Josh Kahn's blog

This post is a little off the regular political beat, but it’s an interesting example of political style culture messaging seeping into a commercial ad campaign.  Everyone’s seen the famous Mac vs. PC ads over the last few years, but Microsoft has recently begun a massive ad campaign to play off of Mac’s branding:

This spot and the two others in the campaign follow the classic testimonial political ad format. In this formula, the campaign gives specific demographics of voters permission to support their candidate by showing a real person from the target group. Microsoft’s trying the same thing although the people in the ads aren't exactly “man on the street.”

How have the conventions changed the Presidential race?  While Obama focused on reinforcing the campaign’s current dynamics, McCain made two strong plays to change the equation.  While he could have done a lot more with the opportunity, McCain was still marginally more successful than Obama.

Obama’s Democratic convention stuck to the playbook the campaign has been using all year.  Same speeches, same Obama, same shtick – larger TV audience.  Obama’s speech could have been given any time since his nomination and most of the surrogates stuck to the “McSame” attack they’ve been pushing since Hillary dropped out. 

This is the slow and steady approach and it makes sense for a candidate who would win if the race were held today.  Team Obama chose their plays months ago and they’re not pivoting now.  Their major failure was their inability to correct any of the mistakes in their playbook, specifically voters’ inability to relate to Obama’s life story, and ultimately their convention didn’t change the dynamics of the race.

The Republican convention on the other hand was a little more lively.  As the underdog, McCain can’t afford to play it safe and his team came in looking to shake up the race’s fundamentals rather than reinforce them. 

With Sarah Palin now on the ticket the GOP has added one more contender to our already deep bench of potential ‘12/’16 presidential candidates.  Bobby Jindal tops my personal list along with Tim Pawlenty but a lot of people would add Mitt Romney and Mark Sanford as well.

Who’ve the Democrats got?  Joe Biden (::chortle::), Kathleen Sebelius (female but underwhelming speaker), Janet Napolitano (ditto), Evan Bayh (as if the D’s will nominate a moderate), Bill Richardson (what was that people said about Al Gore, oh right, grew a beard and got fat) and Mark Warner (let’s just say there’s a reason he dropped out this time around).  

I’d take our bench in a second. 

The South Carolina State Republican Party’s new national McCain ad looks like a crass attempt by State Party Chairman Katon Dawson to boost his own RNC Chair campaign even if he damages John McCain in the process.  Dawson is considered one of the leading candidates to become the next RNC Chairman if McCain loses and has been openly running for the job since at least 2007.

Dawson just announced that he’s running the ad in Minnesota during the national convention next week, according to him as a way to help McCain by rebutting Obama’s “multiple houses” attack.  That’s pretty far fetched.  Sometimes state parties get involved in presidential buys in their own states, but never on a national level.  This is the McCain campaign and RNC’s job and by running ads in Minnesota Dawson is distracting the press from McCain’s biggest message opportunity of the race.

Even worse, his “defense” is helping Obama revive the seven houses attack.  McCain’s campaign aggressively rebutted Obama’s housing ad last week and it’s mostly dropped out of the news as a result.  All Dawson has done is dredge it up again.

Finally.  Here's hoping it's well done and that there are many more to follow.

Update: Here's the spot, and a quick review:

This is a generally solid ad with one major flaw.  The opening line "Barack Obama knows a lot about housing problems" and the closing line "that's a housing problem" are complete inside baseball.  No one who hasn't been paying neurotically close attention this race (ok, like me and probably everyone reading this blog) knows what the heck the spot means by this.  It's a comeback to the Obama ad that just went up on rotation, sure, but that's way too obscure for a normal person who's isn't a political junkie. 

Those two lines may not seem like much to pick on, but they make up 1/3rd of the ad's total run time (not counting the disclaimer).  That's a lot of air to waste. Just stick with the corruption message next time guys. 

It’s official, Obama isn’t just running a negative campaign, he's running an all-out smear fest.  Obama’s Ralph Reed ad accusing McCain of being in bed with Jack Abramoff is especially Swift Boat-like.  He's going after McCain’s strength in a very Rovian way, never mind how baseless the attack is.

