Political Campaigns

High budget attack ads feign amateur look

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Attack ads and negative ads are not the same. However, they grew out of the same gene pool of political campaign strategy, attempting to annoy, cause fear, and basically present a slice of the ‘truth’ in 30 seconds.

Most ads, ‘scheduled’ to run on YouTube, MetaCafe and similar video sites for long tail value, are created fast, with no time for the finer points for which video production housed charge an arm and a leg. In fact, the more amateurish the video is, the more street cred (and YouTube hits) it gets. No wonder some well-funded organizations are tapping into this high-budget, low tech formula.

This ad, (by NFIB) a slam against Tom Allen, is fairly well produced, even if it is in poor taste. Actors play government snoops, there’s the use of an eighties (Mission Impossible?) split-screen technique, the grainy black & white consciously done. It’s not the kind of low-budget ad made by a bunch of amateurs one evening over beers. Someone had a storyboard, paid attention to detail here.

Unfortunately for the NFIB, this ad has been viewed fewer than 150 times on YouTube. Maybe YouTube audiences have higher standards!

“In what respect, Charlie?” reveals poor grasp of media

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Hard not to feel bad for Sarah Palin.

She’s completely rattled by the media, and does not have the instincts or training to push back.

Her response to Charlie Gibson on his question about whether she understands the Bush Doctrine, with the question, “in what respect, Charlie?” revealed two things:

  1. She was clueless and probably had never heard the term before.
  2. She was dumb enough to take the bait and succumb to the question whose sub-text was “prove to me you’ve done your homework.”

With Katie Couric she appeared to simply be following instructions & talking points by repeating her answer when unable to clarify a follow-up question. That was before she swung into operation-Putin, about him flying into U.S. airspace. She was also not ready with specific examples. “I will try to find you some…” is NOT an answer!

It’s easy to see the urgent need for media training. But more than that, she need media understanding. Anticipating what the interview might be looking for and coming prepared with it.

Let’s hope that in the next few days someone will give her some proper media training. Memo to governor Palin: There’s plenty of free advice out there, if the McCain campaign has no time for this. Here are just two.

Video scrutiny keeps ’em honest

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

There are lots of web sites, political groups, media folk and organizations (even the candidates’ sites) fact-checking statements politicians make, so it must be increasingly hard to face the cameras.

Some wing it, others –like Joe Biden- completely make it up as they go, only to be found out. Everyone is up for this kind of scrutiny.

Watch Jon Stewart’s approach, running side-by-side video clips that reveal the danger of double talk.

Video scrutiny like this is playing an interesting role this election season. It must force campaign managers to think hard before deploying surrogate snipers on the campaign trail

Negative ads taint McCain’s character

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He shouldn’t have gone there, but he did. John McCain stood out as a different breed among the presidential hopefuls on the Republican side, watching as contenders like Rudi Giuliani and Mike Huckabee imploded. He displayed an unusual trait in politics: Presidential.

But the Karl Rovian attack ads unleashed by the McCain campaign are showing a new trait in McCain. Desperate. Heck, you don’t have to believe me. Even Karl Rove thinks they are going too far.

“I regret, and am sometimes offended by some of the negative aspects of this campaign,” he recently remarked in an ad released on YouTube. It’s as if he’s saying “I’m John McCain; I’m not sure what I was thinking when I approved this message.”

I guess being found out (even as far back as January this year) is also regrettable.

McCain’s campaign, seduced by the capacity to launch inexpensive ads via YouTube, will soon find it is backfiring. There’s too little thought put into these pictures + sound bites + title card videos that are caricatures of ads. They taint his political stance by naively allowing the “..and I approve this message” sound clip to be added to the video.

Will negative ads backfire for Obama? Absolutely! But McCain ought to know better, having being the target of such tactics in the previous election.

Using John McCain as a punching bag

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The media buzz around The New Yorker’s satirical cover of the Obamas, has crowded out another story.

John McCain’s the punching bag of a political action group of the labor union, the SEIU. The cheesy godzilla-themed web site links to a YouTube video about “closing tax loopholes for buyout monsters.” Evidently McCain is not the story, but seems to be a convenient icon.

It’s part of a campaign in support of a tax bill going through the senate tomorrow. Like the metaphor itself, the ‘global campaign’ seems hugely overblown. The video and a web site seem incredibly tame. Other groups such as the AFT, engage their potential audience in much more creative ways, including –but not being obsessed by –social media.

My point? It’s way to easy to whip up a campaign with one or two social media embellishments and a web site when there’s a lot more grunt work to be done. Thank goodness there’s no godzilla-related twittering!

Soft drinks and presidential candidates

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Someone asked me to describe the “positioning” of the three candidates in the race for the White House. Were we facing tough choices between the first possible Black president, the first potential woman in the White House, and an “veteran” candidate?

I tried to explain how while their positioning is blurred, they were good studies of branding. Their cross-over ideologies and mutual respect for one another (Clinton’s not in this camp) make them less a Coke vs Pepsi, and more like Mountain Dew vs Red Bull –which are now called “functional soft drinks.” Yes, McCain exhibits exhibits characteristics of an energy drink, with functional benefits. His packaging is very strong, and his positioning is very shrewd.

On the beverage side, all this election interest has not escaped Mountain Dew, which is holding its own “Dew-mocracy” to find the elixir of freedom.

As for Red Bull, WIRED’s (What’s Inside) analysis of Taurine, an elixir, called it a mild sedative, an age-defying antioxidant with “the potential to steady irregular heartbeats.”

Sounds like Obama?

