Thursday, March 22, 2007

Fallout from 1984 Political Video

This morning I was going to make another post about the Hilary/Obama 1984 video incident based upon other blogs that I saw and commented on at Pardon my French, Oval Office 2008, and Parislemon. Essentially, I am not convinced the Barack campaign did not know about the creation of the video, though I am sure it was never 100% sanctioned or approved by the campaign. Eric over at Pardon my French says that the agency runs the risk of losing the account, and this is definately true, unless the campaign knew this about this and planned for this behind the scenes, but insulated themselves in order to withstand the blow.

Also, I think we are going to be seeing a ton more of this type of guerilla marketing of the political candidates, primarily because the cost of distributing content via the internet is significantly less expensive than historical channels such as direct mail, television or radio. So this is just the beginning of a new way to market candidates.

There is one additional point that I still feel compelled to highlight about the video. Over at the Huffington Post, Martin Lewis wrote a post "Vote Different" Ad Maker Should ACT Different... and he makes a great point about the way the problem with the entire process, and something that I see that continually plagues the democrats; the ability to spend gobs of money tearing each other to shreds, and making the jobs of the opposing party that much easier. Lewis suggests how to channel the energy and creativity that went into the production of this video into a more positive experience. This is great advise, and I would love to see more of this kind of political advertising.

  • Make ads or videos that promote the excellence of your preferred candidate - without disparaging other Democrats.
  • Use your skills to make ads that attack Republicans.
  • Use your skills to help swing voters realize how they were gamed by Bush and his Republican backers into voting for a bill of goods in 2000 and 2004.
  • Use your skills to motivate the millions and millions of NON-voters who have abstained in past elections - to vote FOR a Democratic candidate. Or AGAINST Republican candidates.

I recently had a long discussion with a friend about the best way to get more people to register, take an interest in the election and get out and vote. Anyone out there have any suggestions on how to do this? I figure guilt is always good, but not sure how to implement this on a national scale. Let me know what you think.

However, as usual I am a day late and a dollar short, since in my opinion the news about John Edwards wife's cancer recurrance has become a bigger story today. I really think that Edwards could be a decent candidate and if is he not too distracted or if his wife, Elizabeth does not get worse or too sick, then he could be a serious contender, not a pretender. But maybe it is not meant to be for John Edwards. Time will tell

2 comments:

Unknown said...

There's something else that strikes me about the current nature of political ads these days, and I'm sure it's been long discussed by plenty of people who are more in the know than I am. But these days, it seems that I don't so much see a political ad by itself, but I see an article about the ad. This one is just the latest example. I've seen lots of posts about it, all of which linked to it, but none of them were just presentations of the ad, they were commentary about it. So now you have the message presented side-by-side with thoughts about the message. This is mostly an internet thing, but I've noticed more and more of it happening with radio and TV.

Jeff Herz said...

Holmes,

Thanks for the comment.

Well part of the new world (web 2.0) is the ability to create a buzz around something, in this case a political ad, and get people to talk about and comment on it.

The more folks that are talking, the more folks are likely to remember the underlying theme. Sometimes this works, sometimes tihs doesn't.