The Obama campaign is counting on the classic “he started it” argument and a docile media to let him continue his Different Kind of Campaign shtick, and without some very aggressive action from the McCain campaign that’s exactly what will happen.  McCain’s press shop has been admirably swift and aggressive in rebutting Obama’s attacks, but they need to run a paid media play as well.

McCain should run spots during the Democratic National Convention hitting Obama for corruption (see Rezko scandal, Freddoso’s new book) and hypocrisy (for running a “Karl Rove Style Negative Campaign,” literally use Rove’s name, it’ll spark a fantastic press frenzy).  The spots are primarily about disrupting Obama’s convention coverage and would be a perfect hook for the party’s robust Denver strike team.

Check below the jump to see 9 of Obama’s recent negative spots.

Over the last 15 years Americans have physically sorted ourselves into cultural enclaves that share strikingly similar tastes in everything from cars and clothes to churches and politics.  Bill Bishop isn’t the first observer to point this out, but his new book The Big Sort is the deepest analysis of the phenomenon’s origins and political effects so far. 

One of the first big discussions we had on this blog was a debate over the roles of targeted micro messages and unifying macro themes and this book breaks down the demographics behind that debate. Americans have retreated into enclaves of “image tribes” as divided by geography as they are by ideas and tastes and according to Bishop, there’s very little common dialog left.

The Russian government’s incompetent attack against John McCain has handed him a great weapon against Obama.  The attack makes clear that the Kremlin wants Obama to win the election but the open support of a nation busy doing this is hardly going help a candidate who’s already fighting a reputation for dictator-coddling.  John McCain’s statement on the crisis was excellent, but there’s a lot more his campaign can do.

The McCain campaign and the RNC should directly tie Obama to the Russians.  The message: “Russia wants Obama to win because they know he’ll be a weak President.”  

McCain couldn’t have said this without the Russian attacks against him, but their on the record implicit endorsement of Obama gives him full license to seize the message.  The McCain campaign has been starting to tiptoe around this already, but they should hit Obama at full force for standing by while an American ally is invaded.

Patrick is right, web ads have frequently been a lot more memorable than presidential TV ads this cycle and there are a couple of good reasons for it.  The campaigns have been much more willing to take risks in web videos and fundamentally, television ads as a tactic are better suited to races further down the ballot.

TV ads also have to accomplish different tasks than a web ad.  A web ad’s two key goals are to draw eyeballs (“go viral”) and influence the press, while TV ads are primarily about defining a candidate in the absence of other information.  A voter who has met a candidate in person, heard about them from a trusted friend or read about them frequently in the news isn’t going to be nearly as influenced by a TV spot unless it includes radically new information.

This cycle we’ve seen great web videos and atrocious ones – but the successful ones have all been irreverent, “too long,” hokey or generally different from traditional spots.  In other words, they take risks.  It’s relatively easy to justify a risky web video because if no one watches you’re only out the cost of production.  Screw up a TV ad though and you’ve flushed the entire cost of the ad buy.  Even worse, if the ad really flops you’ve just paid money to drive your own numbers down.  

Since the McCain campaign released their Celebrity spot yesterday and taken a more aggressive tone overall there’s been a huge amount of second guessing from the pundit class and politicos like John Weaver and Mike Murphy. The gist of their critique has been that McCain is diminishing his own image by going too negative too early to the exclusion of his own message.

How to attack the opponent without looking “mean” is a classic campaign problem and there’s a classic answer – when possible, use surrogates.  The RNC could easily have run the Celebrity spot instead of the McCain campaign itself and it would have shielded McCain personally from some criticism.  

The points still would have gone on TV, the RNC press shop would have still pushed the message and McCain personally would have had more distance.  That tactic wouldn’t have deflected criticism completely but it would have helped a lot, especially in the press.

The major downside to this strategy is that an ad coming out of the RNC has less earned media pizzazz, but the spot itself is sensational enough that they still should have been able to gin up nearly as much coverage as the McCain campaign themselves.

Overall, even though I share a lot of Murphy’s concerns (and the one Marc Ambinder’s anonymous strategist outlines) I’ve been heartened by the new strategy.  The campaign’s recent moves have shown a willingness to take some risks and have successfully injected the campaign’s message back into the press.  That’s a critical change from the last few months and if they start taking some risky plays to build up McCain himself we’ll have a real chance to win this thing.