On the campaign trail with advancers, the 'roadies' who stage manage every handshake

On the campaign trail, a single moment caught on camera can make or break a day. 

A bad footy kick — like the one from Peter Dutton which accidentally took out a camera operator. An awkward exchange — like the time Bill Shorten asked a woman what her favourite type of lettuce was. An innocent chat with a group of students in front of giant Hitler poster — that actually happened to Kevin Rudd.

They sound like distractions, and they are, but in the campaign business where you have only a few weeks to change voters' minds, distractions cost time and energy.

Campaign events are staged political theatre, and they're carefully choreographed by a team of advancers working for each side.

"An advancer is essentially a roadie," says Ally Luppino, who advanced for Scott Morrison in 2019. "You're scouting locations, you're looking for friendly people for him to spontaneously shake hands with."

You read that right. Those spontaneous hand shakes? They're not entirely spontaneous.

"But the interesting thing about that is, those people don't know that those handshakes weren't spontaneous," Luppino says. "You go out there as an advancer, no one knows you work for the prime minister.

"You talk to small businesses, you get a flavour of what their politics might be … whether they're going to be somebody who would absolutely hate the prime minister and then we strike that off, or if there's somebody we think will have a great conversation with him."

Such is the art of manufacturing a media moment.

You can turn off voters if your authenticity looks inauthentic," conservative strategist Toby Ralph says. "Once you can master inauthentic authenticity, you're doing well."

Staying one step ahead

It works much the same on the other side of politics. Alisha Aitken-Radburn advanced for Labor campaigns (before her time as a reality TV star), including Bill Shorten's 2016 run.

"You will receive a very top line brief that can be as simple as, we're looking to showcase that Bill is good with the economy," she says. "What I quickly learned in the trade of advancing was that means high-vis, hard hat, and standing next to the biggest earth mover we could find."

Both major party campaigns have teams of advancers, staying one step ahead of their leader and preparing the media moments for the days ahead. They choreograph the event, map out what their politician will do, and make sure it goes smoothly. It is a key part of a campaign's media strategy.

"Such a focus of the campaign is winning the 6pm news," Aitken-Radburn says. "That would be a regular conversation in our office. Who won it? Was it us or the Libs?"

They're making sure that the pictures the media films can't be used to make their candidate look bad. Sometimes that means covering up signage like a "for sale" sign, or making sure there are no gate crashers.

All while trying to remain in the shadows. Advancers want to be neither seen nor heard. They don't want to become the story.

"In fact, if you were seen, if you ended up in a nightly news bulletin, you had to buy the rest of the office a case of beer," Aitken-Radburn laughs.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the advancer gets caught.

"There were a few instances while I was on the campaign where … we were caught putting tarpaulin or a piece of sheet over the sign and that became the story in reverse," Luppino says.

And sometimes things go worse than that.

When pictures go wrong

Speak to anyone who's worked as an advancer and they'll list off their campaign horror stories.

One of the classics of the genre is Tony Abbott's visit to a shopping mall that, unfortunately for him, contained The Reject Shop. The photographers noticed.

A moment like that derails a campaign day, purely because it means people are distracted from talking about your key campaign line.

"You're working for three days for maybe a five-to-ten-minute moment," Luppino says. "When something like that happens, it's unfortunate."

Labor has had its share of similar moments.

One that Alisha Aitken-Radburn says gives her "anxiety" happened while Kevin Rudd was leader and visiting a school. He went to a classroom that was studying a particular time in history.

"He's bent down and he's chatting to these students," Aitken-Radburn says. "Beautiful pictures, except there's all these pictures of Hitler and Mussolini in the background.

"How do you miss this? "The main reason your job exists in many ways is to prevent those sorts of pictures."

The sausage and the tackle: unforced errors

Sometimes a media event gets derailed and it's not the advancer's fault. Sometimes the leader does all the work.

Like when Scott Morrison tackled a child on the campaign trail in 2022.

"I was out of politics [at the time] … but the moment it happened, I just thought this is going to be used optically for really negative things towards Scott Morrison," Luppino says.

"I think everyone in Australia was thinking, how did that happen? Why were you tackling a small child?"

"Do you have to take Scott Morrison into a back room and tell him: Maybe don't fully tackle a seven-year-old to the ground?" Aitken-Radburn says. "Not good optics."

She says one of the other golden rules, aside from not letting your politician play sport, was to not let them eat on camera. Bill Shorten didn't follow that rule on election day 2016.

His unorthodox technique for eating a democracy sausage created a campaign distraction in the final hours of the election.

"I think I thought the same as a lot of people did," Aitken-Radburn says. "I feel like I don't know my boss anymore."

These things do have consequences, she adds. "There would have been people who saw that image and were like, 'that guy can't be my prime minister'."

Advancer nightmares expose the media strategy 

Whether or not incidents like an oddly-eaten sausage are truly campaign disasters is probably up for debate. But in the bubble of the campaign, advancers take them seriously. And they partly explain why parties stage manage campaigns so tightly.

Advancers, along with the rest of a campaign's staff, are orchestrating a campaign.

And the best way to minimise risk is to control as much as you can, from the location of an event to the movements of the media travelling with the leader.

The travelling media are herded onto buses for an event, herded to a media pen, then at the end of the event herded back onto the bus to go to the next mystery location.

In short, it is an extremely manufactured environment.

"There is so much espionage when it comes to advancing," Luppino says.

Part of that is about security. Both leaders are travelling with a security detail, and the AFP agents responsible for the leaders' safety want to be able to control the environment they're in.

But a significant element is strategy as well. Because if the opposing side find out where you are and what you'll be talking about, they might sneakily send along some gate-crashers or try to schedule against you.

"They want to make sure that their opposition doesn't know where they're heading because everything becomes so reactive in a campaign," Aitken-Radburn says. "They want to guard their secrets."

Early in this campaign, we saw protesters, sometimes posing as journalists, interrupting media events.

"The idea is to spoil the media moment and to cost the travelling team a day," Toby Ralph says. "The advancers' job is to make sure that doesn't happen. It will."

Campaigns are taking fewer risks

This election, we're also seeing candidates doing fewer "street walks" — where a candidate interacts with voters in public — than we used to.

In 1993, John Hewson famously held large rallies to sell his expansive vision for the country.

He would put up with and sometimes even engage with hecklers. At one rally in Brisbane he had eggs hurled at him, even catching one, declaring: "I get the catch of the series!"

Of course, John Hewson somewhat unexpectedly lost that election.

It's one of the reasons campaigns have learned not to present complicated policy books, and to keep as much of the campaign under control as possible.

But fast forward to 2025, to a time when there's a lot more cynicism about politicians in general, and we can plainly see the stage management at work.

"I think people know that campaigns are highly stage managed and that our leaders are highly risk-averse," Aitken-Radburn says. "And so I think that's why people tune out."

"I think if politicians were a little bit more bold, they would really reap the reward that campaigns can produce."

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