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Campaign slogans are subject to pillory and parody - but a good one can lift the hopes of the politicians pushing them. Who comes up with them? And how?

Photo: Supplied /Labour Party

It's got to have "zizz, zazz, zing, zook" and a "wow".

"It's a little bit like poetry," ad man Mike "Hutch" Hutcheson tells The Detail, as he describes a slogan.

"It should be a short verse or a short statement that captures the zeitgeist of something or someone or a time.

"Good slogans are founded in truth ... something fatuous that doesn't ring true to people just makes them laugh it's an eye roll. What you want is something that moves the hearts of men."

The Detail also talks to Sir Bob Harveysurfer, former Waitkere mayor and top ad-man, and the self-proclaimed political slogan king of New Zealand.

He was part of the group who brought slogans into the political game in New Zealand during Labour Party campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He got the idea from briefly working at an advertising agency in New York, which was pitching to advertise Richard Nixon's campaign in 1968.

"They were emphasising how audiences could be inspired by music, slogans slogans were forbidden, of course, in New Zealand then," Harvey says.

"Nothing was happening in New Zealand all the political ads said "vote Labour, vote Social Credit, vote communism"which was very much a viable alternative! They had obviously a big photograph of one of the candidates pretty bloody dull and boring stuff."

When Norman Kirk arrived on the scene, Bob Harvey got the job of promoting the Labour Party.

He was the mastermind behind the 1969 slogan "Make Things Happen"and the 1972 slogan "It's Time".

He came up with the "Make Things Happen" slogan on a run but it didn't win Kirk the job of prime minister. However, the 1972 campaign tagline did.

"It came from a meeting I was at, with a guy called Arthur Faulkner ... and he was giving a talk, I think somewhere in Mt Roskill, and I was sitting here and he said "it's really time, it's time for a change.

"I thought, 'that's a good line', so I wrote down on a piece of paper 'it's time for change'. Then I did some bumper stickers and showed Norman."

Harvey says Kirk thought 'it's time for change'was too "extreme", so the phrase was snipped down to "It's Time".

Harvey has worked on winning campaigns for the likes of Tim Shadbolt in Waitemat and Mike Moore in Mt Eden. But when he ran for mayor himself, he couldn't come up with a tagline.

"I found it really difficult to come up with a slogan for myself ...I just simply went with 'Harvey for Waitkere'."

To test out the slogans beforehand, he would work with Auckland University lecturers and students and "you'd get a reaction very quickly" to figure out if it was good.

But is a slogan really all that important?

"There [have been] some great slogans over the years but you don't have to have one, you're better to have a really good story and a story that tells the truth. I think we're far too preoccupied with the witty, pithy statement," Hutcheson says.

He talks about Len Brown,the first mayor of the Auckland Super Citya campaign he worked on.

"We did the research and found that the real problem facing Aucklanders was transport. So we said to Len, 'you've really got to get on television and talk about transport ... I can't even remember what the slogan was because that wasn't the story.The story was he talked about transport and solving Auckland's transport woes."

Listen to the full episode for Sir Bob Harvey's tales of success and failure as the 'slogan' is born in New Zealand.

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Original post:
The zing zazz factor in a slogan - RNZ