Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the Liberal Party Scott Morrison. Inset: Sean Topham and Kelly Boxall. Main Image / Getty Images
Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the Liberal Party Scott Morrison. Inset: Sean Topham and Kelly Boxall. Main Image / Getty Images
It is just over a month since the Australian election, and it is unusual to find a post-mortem of the winning campaign without credit going to the superiority of the Liberals' digital campaign over Labor.
Kiwi Sean Topham, aged 28, was the digital whiz who worked at in the innersanctum of the Liberals' campaign HQ in Brisbane.
National Party leader Simon Bridges also lent Scott Morrison his own social media guru, Kelly Boxall, for the last few weeks of the campaign. She was a former press secretary to John Key when he was Prime Minister.
Sean Topham, former president of Young Nationals, set up his own digital and creative company after finishing his law degree. Photo / Supplied
Topham, a former Young Nationals president, was brought on board the Liberals' campaign earlier, about a year ago, by campaign director Andrew Hirst, who is credited with having run a superbly disciplined and focused campaign.
Hirst is a former Crosby Textor staffer and brought in several former colleagues as well as current CT staffer Michael Brooks, based in London.
Topham met Brooks in 2015 when he worked on former British PM David Cameron's last campaign. For someone so young, Topham has a remarkable campaign CV.
He worked on Key's campaign in New Zealand in 2014 when he was president of Young Nationals, on Cameron's campaign in 2015, and on Malcolm Turnbull's campaign in 2016.
And those three were successful campaigns by incumbent Prime Ministers, although none of them remains an incumbent.
Topham also worked on former National Party PM Bill English's campaign in 2017 – although he did not do the two most famous social media components of that campaign, the Walk-Run and the Spaghetti Pizza.
He worked on the South Australian Liberal Party campaign in 2018 when Steven Marshall came to power, he did video production this year for the successful re-election campaign of the New South Wales Liberal Party under Gladys Berejiklian, and he worked for the Liberals to return Scott Morrison as Australia's Prime Minister.
Some of the work was in an individual capacity but in 2015 Topham formed his own digital and creative company in Auckland and has since been joined by Ben Guerin, aged 24, to form Topham Guerin.
The economy is strong with this one. #StarWarsDay #MayThe4thBeWithYou
They have trendy brick-exposed offices in central Auckland near St Patrick's Cathedral, and have 10 other staff.
Topham was joined in Brisbane by several members of the team for the last month or so.
Their work ranged from social media to email marketing to the Liberal Party's online shop. They worked on projects from instant social media response to longer-form material.
Social media for the campaign included a mix of video, animations and graphic.
"We worked hard to present that creative in a variety of different ways to suit the different platforms and audience," Topham told the Herald.
"With that work you use a range of analytics tools to track everything you are doing online to ensure we were getting our content in front of the right audience at the right time and then we'd work to optimise that content and target it throughout the campaign based on quantitative and qualitative feedback on how it was performing.
Prime Minister John Key, with his press secretary, Kelly Boxall, in 2014. Photo / Mark Mitchell
"We were highly responsive to daily events so leveraging Labor's missteps and rapidly cutting short clips or graphics and rapidly pushing them out on social media."
The final week of the campaign coincided with the build-up to the final episode of The Game of Thrones, which devotees will recognise as the inspiration for the take-off of former Labor leader Bill Shorten in Facebook poster: House Labor, Labor never pay their debts.
Likewise they devised a graphic of Scott Morrison as Obi Wan Kenobi to run on May 4, Star Wars Day [May the fourth be with you, if you didn't realise why].
They produced more serious material such as the "My Vision" video of Morrison which received 1.7 million views online after being released on the eve of the election being called.
The results of the digital campaign have been well acknowledged.
Last time Labor delivered a surplus, Bob Hawke was on the Iron Throne.
Labor never pay their debts!
According to Britain's Guardian newspaper, in the last 18 days of the campaign Liberal Facebook videos were watched four times more than Labor's.
The Guardian's Christopher Knaus writes: "The figures are surprising given the two parties shared roughly the same number of videos: 188 for the Liberals and 181 for Labor.
"Labor's page also has 299,954 followers, compared to 274,407 for the Liberals." And while the Liberals had 37 videos out of 188 that had an audience of more than 100,000, Labor had only 11 out of 181.
Topham completed a law degree at Auckland University in 2013 but says he was passionate about digital, graphic design and websites.
"I had a conversation with Obama's digital director from 2012 in 2013 [Teddy Goff] and he said, 'Look, digital is only getting bigger, and more and more businesses are going to rely on it to drive growth and be a key part of their organisation. You're young and you are passionate about it and that's what these businesses need to hear from.'
"So I thought oh yeah, I'll have a crack at it."
He says that while he is better known for his political work, only three of the company's 12 staff had any involvement in politics, and it is not the main part of the business.
They are involved in digital marketing campaigns, placing online ads, corporate branding, digital audits and a whole range of digital and creative work.
"Now we've got a team of leaders, creators, builders, and problem-solvers," says Topham.
"We think we are a pretty bold and creative digital agency. We work with really ambitious brands and companies and public figures around the world to achieve outstanding results.
"Like all small businesses there is a lot of hard work that goes into it and trying to form great relationships with great people all around the world."
Over the nex12 months, they are looking to expand into Australia and Britain.
"We decided we wanted to be a global business from day one – expose ourselves to everything on the world stage and try and be a part of it."
The company offices in central Auckland. Photo / Supplied
