The Bad Ad-itude Blog

I want to take a break from advertising to talk about what the rest of the country is talking about: those dangerous, dry Santa Ana winds.

According to this New York Times article, President Bush, no doubt haunted by memories of the Katrina relief disaster, had already pre-approved Schwartzenegger’s request to declare a state of emergency in California on Monday morning. The man who, thanks to Michael Moore’s ruthless and depressingly hilarious depiction, is now famous for sitting in a children’s classroom at storytime as renegade planes crashed into the World Trade Center, has canceled all of his previous engagements to go to see the fires for himself tomorrow.

What do you think this is? A last dash political move to boost public opinion polls? A hope to leave behind some sort of positive legacy? Or has President Bush finally torn his eyes from striving for worldwide profitability of his country – at great cost – and recognized that perhaps individual citizens are worth taking care of?

--Lindsey 

Dear Politicians,

Is that $3 billion just burning a hole in your pocket? Do you want my vote? Well, make an ad like this and I will vote for you, no questions asked.

~Mike

What would you do with $3 billion?

You could buy 1.75 billion ounces of customized M&Ms. Or you could purchase 111,131 Chevy hybrid cars. Or pre-order 2.3 billion copies of Britney's latest CD.

Of course, these calculations are subject to error as I have no prior experience with financing $3 billion and I'm not a math major for a reason.

What's with the magic number? According to this CNN story, the amount of money spent on TV ads for the 2008 election cycle is projected to reach $3 billion. That's almost twice the amount of money spent on political television ads in 2004.

Is this money well spent? For someone like Mitt Romney, who has spent the most on TV ads out of all the presidential hopefuls thus far, I'd argue it's crucial for him to build name recognition any way he can. He lacks the celebrity status of an Obama, Clinton, or Giuliani. I'd also say it couldn't hurt John Edwards to start showing off his gorgeous locks in a commercial or two if he doesn't want to get completely left behind in the dust of Obama and Clinton.

But if I could truly offer these candidates a piece of advice, I'd tell them to spend most of their advertising moolah more creatively. Most TV commercials are white noise unless they're funny or catchy like this one.

For better or for worse, I think a campaign driven by "infotainment" could beat an honest campaign any day of the week. Regular people don't win presidential elections, celebrities win presidential elections. A charismatic Kennedy will beat a drab Nixon.

So get your TV remote controls ready, there will be plenty of channel surfing to do if you plan on tuning out all of the manipulative political mumbo-jumbo commercials, approximately $3 billion worth.

~Kristin 

While watching television last week, I saw an advertisement. I knew it was an advertisement because my Strategic Communications major has taught me the textbook signs:

-It was one-way communication taking place through a form of media
-It was paid for by a disclosed sponsor
-It was persuasive in nature

According to these rules, this advertisement would be entitled to what our government has been calling "commercial speech" since a Supreme Court decision in 1942. Our government protects us from misleading commercial speech using something called the Central Hudson test, after another Supreme Court decision in 1980 .

The Central Hudson test says that a commercial’s right to free speech can be infringed upon if it is misleading.

It makes perfect sense, right? After all, I want the government to step in for me if I am being lied to by a drug company, or even my favorite brand of shampoo. False guarantees, lies, and deceit for the sake of someone else’s bottom line are dangerous. I am more willing to live beneath a conditional First Amendment than have to sort through that information on my own. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to research each claim made by a company that answers to no authority? Before these restrictions, ads made wild claims, saying some medicine would cure aches, pains, coughs, barrenness, ulcers, hair loss, body odor, tooth decay, all of it – "Just One Drop!"

Let’s go back to that advertisement I saw last week. It was actually a presidential campaign ad for Bill Richardson. It fits all the criteria listed above, and yet, it is lumped in the category of political, not commercial, speech, and is subject to no regulation by the FTC.

Is it fair to expect citizens to have to sort through these ads to determine which claims are empty and which contain truth? Is it truly my responsibility to determine whether Claire McCaskill intentionally allowed the elderly to suffer? Is it my responsibility to research whether some other candidate saved the rainforest, or some other grand claim made?

What do you think? Do political advertisements need more responsibility in order to receive free speech – even if that responsibility is simply truth?

