Political Ads, Once the Worst on TV, Enter a Golden Era of Surrealism
You might not realize it, but we're living in a Golden Era of political advertising. A creative revolution is spreading through the once-hoary genre, sweeping away doom-voiced recitations of candidates' histories in favor of animation, sarcasm, humor and the memorably surreal.
The epicenter of all this is California, where former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is running for the Republican nomination for governor and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is running for the GOP's Senate nomination. They're opposed by attorney general Jerry Brown and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. And they're all funneling huge sums of money into a campaign that is, so far, compellingly bizarre -- and a huge break from the past.
A different version of the revolution is playing out in the U.K.'s general election, where the Labour government has largely dispensed with the idea of creating its own campaign billboards in favor of asking its supporters to create their own attack adds on the opposition Conservatives.
The most recent volley in California has been the "Meg-a-tar" (pictured), an animated version of Whitman produced by Brown's allies who, when the going gets tough turns to her private jet and says, "I just gassed this sucker up and kicked back at a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet."
That followed a Fiorina video in which Boxer was portrayed as a Monty Python-esque blimp casting a shadow over California:
Fiorina will get much of the credit for jumpstarting the trend, In February, she launched a video in which her Republican primary opponent, former Rep. Tom Campbell, was portrayed as a "demon sheep."
Where this is all going is anyone's guess. The good thing for those of us who follow advertising is that, after years of producing the most boring ads on earth, the category is finally worth looking at.
The U.K. is taking the trend to its logical extreme. After the Conservative Party launched a widely ridiculed traditional poster campaign, the ruling Labour Party turned to its supporters to create their own ads. The winning ads will be displayed on digital billboards in London and Manchester.
Traditional advertising may turn out to be a disadvantage for a candidate in the long run. As soon as the Conservatives published their most recent posters, they were turned into spoofs by Labour activists.
It's hard to be believe that as recently as 2004, election ads consisted entirely of repurposed newspaper headlines and earnest voiceovers. Here's one of them. I promise you won't make it through more than 30 seconds.: