The War Room | Lesson Four: Get Your Message Out (For Money!)

Okay, back to the War Room.  Lesson Four is why and how you need to get your money out with paid media.  It's an interesting chapter if you are a fan of political history and offers the background into how political advertising evolved over time.

Kinsella talks about Daisy, perhaps my favorite part of Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics.  Of course the important lesson from Daisy is not that you need to convince your opponent that he or she will lead us to nuclear war but rather that advertising can reinforce an idea that is already in voters mind about your opponent.  If you have never seen Daisy, it is embedded there to the right.  This started me thinking about two recent negative campaigns across the country.

The first one is the Conservative Party's Not a Leader campaign directed at Stephane Dion.  Several pundits have said that this has hurt Stephane Dion and has allowed him to be framed by the Conservatives.  While I saw the commercials and thought they were well done, I didn't think that they were that accurate.  In the Chretien cabinets I thought Dion was quite effective.  The timing was brilliant in that he had just won a hard fought leadership campaign and the party was divided.  Capitalizing on the internal dissension which is a normal part of politics, the Conservatives used the opportunity to attack and used the words of his own leadership rival and Dion's words against him.  The Liberals either facing a shortage of cash or didn't have an operating war room to strike back quickly didn't follow James Carville's rule and didn't hit back and now many think that the charges laid by those ads has stuck.  They did run their own ad several weeks later but by that time, "Not a leader" had done it's job.

The second campaign I keep thinking back to the recent Saskatchewan election and the NDP Wolf is sheep's clothing advertising campaign.  While the ads were hard hitting, they had no impact on the election or the polls and even NDP members I knew didn't care for them.  People didn't believe that Brad Wall was like Grant Devine and b) we couldn't figure out why it was necessary to bad mouth Alberta all of the time.  The other thing is that the Saskatchewan Party did hit back with a pretty good ad of their own.  Their counterattack ad which came out soon after the NDP spot aired did got in a shot of their own that did articulate what many people in Saskatchewan thought.  Again, even die hard NDP commented to me that they thought the spot was excellent.

Both of those examples feature negative ads which makes sense because as Kinsella points out on page 123, negative ads work.

There are two reasons for this.  First, television is an emotional medium, and emotional messages work best with voters.  "With too much information around," the professors wrote, "our senses are overloaded and advertisers have turned away from information imparting ads to an approach that 'goes for the gut,' appealing to core values... Negative ads are crafted in the best dramatic tradition:  they contain characterization (implicit or explicit), plot and conflict."  Second, they wrote, negative ads work because they are negative.  "Simply put, negative information is more powerful in crystallizing decisions than positive information.  In politics, it is said, 'mud sticks' and negative ads are the way in which seeds of doubt about an opponent are introduced and negative perceptions are reinforced"

Okay that all makes sense but this is supposed to be a review from a NGO point of view and my advertising budget is pretty small with not a lot of cash for negative ad buys.  How do I get my message out?  How do I survive in the data smog that is today's media market?

As I was thinking about this while reading the next part of the lesson on how to do a ad buy when I got distracted by an article on how much it was going to cost for the Democratic and GOP candidates to do ad buys in all the February 5 state primaries.  They are confronted by the same problems that I had.  Too much message, not enough money to get it out.  As I looked around at the Sask Party and Saskatchewan NDP YouTube sites it hit me that this for NGO's, this is where much of the media efforts are going to be.  It won't replace advertising during Hockey Night in Canada or the Grey Cup but it is a distribution system that does have some power that is going to grow. The NGO's are not the only ones who are discovering this, Tony Blair launched Labour Vision on YouTube (whose main video has Gordon Brown now claiming credit for it) The often stodgy Conservative Party has one.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is using it.  Even Hillary Clinton is creating ads just for the web.  If The War Room is a partial update to Kicking Ass, I imagine that the next update will feature not just a ad buy guide for network and cable audience but one for the web as well.  Before you guffaw, before long everyone will have moved to a smart phone or media device like a iPod Touch which include YouTube capabilities.  In case you haven't heard, a tiny company called Google is getting into the mobile phone market.  Do you think that phone may have YouTube built into it as well?    I am not saying that television is going away but it is going to be increasingly hard to ignore the impact of YouTube and Google Video in the future.  Some more about this will be said when I get to Lesson Nine but if I was running a lot of organizations, I would start thinking long and hard about how you use video, how one creates a network to get the word out, and how that can grow, even if a Super Bowl commercial isn't in the works.

Book Information

The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win by Warren Kinsella
Published by Dundurn Press

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