San Francisco — Yesterday we saw the release of a whole slew of political video (thanks to Mark Halprin's The Page for always keeping me up to date). Here's a look at a few of them.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign will begin airing "Changing World," another national security ad (you can watch the previous one here). In 30 seconds the ad goes from defining the problem, to highlighting the candidate's record on the problem, to outlining solutions. As someone into all things tech, I was particularly happy to hear that "cyber attacks" made the list as one of the threats we face, reminding me once again of the enormous technology gap between the two leading presidential candidates (see Maggie Barker's recent post for U.S. Sen. John McCain's latest luddite internet comment). Also, I found the tenor of his solutions particularly refreshing. Signaling a departure from the brutish militarism that has most recently been the pillar of our national security strategy, the ad invokes an emphasis on multilateral engagement as well as a change in energy policy as means to address the external threats that face our country. And while I realize this isn't necessarily a new policy stance for the candidate, the ad does a good job of instantiating some of the change Obama is promising.
The ad will begin airing on national cable today. Have a look:
MoveOn.org and Planned Parenthood are set to air ads both of which target John McCain. In a $100,000 national cable buy, MoveOn.org continues to focus on the war in Iraq, hammering McCain on his opposition to a timeline for withdrawal. You can watch the ad here. The centerpiece of Planned Parenthood's ad is a video clip featuring a beleaguered looking McCain taking painfully long to provide a non-answer to the question, "It's unfaiir health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. Do you have an opinion on that?" Watch the ad here.
JibJab, the same people that brought us the wonderful web video "Our Land!" in 2004, released a new parody set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They are a Changin'." It's good for quite a few laughs regardless of your political preference. Take a look:
Calling the potential for nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists "the single most important national security threat we face," U.S. Sen. Barack Obama seeks to reorient the national security debate in his latest TV ad, "America's Leadership." He hits notes of experience and bipartisanship, citing his record in the Senate of working with Republican U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar on nuclear proliferation. Take a look at the ad below:
This ad runs in the same 18 states that the Obama campaign has previously targeted. You can see how the ad buy looks transposed on a U.S. map here.
"Dignity," a new ad just released by the Obama campaign will hit the airwaves today. The ad focuses on U.S. Senator Barack Obama's record on the economy, while contextualizing his position with a brief biographical note. It's the second general election ad from the Obama campaign and it will run in the same 18 states as the campaign's first, "The Country I Love." Take a look:
For more on Obama's impressive electoral strategy check out Simon's post here. And given that this ad will be running in the same states as the previous buy, have a look at the ad coverage map I made for "The Country I Love."
A look at the states in which a campaign chooses to run a national ad can provide an important window into the campaign's electoral strategy. Just as I did last week with U.S. Senator Barack Obama's "Country I Love", I've created a map of U.S. Senator John McCain's ad buy for "Global."
In order to properly contextualize the geography of the buy, here again is the electoral map with the states NDN considers core Democratic and core Republican.
And here is the same map with a green layer showing the states where the McCain campaign is airing its ad.
Jake Berliner posted the ad here and provided some analysis of its content, calling into question McCain's green credentials. But while the subject of the ad is climate change, the opening lines reveal a not so subtle political message, "John McCain stood up to the President and sounded the alarm on global warming five years ago." Of course, it's no secret that McCain has been trying to distance himself from the President and clearly he sees his stance on climate change as providing evidence of his independence. But while the presumptive Republican nominee seems to believe that this is an important issue for him politically, he apparently hasn't taken the time to fully understand the policy side of his climate change stance. Just as McCain disturbingly flubbed the taxonomy of religious groups in the Middle East on multiple occasions (see Simon's post "Old Man McCain"), he's been tripping over his own feet when describing his cap-and-trade policy. In various forums, he has insisted that he supports a non-mandatory cap as a part of a cap-and-trade plan despite the fact that this is inconsistent with the plan he supported with U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman last year as well as with what is written on his own website,
John McCain Proposes A Cap-And-Trade System That Would Set Limits On Greenhouse Gas Emissions While Encouraging The Development Of Low-Cost Compliance Options.
The only way to read this and not come away thinking that McCain is contradicting himself is to somehow believe that the limits mentioned above are non-mandatory. So either McCain doesn't understand his own plan or he favors non-mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, a position which would render his cap-and-trade plan entirely ineffectual. These, my friends, are not very good options.
Moveon.org has just announced the winner of their Obama in 30 Seconds ad contest. It has been a very successful project with over 5.5 million votes cast and over 1,000 videos submitted. Peter Leyden discussed the contest earlier on our blog here.
Personally, I find the winning ad to be quite powerful. It strikes a nice bi-partisian tone while simulatenously packing in a multifaceted agrument that addresses many of Obama's perceived weaknesses. It features a white male (maybe working class?) who is a military vetern (national security) and at one moment appears with a flag flying in the background (patriotism). While not as creative as many of the other submissions, the ad is able to present a strong advocate that may appeal to a constituency that Obama has struggled with as of late. This ad certainly shows the wisdom of the crowd, and perhaps, the wisdom of Ben Affleck, one of many celebrity judges.
MSNBC reports that MoveOn.org will air the ad in Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado spend around $200,000.
With record breaking fundraising comes record breaking spending. A recent NYTimes article cites CMAG figures showing that the Democratic candidates are spending more on TV advertising than in any previous primary, but given that none of these ads cast aspersions in the direction of the Republican nominee, this has led some to worry that McCain is getting a free ride.
After spending nearly $16 million in Pennsylvania, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have already passed the $100 million mark on television advertising in the states that have had primaries so far. The two Democrats' aggressive campaigns against each other have left little in the bank to mount an attack against Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Given that the Democratic candidates have maintained their focus on each other—at least when it comes to TV advertising—the DNC, Moveon.org and the SEIU are picking up the slack and have begun running TV spots critical of John McCain.
