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PDA / RALPH NADER ELECTION SUPPORT
7. RHETORIC & DEBATE
MEMORABLE ADVERTISING: written by Bill Hillsman

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Peter Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

MEMORABLE ADVERTISING:

Bill Hillsman

I’m going to talk first about how you actually craft a good ad or evaluate whether the ad is any good, then I’ll talk about how to make media plans, and maybe save money on them.

When you really think about it, any political communication needs to do three things. First: it’s got to get the attention of the audience. Second: you have to provide the information they need to persuade them. And third: you want to produce some type of an emotional response so they’ll be motivated to go vote. If there’s one thing I’ve been convinced of in all these years in politics, it’s that most political communications people think voting is a logical act. It’s not. You don’t really reason somebody into voting the way you want. Voting is an emotional act, which is something that Republicans understand much better than Democrats do. That’s why they’ve been able to sell this big lie to enough people to put Democrats on the defensive and make Democrats respond to Republican framing of the issues rather than set their own agenda.

It’s very important in the 2022 elections for Democrats to confront their opponents. Make them uncomfortable. Put them on the defensive. Every Republican candidate should have to answer whether or not Joe Biden is the duly-elected president of the United States. Every Republican candidate should have to answer for the thousands of MAGA people who stormed the capital. Don’t miss an opportunity to remind voters that, in fact, Joe Biden won the election by seven million votes—that’s pretty much a landslide.

When it comes to targeting your audience, remember that there’s more of us than there are of MAGA Republicans—quite a lot more as a matter of fact. And especially if you’re involved in a close election, remember that most swing voters, especially self-identified independent voters, are the people that decide every close election. They deserted Donald Trump and the Republicans in droves in 2020. So the more you can tie your Republican opponent to Donald Trump and the attack on the capital, the more these swing voters are going to come your way.

Republicans are going to want to talk about inflation and crime in this fall’s election. The truth is that both of these are after-effects of a worldwide disease. Pandemic inflation is a function of supply and demand, and when supply chains are disrupted, there’s a shortage of goods. Then combine that with immense worker shortages and absenteeism caused by COVID, and you get major price hikes for less-available goods and services. This is not brain surgery.

Worker shortages result in more criminal behavior as well, because there are fewer patrols on the street, and there’s a criminal justice system that’s delayed by or shut down by COVID. So the Democrats kind of blew their chance in late 2021 and early 2022 to anticipate these attacks and frame that message that you can’t control inflation or crime until you control COVID. Doing this successfully would have really altered public perception going into this fall’s elections. But this is where we are.

So what are we going to do? I agree with previous speakers who said that Democrats should talk about their accomplishments, especially the ones that affect people’s day-to-day costs of living. Hopefully, there’ll be a prescription drug plan passed before the November elections [a month later, there was] that Democrats can merchandise. Remember, one of the reasons that Obama won reelection in 2012 was that Americans, regardless of their party identification, really liked his healthcare plan—that alone was able to overcome many other issues and problems they might have had with a potential Obama second term.

Republicans understand that fear can be a powerful emotional motivator, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use it either. And it needs to be aimed at the swing voter audiences: independent voters, moderate Republicans, suburban women and older lapsed Democratic voters, especially union members, who voted for Trump at least once, if not twice. The message has to be couched in what’s traditionally seen as a Republican value: personal freedom.

So the fear that we want to talk about is not somebody breaking into your home, but rather the fear of these government intrusions into personal liberties—your right to take care of your own body, your right to vote, your right to marry and raise a family as you see fit, your right for your kids to have quality public education. When you really expose what Republicans are up to, swing voters who don’t pay that much attention to politics are really shocked.

Here are some good guideposts to follow whether creating communications for yourself or evaluating the work of consultants. Number one is: be direct. Number two is: know what the one point (and I do want to emphasize one point) that you want the audience to remember. Too many political ads and communications try to make five or ten different points in a limited time and space, and consequently they fail to make any of them.

