Their alchemy helped consign the Labor Party to another three years in political purgatory. Now the same team of digital gurus are working with Boris Johnson to break the Brexit deadlock.

They are Topham Guerin, or TG, a boutique digital marketing agency from New Zealand headed by Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, two Kiwis still in their 20s.

They run what has been dubbed a 24-hour meme machine — a social media firehose of attention-grabbing, emotion-manipulating, behaviour-nudging messaging designed to corral the faithful and convert the fence-sitters.

These are not issues Topham Guerin wants to broach. In a text message, the head of TG's Australian arm, Andrew Blow, said it would be "entirely unprofessional" to discuss details about clients or the work done for them.

But on May 26, a week after Bill Shorten lost the "unlosable election", founding partner Ben Guerin was more forthcoming. In a flush of post-election euphoria, he spilled the beans.

Appearing before a Sunday afternoon session at the Australian Libertarian Society's annual Friedman Conference, Guerin spent 18 minutes humblebragging about the tradecraft TG used to ambush its opponents and influence the voting public.

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Footage of that talk is now buried 32 minutes inside a YouTube video titled "Friedman 19 // Using Social Media Effectively", a clip that has sat unliked and largely unwatched since it was uploaded three months ago.

It shows Guerin giving a blow-by-blow account of how TG won what he called "the battle of the thumbs".

He also boasted about weaponising "boomer memes", deploying a strategy called "water dripping on a stone", and unlocking "arousal emotions" to maximise the impact of the Liberals' social media posts.

And he talks about how social media feeds for another political client were sanitised to downplay criticism and negativity in order to give the impression of broad, enthusiastic support.

The video is more than just a recap of a successful political marketing campaign, it's a guided tour of the dark arts of contemporary information warfare.

Act fast, break things

Topham and Guerin came up through the ranks of the Young Nationals, the youth wing of New Zealand's conservative National Party, and worked on the fringes of political campaigns both in New Zealand and Britain before launching their own firm in 2016.

Their first big break came in 2017 when they were hired by New Zealand's National Party to help then-prime minister Bill English take on a resurgent Labour Party under new leader Jacinda Ardern.

Their client won the largest share of party votes and seats, but they ended up on the losing team.

"They were facing this new phenomenon of Jacindamania," said Tim Murphy, co-editor of New Zealand news website Newsroom.

"She was on a wave of charm, freshness and vitality against a nine-year, three-term government."

But the zing in the Nationals' digital campaign didn't go unnoticed.

"It was kind of an 'act fast, break things, move on' [attitude] that was obvious," Murphy recalled.

It's the same style of campaigning TG has since rolled out both in Australia and now with the Conservative Party in the UK, repurposing many themes, memes and slogans across the different jurisdictions.

Through their connections — including with Crosby Textor, the Liberal Party's go-to political advisory firm — TG ended up doing some work for state Liberals in elections in South Australia in 2018 and New South Wales earlier this year.

The big break came when the Liberals hired TG to take a leading role in the digital campaign ahead of the May poll, working in the election engine room alongside the party's federal director, Andrew Hirst, and his team.

A Liberal Party spokesperson declined to say if the party was still using TG's services but noted Topham Guerin "did an outstanding job for the party during the recent election campaign".

But six months on from the election, the Liberals are still paying for Facebook ads to sell Scott Morrison, posting attacks on Labor, and two of the page's administrators are identified as being New Zealand-based.

And now that TG have reunited with former Liberal Party deputy director Isaac Levido, who has joined the Conservatives as campaign director, expect to see even more recycled creatives.

Water dripping on a stone

Labor's own review of its election loss highlights many failings of its digital operations — an increasingly critical part of any modern campaign.

These include a "reluctance to embrace 'digital-first' campaigning, [which] left it flat-footed and falling behind its opponents".

Also cited was a failure to empower the digital team and to treat it as ancillary to the main campaign.

The report said social success in earlier campaigns had led to "perceptions Labor had a superior ground game to the Liberals and was better at social media campaigning".

Guerin spotted many of the same weaknesses six months ago and said so in the YouTube video.

"They were so complacent at the beginning of the campaign thinking that because they were left-wing they were going to win the war on the internet," he said.

TG's Ben Guerin speaks at the Friedman Conference. ( Supplied: Facebook )

The Liberal team, he said, had out-gunned their opponents in both volume and engagement, concentrating their efforts in marginal seats.

"That's how you win an election that no-one thinks you're going to win," he told the mainly centre-right-leaning audience.

And achieving mastery of Facebook — which has become the key platform in digital campaign strategy — is at the core of the TG playbook.

When the average Facebook user spends just 1.7 seconds on each post, the challenge is to get them to "stop long enough on our content, to process it, to react with it, to interact with it and then share it with their friends".

"This is the single most important point: the best social media strategy is water dripping on a stone. You've got to be pushing the same consistent message day-in, day-out," he said.

In Australia, the main anti-Labor "dripping water" message was, according to Guerin, that "Bill Shorten is the bill Australia can't afford".

