From the minute he was elected the second time, I knew the Orange Discrepancy was going to force me out of the country.
I just never thought that the shoving would come from the estimated $10B now being spent on the poorest excuse for advertising in any cycle I can recall.
Almost all of which have either spotlighted the man's failures in office or the pathetic state-of-the-state that’s brought us to.
And the ads?
Formulaic, dark, heavy, entirely duplicative right down to the “and that’s why I approved this ad trope” that’s so dusty, you sneeze when it comes on air.
And those are the ones that are at least marginally watchable.
With the stakes this high, you’d think the people who approve these damn things would have recognized by now that creativity is the only reliable force-multiplier outside of spend.
After all, an ad that is ignored has exactly the same value as one that never ran.
Whereas an ad that's seen, noticed, and, most importantly, makes an emotional connection has 2x to 4x the measurable persuasive value.
And that's based on hard data from System1 and highly credible others.
It’s also based on experience in winning far more than I’ve lost, as true for the dark arts of negative advertising as it is for the light. Which is interesting because it brings us to a singular kind of double-speak you hear in political media circles.
When asked, the pros will tell you they go toxic “because it works.”
Which, to be honest, is a point that’s no longer even remotely debatable. Even if survey after survey shows that voters go beyond mere hatred to the far realms of loathing on this stuff.
So what’s the logic of putting ads up that pound their way into oblivion, which, by definition, cannot work?
Search me, even if it’s an AI-augmented search.
Then there’s this: in any white-hot election cycle, people believe the evidence of their own senses, at least as filtered through the lens of bias.
That puts advertising into a somewhat secondary role where our first job is to persuade the swings who decide every election. The second is to turn out the base.
Neither of which is possible when, again, the ads are dull to the point of invisible.
To show you how bad it’s gotten, the most remarked-on ad of this especially silly season was a Ramaswamy spot featuring his opponent’s utterly bizarre mom, dissing her estranged daughter on grounds so painful you really do want to look away.
It’s total crap. Not just because of what it says, or how it’s written, or how it was filmed, but because it’s just another, if highly insane, talking head.
Nothing creative except for the inventiveness of digging up the walking dead pathos and putting it on screen.
And yet, it’s become the most talked-about spot of the cycle. WTF.
Anyway, it’ll be blessedly over next Tuesday, and I’m back the next day.
Likely, it would seem, to want to jump into the mass demonstrations that will be required if/when you know how tries to further demolish democracy.
See you then.
