AD: Yeah.
BG: And, you know, we can talk in a moment about some of the things that we did during that campaign. I think it goes to show the difference between being a campaigner and being a reforming Prime Minister. I think changing the way that government works is really, really hard. It's almost easier to persuade millions of people to vote for you than it is to persuade a few thousand people to change the way that they work in the British state.
AD: Yeah.
BG: That's a really niggly question. You know, I think any incoming Prime Minister has to think about what got them there and then think about a completely different set of skills and strategies that are going to help them change the way that the government operates.
AD: Yeah. I think you're right because there was so much, I suppose that there was so much campaigning, the campaigning skills were very effective but the government skills were not so much. And I think that he found it - I don't want to talk about any of it that much, really, but - I think he found it quite difficult to get what he wanted to do done, because he didn't know how to pull or exercise the levers of power in a sort of concerted way. Maybe.
BG: I think that could well be the case. You know, I think you probably have to go back to Tony Blair to, you know, find a Prime Minister and his team that were really deeply thoughtful about how the government worked. I mean, people like Dominic Cummings have thought a lot about this. You know, he's had plenty of ideas about how to change the way the government works. Maybe if COVID had turned out differently and if he had stuck around we'd be in a very different situation now. I think the reality is it's not sexy or interesting to think about reforming state institutions.
AD: Yeah.
BG: That's ultimately what really matters. You know, we've got amazing work being done with GDS, the Government Digital Service, around gov.uk. It's an incredible platform and it could be doing so much more, you know, and so you mentioned that Boris was a great campaigner and in 2019 we all saw that. That carried through into 2020 and we got brought back in to help with some of the COVID advertising and you know there are also things that didn't go well in terms of COVID, but one thing that really did was the clear communications particularly at the beginning, with Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives, which is a slogan that we helped come up with right at the beginning days of COVID. You had a team with a lot of people that had been involved in 2019 who came back to help out, knowing how important it was to save lives during the pandemic.
AD: Could you just explore a bit the challenge of selling an idea to a politician and a client? What are the differences in that? What's the stakeholder group like, compared to, for example, a bank?
BG: Well, firstly, a bank probably has a few more layers of inward management before you get to your key decision maker, and in a bigger company, there are more people that can stop an idea, and that's, I think, a real struggle that any advertiser has dealt with in the past, right? When you've got to keep everyone happy so by the time the final idea gets to the CEO or the CMO - who might have actually been backing it and really wanting an innovative idea - it's often watered down. Politics is by nature flatter, so it is easier to get a bigger bolder idea to a key decision maker.
Politicians are also used to looking at a lot of market research, probably more than a lot of other business leaders, and as a result, they know how to read polling, and they also know what polling and focus groups can and can't do. I think in advertising, we're really addicted to testing ads and saying “well it performed well in groups, so we run it or it didn't so we won't”. In politics you know, because you're doing so many focus groups, that you understand the volatility of them, that you use focus groups as a tool to sort of check that you're covering all bases and then help expand your thinking rather than a simple AB test on an idea. So politicians are more acutely aware of that. Though, ideas will still be tested, the strategy that the idea is based on is probably being refined off all sorts of focus groups and quantitative research as well as polling, but the big thing is politics is about personalities and the best ideas are authentic because they resonate with that personality. I think there are very few politicians that could have run with “Get Brexit Done” as authentically and charismatically as Boris Johnson did.
AB: Where did that originate? The Get Brexit Done slogan? A lot of people say they were involved in the origination of it.
BG: Ironically, that came from a focus group, and this is a great use of focus groups, you know. So we worked with, obviously, a fantastic campaign team. Our job was on the digital and creative side, but Isaac Levido was the campaign manager and in charge of the research and inside of the campaign. And, when you're trying to understand the mood of the nation, you do a lot of listening, and people were using their own language to describe how they feel and people said in groups that we just need to “get it done”.