That was expressed in ads and posts designed to stir up concerns about property taxes (changes to negative gearing), retirement tax (scrapping franking credits), car taxes (electric vehicle subsidies) and resurrecting the death tax bogey.

On the flip side the "I'm standing with Scott" mantra was hammered home.

In the UK, the repetitive pro-Boris message is "get Brexit done" and the anti-Labour one is "more dither and delay".

Using 'arousal emotions'

Guerin says that after capturing attention, the next task is to encourage engagement, which means getting the reader to like, comment or share the post.

The way the Facebook algorithm works, the more engagement you get on a piece of content, the greater the chance that it spreads further.

In the video, Guerin defines engagement as a response of emotion.

"Like, we're not going to interact with something if we don't care about it. But the particular emotions that we need to unlock are arousal emotions, we're talking anger, excitement, pride, fear," he said.

"Your content should be relating to one of these emotions for anyone to give a damn about it."

And TG posts turned out to be highly effective in engagement as the charts below from social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle show.

Head-to-head, Scott Morrison's personal Facebook page was streets ahead of Bill Shorten's in terms of reactions, shares and comments. This almost certainly reflected Morrison's dominating lead in the 'preferred prime minister' stakes.

And it was almost the same story when comparing the main Labor and Liberal pages, even though for most of that period the polls put Labor marginally ahead. It wasn't until the eve of the election that Labor skipped ahead and then that was likely a reaction to news about the death of former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.

Pumping out 'boomer memes'

In Topham Guerin's world, perfection is the enemy of good enough because it's less about the quality of the posts and more about the frequency.

Guerin said the team adopted the 80/20 rule, meaning that if something was 80 per cent good enough, it would just be published, even if it had a small typo or was missing a full stop.

"It's an arms race for who can dominate the [Facebook] newsfeed and if your opponents are starting to catch up, it's time to crank it up a notch," he explained.

And this graph from CrowdTangle shows clearly how the Liberals kept ahead of Labor and then jammed on the accelerator as soon as the election was called in April.

To maintain the advantage, the team had to ramp up to some 30 posts a day at the height of the campaign — a benchmark that required them to churn out something new every 20 minutes.

That frequency required the team to resort to using what they called "boomer memes", deliberately lame or cliched visual gags that are poorly designed and may sometimes reference themes in popular culture.

"You're going to slap some Calibri font on a shitty … reused meme and you're going to publish it and then you get onto the next one, and … that content is going to do better than the thing that your poor graphic designer spent a week on. Sad but true," he said.

Guerin said it was also important for the team to respond rapidly to what he called "all of a sudden issues", which needed to be exploited before the moment was missed.

"Every campaign has blunders, but by being able to capitalise on them and turn these blunders into viral moments that stuck with people's perception of particular candidates, that's how you change people's minds," he said.

Like the moment at the conclusion of a televised debate when Labor senator Penny Wong, who was in line to become the Shorten government's foreign affairs minister, refused to shake hands with Trade Minister Senator Simon Birmingham.

But in the UK, the next step in the evolution of this race to create viral campaign moments has already resulted in the Conservatives being accused of doctoring TV footage.

A video posted by the Conservatives appears to show Labor's shadow Brexit secretary stumped and unable to answer a question about Brexit during a live TV interview. No matter that the original version of the clip showed him providing a lengthy answer.

Viral success achieved, despite overwhelming evidence that the video was a fabrication.

'Ban and block like there's no tomorrow'

The final part of the equation, according to Guerin, is to give people a sense of belonging and to make them feel they are an active part of a movement, not just an onlooker.

The red carpet should be rolled out for the true believers and the malcontents locked out.

He says some of the best content the team created were simple photos of the Prime Minister plastered with slogans like: "I stand with Scott."

"I'm a part of something bigger than myself," Guerin said.

Sean Topham and Ben Guerin at Kirribilli House during the election campaign. ( Supplied: Facebook )

"It's like backing a football club. It's like being part of a church. It's like being part of a family, a clan, whatever. Absolutely I'm going to share the heck out of that."

He also believes that every page the party runs on every social media platform should become a safe haven for supporters, one that radiates consensus and a solidarity of purpose.

"Sometimes you've just gotta ban and block like there's no tomorrow," he told the audience.

The revelations by Topham Guerin come at a time of increasing concern about Facebook and how the platform is used to influence elections results around the world.

The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election still looms in the collective memory.

Not helping matters is Facebook's continued reluctance to subject posts and ads by politicians, parties and candidates to any kind of oversight or fact checking — a decision that many fear will open the floodgates to misinformation and lies.

If you know more about the details mentioned in this report, please contact us. Email investigations@abc.net.au

"Political communications in general is becoming less filtered. There's less scrutiny being applied to it," said Caroline Fisher, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Canberra.

"It is not possible for journalists to monitor everything that's put out there. And yeah, that poses real issues in the accountability of political messaging in democracy."