The Obama and Romney campaigns have been putting out out a series of increasingly hysterial ads ahead of the party conventions. Brand consultant James von Leyden casts an eye over them.
Even the race for the American presidency has a silly season.
How else to explain the huffing and puffing emanating from President Obama and Mitt Romney over the last few weeks?
A series of increasingly hysterical ads have been running in the swing states. Tracking data shows that 75 per cent of the ads from the Obama camp have been negative – surprising, given Obama’s reluctance to use negative advertising in the 2008 election campaign.
The best of the Obama ads – insofar as it has a creative idea – is Firms (see above). It shows Mitt Romney giving a toe-curling, off-key rendition of America the Beautiful.
As Romney sings about “spacious skies and amber waves of grain”, scenes of desolation unfold – empty factories, derelict industrial buildings and deserted offices. Titles state that, as CEO of Bain Capital, Romney outsourced jobs to Mexico, China and India while stashing away millions of dollars in Swiss banks and tax havens.
‘Not coming clean’
A consistent theme of the Obama campaign is that Romney has not come clean about his activities at Bain (nor his tax position).
Stung by the outsourcing allegations, Romney countered with No Evidence (above). A voiceover asks: “When a president doesn’t tell the truth, how can we trust him to lead?” The ad claims that the outsourcing attacks were “misleading, unfair and untrue”, even using Hillary Clinton as a witness for the prosecution: a clip from the 2008 election campaign shows her declaring “shame on you, Barack Obama!”
On 7 August Romney made an allegation of his own, that Obama had “gutted” welfare reform by removing the requirement to work. Obama was quick to respond with a counter-attack in which pundits line up to condemn Romney’s mendacity: “PolitiFact gives this the rating of Pants on Fire, which means really, really false”; “no, absolutely no truth to it”; “that is not factually correct”.
In the struggle for the semantic high ground, Obama has established a “Truth Team” to rebut what they see as Romney’s manipulation of the facts. Romney, for his part, has appropriated the word “believe”, coming up with the slogan “Believe in America”.
Both the Democrat and Republican campaigns were galvanised by the appointment of fiscal conservative Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate. The Obama team pounced on the news as a chance to hammer home their key message, that the election represents a choice between an America for the rich and an America for everybody else.
To chilling music reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Back to the Failed Top-Down Policies (above) declares that Ryan is “the mastermind behind the extreme GOP budget plan… a plan that Mitt Romney endorses… it hurts seniors… it hurts middle-class families… it hurts students… all to pay for tax cuts at the top”.
The Romney effort, America’s Comeback Team (above), shows Paul Ryan giving a rousing address in front of the battleship Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia. He affirms that “higher unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is NOT the new normal!” – underlining the Romney charge that the economic crisis is Obama’s fault and that a new team is needed.
Ryan concludes by declaring that, come January 2013, he and Mitt Romney “will unite America and GET THIS DONE!”
Both the Obama and Romney ads dip into the Political Advertiser’s Toolkit of Emotional Triggers and Hoary Clichés:
• Unflattering, grainy or bleached-out shots of the opponent
• Stirring (or chilling) music
• Footage of the candidate engaging with working Americans
• Footage of the opponent looking smug, laughing or otherwise appearing looking out of touch with working Americans
• Use of the phrase “working Americans”
• Shots of abandoned industrial buildings/empty offices/foreclosure signs
• Shots of a concerned-looking American family (preferably mixed race) or blue collar worker or senior citizen(s) or all of the above
• Cutaway shots of the Stars and Stripes or other national symbol (in the Romney-Ryan ad, watch out for the way the sun suddenly sets behind the Statue of Liberty)
With just a few days to the Republican national convention in Tampa, Florida, a new front has opened up: Medicare.
The Romney-Ryan proposals to replace Medicare with a voucher scheme – and the effect it will have on Florida’s sizeable population of retirees – has already led to fierce battles on the airwaves.
No doubt the truth will be an early casualty.
James von Leyden is a copywriter and brand consultant