And that resonated with everybody. It was actually a really unifying message, which is ironic because people talk a lot about politics these days being divisive with micro-targeting etc - but Get Brexit Done worked because it appealed to people that wanted Brexit but it also appealed to people that may have voted to Remain in 2016 that were just fed up with everything that had happened since and said, look, I don't really mind what happens as long as it doesn't drag on for another decade and that unification is why they were able to get an 80-seat majority and win in places that the Conservatives would never have thought of winning in the past.
AB: And I think it's gone down in sort of campaigning history as an effective slogan.
Do you want to talk a bit about the work you've been doing in New Zealand as well? Because I think that's interesting, with Christopher Luxon.
BG: New Zealand's a really interesting case study, New Zealand's an island, we're a pretty small economy.
AB: We have that in common.
BG: Yeah. We do.
AB: Well a small economy now.
BG: I think New Zealand and the UK actually have a lot of things in common culturally. Obviously, very close cultural ties. Both big fans of rugby, both big fans of cricket. At any one time, one of us might be talking about it more than the other. For me, the best All Blacks game I ever saw was at Twickenham, not in New Zealand. See, there's great cultural ties between our countries.
AB: I am a Scotland rugby fan.
BG: Oh sorry to hear that! But when it comes to politics, New Zealand's a pretty small place, like I said, but they are a little bit more likely to take risks, and we had an opposition leader at the time, Christopher Luxon. He's got a fantastic business career. So he was a CEO of Air New Zealand before he came in, one of the biggest corporate jobs in New Zealand, getting people there. That's pretty big.
AB: And they've had quite a good history of doing quite attitudinal advertising.
BG: Great, interesting, novel, edgy advertising, which is important. You're basically telling everyone to shell out a couple of thousand quid to hop on a plane for 24 hours and go to a rock at the other end of the planet. Now there are nice things waiting for you on that rock, but it's a tough job to sell that. Right?
AB: Yeah.
BG: But before that, he was at Unilever in Canada and had a really serious corporate role there. So you had an incoming party leader, a party leader leading the opposition, who understood the value of marketing, and to his credit, he also understood what he didn't know. So when we worked with them, we said, hey, look you've got to be embracing vertical video formats, like Instagram Teels and TikTok, we think they're gonna be really important. New Zealand has a very small spend cap, So we said actually, you can't just rely on paid advertising. You've got to do marketing beyond advertising, and so one of the things that we did, it was a long term play. We had people working with their in-house team for a long time before the actual campaign itself to build the capability to get them in a position where they could be a real fighting force at the campaign. And one of the things that we did is, said you've got to use social media to show your true personality, your true side of yourself to the world.
And the thing with politics is a lot of people get to where they are in politics by micromanaging their appearance, making sure they're always in a crisp pressed suit, really nice ties, all the rest of it, and that's helpful to work your way up within the party machinery but when it comes to talking to voters you've got to speak their language and you've got to be authentic and relatable.
AB: That's really interesting actually.
BG: Well, we often see this with politicians that we work with where we actually have to get them to unlearn things that they've learned to become a good politician, in order to become a better communicator.
And in the case of Christopher Luxon, to his credit, he really jumped in and he went all in. So we showed him the importance of TikTok, dipped the waters in, took a bit of time, but eventually he was coming up with his own content ideas. He was really comfortable doing a selfie video in the back of the car explaining policy. And as the campaign came to its final final few months, we launched a TikTok game where we turned him into a filter. He's a bald guy, and he sort of made lots of jokes about how he didn’t have a head of hair. And you could use the National tax filter, and you'd see yourself as a Christopher Luxon look alike and then you could play the tax calculator game and try and catch coins with your wallet. And it was a TikTok trend that I think we had about 10% of the population equivalent in New Zealand that used it during the campaign. And it helped bring a relatively dry topic of tax cuts to life in the context of a political campaign.
AB: Well, I think it's putting our idea into the vernacular of the audience and I think that's one of the things that I know I think you do pretty well, actually.