Number three: use conversational language. A good political ad is not a speech and it’s not a treatise, it should sound like a conversation. Know your audience. Think of one person in the particular group of voters that you’re trying to persuade, think of what that person’s daily life is like and what’s important to them, and then write your communication directly to that one person.

Think about benefits, not features. Political ads are full of facts and figures and positions on issues and attacks on opponents, and these are all what we call an “advertising feature.” None of them have very much to do with the voter’s daily life. So make your communication about benefits—how is this person’s life going to be improved by voting you or your candidate into office?

Then try to use something out of the ordinary to grab attention. It could be humor, it could be an emotional appeal, it could be a shocking statistic or a fact, and it should be aimed at swing voter audiences: independent voters, moderate Republicans, suburban women, and these older lapsed Democratic voters. You could also use a production effect—a sound effect, or a video effect—to grab people’s attention. But remember, if you don’t grab their attention right away, your message is due to failure from the start.

The final guideline is: argue from the specific to the general. We worked with Ralph Nader when he ran for president in 2000, and I couldn’t believe every time I saw him speak in a local area—he started with some problem that was unique to that particular constituency of voters. So you want to talk about something specific that’s going on in a voter’s actual life, and then work your way out to how your election or your candidate’s election can help solve that problem and make life better.

Here’s a quick word about media plans and media buying. Everybody thinks media plans are science and math problems, but they’re not. They’re kind of an art. If you’ve done these things as long as I have, you realize that if you have experienced media buyers doing these things rather than just computers, they can overlay information about the audiences that you’re trying to reach that computers just aren’t really capable of. And when this is done effectively it saves you money, and then you can use that money to do other things in the campaign like voter identification programs or get out the vote programs.

Nearly every mass media plan that we’ve analyzed of late is spending much more than would be necessary if the media buy was worked harder by experts. Most of them are called programmatic buys, so consultants put a few basic spending goals into the computer and ideally the computer spits out what it determines to be the most cost-effective media plan. Yet we’re seeing that these plans have ridiculous frequency levels that are ineffective, and show commercials far, far more times than voters can stand. That makes the overall buy incredibly cost-ineffective, but highly lucrative for the consultants—so that’s why people are seeing ads repeated with frequency levels of twenty or twenty-five, or something like that which to me is just nonsense. If you’ve got a commercial that works, it shouldn’t take that many repetitions of the ad to get the point across.

I do have a specific example of a media plan that we looked at recently in Pennsylvania. There’s a new communications company in Washington, D.C., called Victory Margins that I’ve been working with for the past couple of years. It focuses solely on reaching the swing voters in any given election. They brought me an analysis that they’d done on all the pro-Biden spending done in Pennsylvania in 2020.

The pro-Biden forces spent approximately double what Trump was spending in Pennsylvania in 2020. So if the ads and the media planning and buying had been effective, Biden should have beaten Trump by a lot, not by a little. As we looked at the data, it became clear to me that the most important imperative in the plan was to amass a common amount of gross rating points—or GRPs—which is just the shorthand term for media buyers. What this plan did in essence was very little skewing or balancing based on audience data intangibles among the various media markets. It had all the refinement of a meat cleaver when using a scalpel would have saved the campaigns and the donors tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

Last, I like to make a strategic pitch for target audiences. The current fascination for the party and Democratic donors with only funding communications designed to expand and turn out the Democratic vote could turn into a long-term disaster. As mentioned, every close election is decided by swing voters, not base voters. Mainly, these are self-identified independent voters, but four years of President Donald Trump and its immediate aftermath have brought in this audience considerably. So in 2022, women voters, lapsed Democratic voters, suburban voters, moderate Republican voters are looking to go someplace else, and Democrats would make a serious mistake if they don’t make a concerted effort in 2022 to win them over—if they’re lost in 2022, I think they’re going to be lost for the next two to four election cycles.