--Lindsey

        Here in good old Missouri (with a “ree” not a “ruh”) we had a pretty awful race for the Senate between Clare McCaskill (D) and Jim Talent (R). After a seemingly endless series of scathing advertisements and brutal attacks by both candidates, I began to care very little about the outcome. Though I cite myself as a Democrat, I could simply not bring myself to actively support McCaskill and her gimmick fueled, petty war of words with Talent. I resigned myself to a position of apathy on this particular campaign, and I have no regrets.
        Around the time of Election Day ’06, I went to a benefit concert for the Young Democrats to see my friends’ band play. As with any political rally, people with clipboards, bumper stickers and collection buckets circulated through the crowd, trying to recruit us impressionable young students into participating in phone trees for McCaskill or to just put a sticker emblazoned with her name on the back of our cars. I grew up going to political rallies in St. Louis, so none of this was really off-putting to me. Just the same old “We’d like your further support, but if not I don’t mean to bother you too much! Thanks anyway!” kind of thing.
        Or at least that’s what I thought.
        Eventually one of the Young Democrats' volunteers headed in my direction, grin on his face, clipboard in hand and stickers in his pockets.
        “Hi, would you like to volunteer for the McCaskill campaign to put the Democrats back in control of Missouri, or would you like a McCaskill sticker to show your support?” he asked, still grinning like the Cheshire cat with a pawful of catnip.
        “Oh, no thanks. I’m a Democrat and all, but I’m not big on McCaskill,” I replied, expecting a calm inquiry about my stance, followed by a short goodbye and good luck.
        “Fine, whatever!” he hammered back, “Let Bush and all his cronies just stay in the White House! I guess you like supporting Bush, don’t you?” Nowhere in my response to him had I said anything about liking Bush or being Republican. Sheesh, I even told him straight off that I was a Democrat!
        I kept my cool for the most part as this sycophantic twit continued to berate me with accusations of Dubya-loving. “No, man, I just don’t support McCaskill. That’s it.”
        “Then why are you here?! Why even come here if you hate the Democrats?” he demanded to know.
        “I’m here to see my buddies play! Jeez!” I then stormed off to the bar to try to kill the memory of that unbearable exchange with alcohol.
        What dazzled me about the whole incident was the incivility of it all. This kid went directly from your friendly-neighborhood-Democrat to a McCaskill-obsessed maniac that could not possibly fathom why a fellow Democrat would betray his beloved candidate. He attacked immediately and left any semblance of a logical argument or debate by the wayside, accomplishing nothing except filling me with even more anger towards the vitriolic, overly aggressive political ire that has saturated our electoral process.
        The deluge of abuse and personal attacks in political campaigns has, I think, now reached a critical mass. Not only are candidates and activist groups attacking each other on the debating platform, the Internet and television advertisements, but now all this political anger has spilled over into major newspapers. Or, more specifically, in the ad space.
        Moveon.org spent tens of thousands of dollars to call General Patraeus a playground insult in the New York Times. If that wasn’t outrageous enough, Rudy Giuliani hit back with an equally absurd ad that not only attacked Moveon.org, but specifically Hillary Clinton. This recent political battlefield promises to yield even more combat, and the primaries are still months away!
        Abuse between candidates in elections is as old as Ancient Rome, but its long tradition within human society hardly makes it permissible. This ceaseless volley of personal attacks contributes nothing to the intelligent debate vital to the Democratic system and cheapens it to wretched pile of political wedgies, noogies, and nyah-nyah-nyah’s.
        So, in conjunction with the September 27 Blog Against Abuse Day, we here at the Bad Ad-Itude Blog implore you, political candidates and supporters, to quit throwing stones and start giving the people what they deserve: a bully free government.  

 -Mike

I once interviewed a random guy on the street for a journalism class about having a female president. He said he was fine with it but she’d probably drop nuclear bombs once a month, during that time of the month. He laughed at his own joke and then quickly diminished his smile to put on a politically correct facade and assure me that he could support a woman as president.

Now, I’m not going to whine about how sexist his joke was but it reinforced something I already knew. Gender matters. It affects how we interact with one another, how we define other people and how we define ourselves.

Gender is also affecting the 2008 presidential race. Just as Mitt Romney is being pigeonholed by his religion and Barack Obama is being pigeonholed by his race, Hillary Clinton is undeniably, a woman.

Although around 25 women have run for president before Hillary, are we any closer to taking a woman seriously in a leadership role?

Personally, I have no intention of voting for Hillary. But recently, even I, who falls in love with Rudy Giuliani a little bit more each day, felt a little defensive of her portrayal in the September issue of women’s magazine, Marie Claire.

Take a look at the September profile of Obama for GQ, a men’s magazine. It’s a profile that takes a detailed look at Obama’s campaign strategies.

Or take a look at The New York Times Magazine’s profile of Rudy Giuliani, published on September 9. It’s an eight-page profile that’s straight-forward and to the point.

But the questions asked of Hillary in this Marie Claire are less than thought provoking.

Hillary sat down for an interview with editor-in-chief Joanna Coles. Coles asked Hillary the age-old question always directed at women but never to men: how do you juggle parenthood and a career?

Coles also asked a handful of “hard-hitting” questions about Chelsea’s childhood, being married to the more famous Clinton and of course, what does Hillary think of the Britney and Paris crisis? Talk about a gripping campaign platform— pro-underwear for celebrities!

To be fair, Coles did ask Hillary about the trendy cause Darfur, abortion and if a woman needs to be twice as tough on the issue of war. But those topics were kept brief and seemed oddly misplaced inside a profile of fluff.

I think Coles did a disservice to her readers by asking questions such as how Hillary keeps her energy up and her eyes “so bright” at the debate in New Hampshire rather than asking her about what actually happened at the debate.

Of course, there are other media outlets than Marie Claire. But would an interview this superficial have appeared in a men’s magazine? Will any of the male candidates have to share their opinion on Britney Spears?

Maybe Coles gave Hillary softball questions so she could relate to readers and gain votes. But if men’s magazines can present information intelligently, it’d be nice to see women’s magazines do the same.

~Kristin