BG: Yeah. Just don't take yourself too seriously is the crux of it.
AB: Well, there's that as well. I think that in many of the campaigns you've been involved in, you've been much more, put it attitudinal in the work rather than formal. Do you want to just talk about that a bit? Because you like to take a piss essentially.
BG: We like to have fun! It’s actually one of our values as an agency… Everyone's gonna have values. They’re very important and they've got to be unique. Right? So one of ours is “work is play”.
If you're in the creative industry, and if you're not enjoying what you're doing coming into work every day, then you're in the wrong role. And so we think you've got to have fun with what you do. And if you do that, you do better work for your clients. We think that's really important.
In a campaign, you know, you've got these 80-plus page manifestos. You've got all these, like, dry parliamentary debates. There's a lot of waffle in there. But actually, everyone's got feelings about politics. You know, your friends, your colleagues, your football team mates, they might not describe themselves as interested in politics, but they've got attitudes and perspectives and really interesting views on how they think the country should be run, and the best politicians can bridge that gap, right.
They can go from the machinery of government and parliamentary procedure and interesting policy positions to having conversations like this one where they really listen, they understand, and they empathise with people's concerns. And the best politicians are able to bridge that gap, and that's really important because you can't do the job of all the official stuff if you're not bringing the perspective of everyday people into it.
AB: We've got an election going on right now, obviously, in the UK. Do you think that we have personalities in leadership positions there that can do that effectively, bridge the gap between making it something that's sort of understandable versus the sort of technocratic perspective?
BG: That's a really interesting question. I think you've actually got two quite similar leaders at the moment in the UK in the sense that, you know, both Rishi and Keir, are immensely capable and intelligent politicians. You know, if they were accountants, I would trust either of them to do my taxes. They both really have a command on the details, and people that work with either of them would sort of say that about them. We've come a long way from sort of the era of charismatic politicians like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, I think that's just the state that the world is in at the moment.
We’ll all take a bit of time to recover from the tumultuous years of the past decade. And so I think parties have put these leaders in charge that they think are gonna be better at managing the economy and fixing the country and taking us where they want to be. That does mean that, you know, no one would say that the current two party leaders are the most charismatic leaders of their parties. And I think it means, you're having a different type of campaign than we have in the past.
AB: Mhmm. Maybe there's more room for policies to be examined more closely, perhaps.
BG: Yeah. This is a really interesting question. You'd love to think so, none of this is a real battle of ideas because you know that’s what we needed. This is where the UK and New Zealand are in exactly the same space. You know, we've had productivity, basically nose diving or plateauing for the last 10 years or so. Houses are going up like crazy, young people are going into the workforce, not thinking they'll ever buy a house. The whole social contract of buying a house, watching it appreciate, and that covers your retirement plus you get a pension, is probably not gonna exist for my generation.
We desperately need politicians that are gonna make transformational changes to the economy, to fight climate change, to achieve better productivity for everyone. Unfortunately I don't think those ideas are gonna cascade their way down into the political argument that we're having. If you look at some of the content on either side of the political debate at the moment, they're saying basically the same things. It’s “we're gonna keep the economy under control, we're gonna fund the NHS”. I'm yet to see a politician that says we're gonna cut NHS funding! That's not a particularly different set of policies.
So we don't actually really have a battle of ideas. We have a battle of vibes. And these vibes are basically the energy that the politicians give out about themselves. It's the signals that they give to different audiences and their content to sort of show that they're aligned with different parts of the population that they share different values, but they're not really contesting any meaningful policy change.
AB: I think that this is a sort of disassociation from the actual doing of government with these guys who maybe, that they try to present themselves as boring and will get stuff done. But they have to persuade people that they can do that. I think they're definitely both outside of their comfort zone, charming a large audience on television. I mean, Sunak comes across as a sort of children's TV presenter, and I don't think people know quite how to place him. He's not of the mould of an old Etonian, a smooth operator like Cameron, or with a boisterous laugh like Boris Johnson, or just slightly, off the wall. I'm talking a lot about conservative Prime Ministers. So we have quite a few, but he does have a job to win the 5th election in a row for the same party, which has never been done before in the UK. I expect to see an unprecedented use of the word, unprecedented in terms of the things people have to do.
