Guest blog: Mark Wallace (Campaign Director, The TaxPayers’ Alliance)

British politics has long been obsessed with communication. Innumerable column inches have been written on the “dark arts of spin”, the merits of PR appeal versus ideological purity, the soaring successes of well communicated campaigns, the unfortunate gaffes and the embarrassing failures of boozy briefings.

But while Britain has a huge and turbulent tradition of communication through the print media and news broadcasting, and there is a huge amount of attention being paid to mastering the field of online and social network communication, there is one area where we lag far behind the rest of the world. Despite their popularity, cinema and TV advertising are largely neglected as political battlefields. Political advertising on TV is currently banned by law, but allowed in the cinema – and yet even that medium is only rarely used.

This is a missed opportunity. Viewing figures at the cinema remain high and – crucially – the demographic is often one which is listed as “hard to reach”, particularly younger people. Moreover, the visual medium is vastly powerful. We are visual animals, first and foremost, and whilst we have (happily) developed reading and writing there is nothing more immediate or direct than visual images. An advert you can see and hear can be far more moving than a newspaper advert or an opinion piece in a magazine. Given that, it is remarkable that the genre has been sidelined.

Even in the one area where political adverts are regularly produced – Party Political Broadcasts – the sector lags behind the commercial comms industry. Consider for a moment the adverts you normally see on your TV. Sure, some of them are dross, but many of them are beautiful, entertaining, hilarious and imaginative. Compared to them, Party Political Broadcasts are too often dreary, stilted and even embarrassingly bad. Whilst political PR is normally the sharp edge of new tactics and fresh thinking, political adverts are miles behind.

The TPA is tomorrow releasing the first cinema advert by a UK political campaign group in almost a decade (watch it online here ), to publicise our new book on the costs of the EU and the need for a new, looser relationship with Brussels.

We’ve found that the requirements of filmed advertising are refreshing and stimulating to how you communicate in general. If eurosceptics, to take the example of the topic this particular advert, only talk to each other or to the same old opponents then their argument will become stale and increasingly irrelevant to real people in the real world. Putting together an advert aimed at a new audience, using such a visual medium, demands that arguments are reassessed and sharpened. As a result, instead of the traditional EU issues of vetoes, treaties and constitutional history, our advert deals in food bills, tax bills and real life costs. Hopefully, it’s quite good fun, too.

Who knows, perhaps if there was more political cinema advertising, party political broadcasts might even improve as a result.