McCainSpace needs a redesign, rethink

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John McCain’s blog roll doesn’t include a link to his daughter’s blog, McCainBlogette. Though it does have Conservative blogger Michele Malkin (HotAir) and LaShawn Barber. Oversight? I don’t think so.

Meghan McCain maintains her distance for a good reason — if you read her blog closely. She does write about her Mom, fund raisers, the White House etc but does her own thing. The McCAin site, however is a tightly managed brand. It features issues, insights, trove of a photography, multimedia, and a networking tool called McCainSpace.

I experimented with it, and was confirmed within a few hours. But it is not what I expected. Since it riffs on MySpace, it suggests a networking space not a fund-raising funnel. It urges you to “build your own network of grassroots activists, take action and have fun.” On the site I created, categories include Modify your goals and Review Your Donors. The only way to build an address book is name by name –no uploading a database.

Huh?

Call me naive, but networking and activism isn’t only about getting people to drop money into a fishbowl. “Taking action” and “having fun” won’t go anywhere fast if those on the network are called ‘donors.’ I think they launched McCainspace too fast. Perhaps they have some functionality in the works, but the clock is ticking.

Obama, and the iPhone generation

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Will a poster be influence the choice of the next president of the United States?

You can sense the cult-like passion these days for Brand Obama. The icon, the metaphor, the human equivalent of the iPhone for a lot of young voters.

The icon status is not accidental. Not that is contrived, either. Take this famous Shepard Fairey poster that’s showing up on the campaign –as you see here on a story about the energized voters at UT Austin. It was created by Mr. Fairey who was not involved with the Obama campaign.

It tells you something about the role of user-generated content that’s matured at a perfect time. Before the mother of all cult brands, the iPhone, was released, Apple fans raced to create designs of what they believed the iconic brand would look like.

Once upon a time presidents and prime ministers were more or less positioned and branded by ad agencies and PR strategists. The famous “Labor isn’t working” poster by Saatchi & Saatchi for Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. This year in the US elections, the branding -if you could still call it that– is in the hands of the people.

Sure, the Clinton and Obama campaigns pays big money for ridiculous he-said-she-said ads. But what’s remembered, talked about, spread virally (the “I have a crush on Obama” and “Yes we can” videos) have been created and launched by citizen campaigners on their own dime.

Speaking of shiny new objects, people camped out to catch a glimpse of, and vote with their pocketbooks for the iPhone. That same crowd –young people –seems all too eager to stand in line to vote for another “advanced communication device.”

Should Obama brush off plagiarism, or “turn the page?”

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Maybe Barack Obama did “borrow” words from Massachusetts governor. It brings up two interesting questions:

  1. How much of what we use in communication should we attribute?
  2. How fast should we come back and apologize?

He called it “too big of a deal,” but as recent history has shown us, plagiarism has been quite a deal. From Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) to Kaavya Viswanathan (How Opal Mehtha got kissed…) to journalists who inadvertently use material without attribution.

“Certainly plagiarism can have degrees,” notes Steve Buttry. And in case you’re looking for attribution,it’s a quote from the American Press Institutes‘s web site, in an article “When does sloppy attribution become plagiarism.” He goes on to say, “For the most part, sloppy attribution is to plagiarism as manslaughter is to murder.

As Plagiarism.org suggests, it’s good to attribute:

  • whenever you use quotes
  • whenever you paraphrase
  • whenever you use an idea that someone else has already expressed
  • whenever you make specific reference to the work of another
  • whenever someone else’s work has been critical in developing your own ideas.

That the accusation comes from the Clinton campaign, makes sense. She is running out of brand differentiation, and will turn to the department of dirty tricks –even though she has lifted lines from Obama such as “Yes we will!” that echoes his “Yes we can!“The ‘academic’ rebuttal -explaining the circumstances of the borrowed words– is never good enough. Considering how anything you say in an election campaign can and will be mashed up, Youtubed and turned into a Swiftboat attack, this could be grave stuff.

Just apologize, and let’s “turn the page,” no matter who strung those three words first!

Quotes for the week ending Feb 09, 2008

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“The business of delivering content and the art of creating content.”

Robert Redford, who will keynote a one day conference-within-the-conference titled Mobile Backstage, on the important of mobile platforms for independent filmmakers.

“Take a look, cruise around our digital scrapbook, and maybe even add your own story.”

Tom Freiman, GM lead on the new Generations of GM Wiki that launched this week.

“Is GMnext and other GM marketing initiatives corporate greenwashing?”

Christopher Barger, GMs Director of Global Communications Technology, on the GM Wiki, about the company hosting ‘environmental chats’ about topics such as alternative fuel and battery life.

“Blogging is as much about reading as writing, as much about listening as talking”

A paper on blogging (titled: Blogging as Social Activity, or Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?”) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano & Michelle Gumbrecht of University of California, Irvine and Stanford University.

To “bring the expertise of specialists, sophisticated medical imaging, and the world’s libraries to a community reachable only by airplane or boat.”

Intel Chairman, Craig Barrett, quoted in Fast Company, on its “World Ahead” program in Brazil.

“When did the measure of conservatism, when did the measure of success, when did the measure of progress, when did it become reaching out to Democrats?”

Rush Limbaugh, on his inability to understand why John McCain is ‘reaching out’ to the Democrats.

“Web, Web, Web — if you ain’t walking onto the stand hand in hand with a Web guy you ain’t no one”

Ben Wood, chief analyst of CCS Insight, on preparing for a battle at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. More than 55,000 atendees are expected to be there.