And Keir, I think, is like a lot of politicians, I'm sure you've met many of them. When you talk to them face to face, they're like this, they're really compelling, interesting, knowledgeable people. But sometimes when they're put in a position, like, on television, they're a bit stiff. They don't necessarily have the same energy. And I think Keir's doing work to try to present a better personality on television. But It would be interesting, how would you advise - I don't know whether you're involved and you don’t have to admit something like that. How would you advise either of them to win?
BG: Well, it's quite funny, actually, because a couple of years ago, I attended a Labour conference event on a panel, with exactly that question. It was ‘how can Labour win?’ And I'll tell you now what I sort of said then, which was you've got to have a clear strategy. And we talk a lot, on podcasts like this one and op-eds all over the place and Twitter's alight with it - tactics. AI this, micro-targeting that, Facebook spend this, and look tactics are great. But Michael Bloomberg spent a billion dollars and didn't become President. So clearly, it's not just about tactics. It's about strategy.
And in 2019, there was a really clear strategy. With Boris Johnson, he was going to get Brexit done. Whether you wanted Brexit or you just wanted it to be over, he was gonna get it done. And then he was gonna unleash Britain's potential and we're all ready for that whatever that meant. We just wanted Brexit to be done and to move into the sunny uplands and that was a strategy that had been crafted based on listening to what people were calling out for and it really resonated.
Because we had a really set strategy, we were able to experiment with tactics. And we sort of showed that there's nothing in politics that can't be done. We put Comic Sans on a billboard on the final days of the campaign. We had Boris Johnson re-enact that iconic scene from Love Actually, but saying Get Brexit Done instead of “I love you”. We did all these things that sounded quite wacky as tactics, but were all just different ways of executing a very simple clear strategy and that was where ultimately the Conservatives got their victory from and everything comes down to that.
Don't get distracted by the shiny tactics, despite whatever everybody's saying, “you've got to do this, you've got to do that”. We used TikTok in New Zealand, it was really powerful, but this election won't be won or lost on TikTok or any single platform. If the strategy of the winning party resonates with people, then that strategy will also cascade down to their campaign team and allow them to do a better job as well of the different tactics.
AB: I think the tactics do end up being talked about a lot more. I mean, in political advertising in this country, it's not regulated. You say you can sort of say anything. Do you think that, for example, truth matters in that context or do you shape truth?
BG: I think ultimately because of social media if you're calling something out that is obviously complete nonsense you're going to get caught out for it. I mean all the platforms now have something like Twitter's community notes and YouTube have a similar thing, I mean it's a really positive step for online discussion. If a politician says something that is just completely incorrect, people are gonna balance out that debate pretty easily. That's why social media is so powerful. People often fixate on claims that maybe a fact checker said actually those claims aren't 100% accurate but the reality is politics is really complicated. If you want to show all the information, you just slap a manifesto in front of somebody and say, right, compare notes in here. We have to simplify in order to connect with people. And that simplification of a policy message inevitably means someone might say, oh, but that doesn't apply to my constituency or that doesn't account for this accounting treatment of how these things are funded. You've got to lose a bit of that nuance in order to simplify your message to connect with people. Sometimes people will say, well, that's a falsehood because you're not sharing all the information, but that's just the reality of communication.
AB: Yeah. I think there’s the freedom of social media combined with the tyranny of feeding the feed, mistakes happen because there's so much done. But I think it's interesting how there are more controls in place now. I suppose there's some concern about the Wild West nature of things with AI and fake news and all of that, but I think we can very quickly see whether something is real or not. That's the risk of doing things that are tricky.