While McCain is on the bus peddling his newly unveiled healthcare plan, the SEIU has put together an ad featuring healthcare workers' take on the Republican Senator's proposal. (Hint: they don't think much of it.) The ad will air in Ohio and Washington, D.C.
In time for the five-year anniversary of Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" pronouncement, which has come to symbolize how acutely Bush has misunderestimated the difficultly of waging a war in Iraq, Moveon.org has seized the opportunity to remind us of where McCain stands on Iraq with both a quotation from his "100 years" remark and a picture of his lovely Bush embrace. The ad will first be aired in Iowa and New Mexico. The SEIU reportedly plans to spend $1 million over the course of next month on ads critical of McCain.
Lastly, the DNC has been getting some media attention for the two ads it has launched in the past few weeks. Taking a similar tact as MoveOn.org, the DNC's most recent ad makes use of McCain's "100 years" response to a question about the length of the US troop presence in Iraq. The ad powerfully couples the McCain sound byte with disturbing imagery and facts from Iraq.
Note: For more on political TV advertising, check out the video from a recent event we did on this very topic.
The ad, slated to begin airing next week during 6 p.m. newscasts, begins with a fundraising pitch followed immediately by the narrated lines, "For twenty years Barack Obama sat in his pew listening to his pastor." Lest we have forgotten about Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the ten seconds of sermon that had brought down upon a Obama a little fire and brimstone, the ad quickly reminds us. We get a split screen with Reverend Wright on one side giving his sermon and a photo of Obama with his arm around the Reverend on the other—in case you didn't get it, they know eachother. The ad's stated purpose is to voice opposition to N.C. gubernatorial candidates Bev Perdue and Richard Moore. So how do you get from the Wright scandal to an attack on these two candidates? Well, they both endorsed Obama and according to the ad, Obama is, "Too extreme for North Carolina." Thus, drawing on the transitive property of "endorse", if Obama is too extreme for North Carolina, and Bev Perdue and Richard Moore endorsed Obama, then they must be too extreme for North Carolina. Q.E.D.
Based on 1,032 ratings on YouTube, this video has an average of two out of five stars. If that were a letter grade, it would be a solid F. Also, if you look at the RCP average of head-to-head polling pitting Obama against McCain in N.C., Obama holds a slight advantage. So if North Carolinians really think Obama is too extreme then, in their eyes, McCain is a fanatic.
Sidestepping the issue of whether he can stand the heat of the "Kitchen", Obama's response to Hillary's ad follows the campaign's usual parry to the the experience jab by highlighting his judgement and unifying quality. The reply seeks to shift the terms of debate from which candidate would be best in a crisis to which candidate can best bring about change.
And a quick side note, some in the media have disparagingly described Hillary's recent attacks as a "kitchen sink" strategy. Now, it's not a stretch to say that entitling an attack ad "Kitchen" seems to invoke that very characterization. Seems like a strange move on the part of the Clinton camp.
A deeper look at the Democrats' TV ad spending in Pennsylvania yields a significant validation of an argument NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been making.
As Gail Shister wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, candidates are beginning to increase their spending on cable advertising.
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama together will spend close to $5 million on TV ads in the closing week before the state's Democratic presidential primary Tuesday.
Philadelphia stations will take in more than $2.5 million of that total, including $445,000 spent on cable - an impressive 17 percent. Cable's average for the five weeks running up to the primary is even more impressive: 22 percent.
Nationally, cable accounts for about 20 percent of political ads this election cycle, experts say, up sharply from the 2004 presidential campaign.
Then, candidates bought cable time "to an embarrassingly low extent," Gallagher says. "They didn't understand we were able to deliver such power for them."
A greater interest in cable isn't suprising given cable's ability to provide much more granular targeting than broadcast. In the same piece, Evan Tracy, a panelist for our upcoming April 24 Reimagine Video event, sums up this point nicely saying, "Cable sells by the pint. Broadcast sells by the gallon."
Turning to the content of the advertising, Hillary's latest ad is very much in keeping with the uniformly strident tone the campaign has been taking in the final days leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Thematically in harmony with her now notorious 3 A.M. ad, "Kitchen" repackages the readiness question. It begins with the narrator describing being the US president as "the toughest job in the world" while we are shown images of past US crises. Our attention is then brought to the current slew of challenges facing our nation ending with, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who do you think has what it takes?" Presumably the implication is that Hillary does have what it takes, turning on its head the demeaning sexist quip that Hillary should be relegated to the kitchen by inferring that yes, she should be in the kitchen, because it is a very hot kitchen and no one else can handle it.
Of course Hillary isn't the only one on the attack. In a break from the generally positive tone of the Obama camp's Pennsylvania ads thus far, "Afford", which began airing on Saturday, goes after Hillary's health care plan. The ad focuses on the same critique we have heard Obama lodge in debates, charging that people who can't afford health care will be penalized. (Another Obama ad, "Reason" also begin airing in Pennsylvania on Saturday.)
On the airwaves Clinton and Obama are engaged in a back-and-forth over his now infamous "bitter" remark. According to Evan Tracey, a speaker at an upcoming event of ours, Obama is outspending Hillary on TV ads by a factor of 5-to-1. Outside groups are joining the fray with the American Leadership Project airing a pro-Hillary ad on healthcare. There is simply an enormous amount of political activity on Pennsylvania televisions.
Here's a little glimpse into the latest TV ad sparring. First, in an ad called "Pocket", Hillary challenges Obama on his commitment to take on oil companies.
The Obama camp was quick to respond while being careful to stay close to his narrative of harkening a new kind of politics.
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