ad critic

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.”

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.  

Feist’s recent guest appearance on Sesame Street has something very important to tell us about political media – and it has nothing to do with cookie access laws or numerical sponsorship regulation.  Her clip is a fantastic illustration of how powerful intangible factors like facial expressions and body language are in evoking emotions.

Watching this video puts a smile on my face and it does the same thing to everyone else I know who’s watched it.  Yes, some of it is the muppets and the novelty of watching an indie star dance around a kids set, but watch her face and body movements, Feist is genuinely, infectiously happy:

Fiest bounces, bops, sways and grins through the entire song, either she’s a fantastic actress or she’s having the time of her life.  As we watch her, we can’t help but smile along.

Deep psychology is at work here.  We’re hardwired to respond to the emotions of the people surrounding us, especially facial expressions.  More importantly, we do this subconsciously, which makes us excellent at spotting a fake.  Acting is basically the art of faking these responses and as any good actor will tell you, it’s much easier to elicit the emotional response in themselves than to try and mimic the forms of the emotion. 

Intangibles like this play a huge role in the effectiveness of a political ad and throwing on a grip-and-grin smile doesn’t come close to cutting it.  A good political ad has to evoke the proper emotion in the candidate during filming to be effective on screen.  Virtually everyone who runs for office is an amateur at this and there’s a real art to directing them – it takes time, creativity and patience. 

Usually, the best thing is to find something the candidate genuinely feels strongly about, then the intangibles like Feist’s smile come naturally.  The entire process is different for everyone and this is one of the big reasons cookie cutter ads are so ineffective.  Personal attention matters.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – who pollster.com’s trend estimate currently pegs as more vulnerable than Susan Collins, Norm Coleman and Mary Landrieu – launched a relatively early negative spot this week against his opponent Bruce Lunsford.  McConnell seems to have learned the lesson of Hillary Clinton’s recent defeat and is looking to sink his opponent before he has a chance to surge.

McConnell is making the savvy, ruthless play here.  Most people would be amazed to hear this, but politicians usually hate running negatives and resist doing it until they feel threatened.  That’s bad strategy.  Negatives are much more effective early against a challenger who hasn’t been defined yet.  It’s much harder to make negative information stick to a guy voters already have an image of.

By hitting Lunsford early, McConnell is also knocking him off message, disrupting his image building campaign and dragging him down into the “just another politician” mud.  For an incumbent who has had a very hard time cracking the 50%, threshold that’s crucial. 

I’ve been critical of McConnell’s incumbency-oriented media strategy, which Lunsford’s early advertising has made clear he plans to exploit, but McConnell’s decision to go negative early will make it harder for Lunsford to take off.  He still needs to offer a more compelling rational for his own reelection, but McConnell has bought himself some time.

“Lunsford Gas Tax”:  McConnell’s first negative is a solidly done, standard-issue hit piece.  It pounds hard on a key issue, sticks to one simple message and aims to sandbag Lunsford’s outsider message by portraying him as a quasi-lobbyist.  The visuals are dominated by gas pumps and soaring prices, it’s easy to take a cheap shot and knock this style as visually “uncreative,” but it’s very on message and at the end of the day effective.  The shooting style is also deliberately un-stylized, which ads credibility in a state like Kentucky where voters are suspicious of glossiness.

Real Voter Takeaway:  Bruce Lunsford doesn’t care that gas prices are stretching my family’s budget to the breaking point.

In one of the most hotly contested U.S. Senate races in the nation, incumbent Ted Stevens (who has been in the Senate since 1968) will most likely be in a tight race in Alaska with Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. (Both candidates have primaries to go through.) Begich comes from the mold of former Democratic Governor Tony Knowles, who lost a Senate race four years ago to junior Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Begich came out with his first ad a few weeks ago, and it is (admittedly) a good ad that starts off by talking about his father who was a Congressman that went missing in a plane accident in the early '70s:

From the outside, Begich looks like a new, fresh candidate that came out of nowhere to be mayor of Alaska's largest city. The fact is that Begich has been a political player with the Democratic Party since the early '80s, when he worked for then Mayor Tony Knowles, and then served on the Anchorage Assembly (city council) for three terms. With a long political history comes a long list of deeds.

Here's a great "ad watch" response from the NRSC, providing some responses to Mark Begich's ad and his time as politician in Anchorage:

It gets more interesting because while Begich has decided to spend his money on TV ads, his Democratic primary opponent, Ray Metcalfe (who was a former Republican legislator and founder of the now defunct Republican Moderate Party of Alaska) has decided to spend his money on a bus to take people on a "tour of Mark Begich's Anchorage". Metcalfe explains in his own words in a local NBC news affiliate story:

"My campaign has purchased a bus, and we're going to start advertising our three-hour tour," Metcalfe said. "We're going to take people around and show them how real estate is used to launder money into the pockets of politicians. We're going to show them the transactions; explain them. It gets pretty hard to deny when you see it."

I encourage everybody to watch the Stevens vs. Begich race closely this fall. We'll see what Stevens can do without much help from the national Republican organization, and what Begich can do with anticipated millions coming in from the DNC and DSCC along with the possible coattails of the Obama campaign opening up multiple field offices in the state.

Thoughts and comments please!

Check out the pair on Gordon Smith.  His campaign’s new spot directly links him to Barack Obama in what is easily the most ballsy ad by a Senate incumbent so far this cycle.  The ad fits neatly into the excellent air campaign Smith has been running and what’s likely to be a wider trend among blue state Republicans of associating themselves with Obama or his message.  Colorado GOP Senate nominee Bob Schaffer also joined in on the fun this week by parroting Obama’s visuals and logo.