BG: Exactly. I mean, look, if you've got a fact that- people are talking a lot about the rise of “deep fakes” and everything. Well, first of all, AI technology doesn't really change what's possible. We've been able to do deep fakes for years. Nowadays, people may just make them faster and more at once, right? But, ultimately, in all the time that people have had Photoshop, we haven't had really big scandals with deep fakes. And the reason for that is pretty simple. We can verify. If the politician says, “Hey that's fak,. that's not me”. If the channels decide to take something down that they think is harmful, then that risk is isolated.
A lot of the discussion around misinformation, I think, is actually worse than the threat of misinformation itself because when we say there's so much misinformation online, you can't trust what you read, well, that's undermining trust in everybody and that means that people are more cynical, they're more likely to go for alternative media, maybe media that's influenced by state actors rather than, actually a really constructive debate.
AB: There's a worry because, the more we talk about misinformation I mean, politics is becoming a below interest category, if we go back to the sort of marketing strategy, Politicians are least trusted more than they ever have been, if you like. We're only a little bit above advertising people that are slightly more interested in politicians than journalists, maybe. Do you think the comparison between political advertising and commercial advertising, how do you think that sort of one can learn from the other?
BG: Look a huge amount, and that's really the crux of the business that I run. It's like, politics is really an incubation area for marketing in general. You’ve had plenty of experts on in the past. I think Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me was on a while back, and he talked about, you know, how politics often has much bigger budgets than many marketing clients might have, but much less experienced marketers. And that really resonated with me, actually, because I don't come from a traditional marketing background.
And, we've done a lot of work in the political space, and it's because a political campaign is basically a marketing startup. You've got millions of people to convince, fixed budget, you've got a few things that you control, like, you know when the debate's going to be, you know when you're going to announce your manifesto. So you know the equivalent of your product launch, right? You've got a really basic outline of a go-to- market strategy. But you've got to fill in the blanks yourself.
You need to understand audience insight. You need a really strong brand platform. You need lots of different tactical activations off the back of that. And then you've got to be understanding what works with different segments of the population to reallocate budget and shift tactics, and in a political campaign, you have so much more data than you might often have in another marketing campaign. But ironically, you don't have the data that matters because there's only one time when people buy your product, they all buy it once and you don't even find out who's bought what until the election results are announced.
So you rely really heavily on proxies, you're relying on data points like engagement rate on social media, which content and messages are resonating with people, you rely on polling obviously, you rely on focus groups, so political marketing is a great incubation ground for marketers to be comfortable with uncertainty and to do things at pace and really innovate and that's really helpful for a lot of brands that also increasingly need to be comfortable with uncertainty.
We're not a performance marketing agency. You know, you have brands that have amazing performance marketing agencies that can work out down to a fraction of a penny where to spend your marketing budget on different channels. But then when they need to start educating a key group of stakeholders or a property developer wants to engage more closely with the local community, everything that they've learned about traditional marketing has to be thrown out the window.
Because you've got to be comfortable with uncertainty in much the same way as you do in a political campaign and that's particularly relevant these days because so much of how people choose products and the brands that they associate with is driven by values not product benefits.
AB: Yeah. There's a big debate about the marketing funnel, as it’s traditionally known, how that's been broken. And the way that people come to that decision making just appears so random. I think it's a time for really good research, actually, now to be more intelligent about how people make decisions and so on. What is effectiveness for you?
BG: Well, I mean, that depends on the client's objective. What is the effectiveness? I mean, it's getting the result that the client asked us for. You know, creative agencies can easily fall into the trap of thinking that the KPI is getting the work signed off.
You know, we've sometimes been guilty of this in the past. “How did the meeting go? Oh, the client loved it. No feedback.” Everyone's high fiving themselves and patting themselves in the back and so we say, okay, right. So that means that the ads are going through to delivery. We shouldn't be patting ourselves on the back until we get the sales data back or we get the research data back on how opinions are shifted because ultimately we are problem solvers for our clients. So effectiveness for us is: have we solved the client's problem, that was the reason they came to us and paid us money to address that problem. That's all it comes down to, and we've got to be comfortable with all sorts of proxy and actual data to help us understand that.
