Political Ads Sell Candidates as Commodity
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28, 2004 – You will never find George Bush or John Kerry on a supermarket shelf next to the Tide, Pop-Tarts or Huggies. Even so, campaigns sell their candidates much as companies market their products, according to one expert.
Though modern political campaigns have borrowed heavily from Madison Avenue over the years – from direct mail to databases – campaigns have a few tricks up their sleeves that today’s marketers could learn from, said David Mark, editor-in-chief of Campaigns and Elections magazine in Washington.
Mark said that though Howard Dean was credited with using the Internet to his benefit, he raised more than $10 million through creative, targeted, direct mail. “It’s a time-tested strategy that has shown its durability.”
Speaking to a crowd of marketing association members on Wednesday night, Mark also said political operatives have been extremely adept at leveraging commercials into wider media exposure. For example, he said the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” commercials, which initially ran in a very few numbers of states, were covered widely by the news media.
Super Bowl ads also have been used in the same way, said Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Policy at Colby College, in a telephone interview Thursday. Word of mouth about the ads reinforced the message, he said. “There’s your parallel.”
The problem with the Swift Boat ads – as well as others – is that the media only repeated the claims, without putting them into context, which just “plays to the strategies of the candidates,” Maisel said.
Mark said that both the Bush and Kerry campaigns have been adept at creating ads in a matter of hours, exhibiting remarkable speed and flexibility. Advertisers, he said, could do the same to respond to consumer demands, based on “real-time marketing information.”
Maisel, who teaches political science at Colby, said that advertising executives also were the first to perfect the technique of a candidate repeating an ad over and over again, pulling it, and then bringing it back later.
“It reinforces the old message,” he said. “People think it’s never been off the air.”
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