AB: Mhmm. Politicians you admire?
BG: Do you know what? I'm gonna give you a really wishy-washy answer, then I am going to give you a serious answer.
The wishy-washy answer, which I don't think gets talked about enough, is anybody who has the chutzpah to stand up and put their name on a ballot paper should be commended, and we need more people doing that in this country.
There'll be what, 650 seats, dozens of candidates, essentially. That's a few thousand people who’ll be running in their local elections this year. Every one of them with a local campaign, teams, volunteers, the thousands of counsellors around them, every single one of those people on all sides of politics should be commended and I don't think we do a good enough job of that. When we complain about politicians not being trustworthy and all the rest of it, you get the politicians that you ask for. And if we keep having such a negative view of politicians then why would anyone go into that career? So number one we should just recognize and value the democratic process.
AB: That's really well said actually.
BG: So I have tremendous respect for everyone that's out there campaigning and I'm, you know, for the election here and everywhere else where we work. I also think it's really interesting that people who follow politics are often really tribal. The closer you get to the heart of politics, the more you, I think, appreciate the human factors on both sides. And it probably surprises people to know that the politicians they admire are really good friends of the politicians that are on the other side of the aisle, and that they have drinks together. So I think that's probably a helpful thing for people to remember.
I've been really surprised over here by just how much more tribal the UK is compared to New Zealand. I feel like it's a bigger economy. You can have bigger bubbles where you don't really interact with as many people who share different views. I think a lot of people in this country use the word Tory like an insult. And to be honest, that's understandable, given what we've had over the last few years! And I can see that, but that's not healthy. You know, we've got to find better ways of bridging that divide. So there's my wishy-washy answer, but I think it's important to talk about that stuff.
As a serious answer, I started my political career working for a guy called John Key ,the New Zealand Prime Minister. Really, really impressive guy. When he was a young kid, growing up with a single mom in Christchurch, South Island of New Zealand, he was bullied at school and he told his mum, he said look I'm gonna be a millionaire I'm gonna be Prime Minister as I'm sure many little kids do and his mum said alright John, good on you, I believe you. But she did actually believe him.
He left school, got great grades, went off to uni and ended up with a very, very successful career in finance. He would have ended up being, before 2008, one of the CEOs of one of the investment banks if he had carried on the trajectory that he was on. But he left that job, came back to New Zealand, ran in a local selection, a local seat, took the local party on board, listened to their concerns, became their MP, and shortly afterwards became Prime Minister of New Zealand, a few months before the 2008 financial crisis.
And I always really respected the grit and the hustle that he had to sort of build a fantastic commercial career but then a really impressive political career where he still steered New Zealand through the financial crisis. He built a great approach called social investment of actually investing in government programs based on effectiveness and how they work rather than just throwing more money at things that sound nice and feel good.
AB: I think that's really necessary in this country actually because there's a lack of investment in social welfare.
BG: Or lack of the right investment. NHS money goes up every year, but no one feels like it's necessarily getting better. And you need a more data driven approach to investment. So I admired him as a politician when I was in uni. I then had the pleasure to work with him, and I think that we need more politicians like that who are willing to bring something from the outside world into politics.
AB: Yep. But he gave you a break, didn't he?
BG: He gave me a break, he looked at this kid - I had purple hair at the time. I'd left uni before I finished my degree, and he said, oh, you can work for me. That's pretty good.
AB: Yeah. Well, listen, Ben. It's been fantastic having you on the podcast. Thank you very much. And, good luck in your future endeavours. And, thank you..
BG: Thank you very much, I really enjoyed it.
AB: Thanks for listening to Politics for Drummies. We look forward to the next episode. We're going to be talking more about the campaign going on in the UK at this moment in time, but it's been a pleasure to speak to Ben Guerin.