• by Tom Messner , December 22, 2004

They spent a billion dollars on presidential advertising this year. In homage to Rosser Reeves-Ted Bates, let's repeat that: They spent a billion dollars on presidential advertising this year.

Was the year like 1972, 1976, 1980, 1992, and 2000 when the gazillions of advertising dollars had no effect whatsoever on the primaries or the general election?

Or was the year like 1988 and 1996 when the strategy, timing, execution, and placement of advertising either determined the winner or, like in '84, the mammoth victory margin?

Two television commercials made a difference in the result in 2004. (Let's define "made a difference." "Made a difference," means that right after the spots ran there was significant movement in the polls that, in the absence of any other phenomena, could only be caused by those commercials.)

The two gems were out of thousands produced by the Bush and Kerry committees, the parties' national committees, and the 527 "independent" groups. One ad was made for President Bush by his internal ad group. It showed Senator Kerry at a forum where he was asked why he didn't vote in $87 billion for the war in Iraq, and he gave his famous reply: "I actually did vote for that bill just before I voted against it." It is a famous reply because the Bush campaign made it that way. A 527 group, the Swift Boat Veterans, did the other effective commercial, and it brought back Vietnam and Genghis Khan even as it brought down the Kerry campaign. The lesson for the future is not that reality works and making commercials that show an opponent's foibles are better than those that tell of them; that lesson was absorbed long ago by the politico-ad community when Dukakis cavorted in the tank, when Mondale bragged that he would raise your taxes, when Dole-Gingrich got euchred and shut down the Federal Government.

The lesson for the future is that presidential TV advertising, as practiced in 2004, was like human wave attacks in which you throw enough soldiers at the enemy that sooner or later you break through its lines. The problem with that lesson is that next time they'll need two billion dollars to pull it off, and neither Tom DeLay nor George Soros may be able to find that much largesse in the pockets of civic-minded individuals.

One new medium this year made a startling, surprising, totally unpredicted breakthrough. That new medium, the same one that replaced vaudeville, returned almost to fireside-chat prominence. This use of radio was not only surprising; it was courageous.

In the political ad arena, there is only television and direct mail. In 1988, I suggested print in Iowa before the caucuses, and it was such a sacrilege that you'd have thought Salmon Rushdie was making the suggestion to Sheik Atwater.

The Bush campaign this time used radio to increase turnout by talking one-to-one, so to speak, with evangelical Christians on "their" stations. The result of this media strategy you saw in the Rather-Woodruff-Jennings frowns as the total vote cast inched its way past 118 million.

What of Kerry? The losing campaign had one advertising opportunity, but the media strategists, as they like to be called, sparing themselves blame for any execution of said strategies, just didn't see the opening, the lifeline, the way to put Soros' and the Federal Government's publicly financed campaign cash to practical use.

Kerry had one great moment, and it wasn't the convention nor his appearance on Doctor Phil opining on spanking nor his wife's ability to say "scumbag" and "shove it" in six languages nor his goose hunting, beer drinking, football tossing photo-op forays. Kerry's great moment was the first debate, the triumph of the comeback of the Yale Debate Team star.

My God! He turned the polls around by 10, maybe 12 farkleberrian points!

What more does a strategist need to see before saying, "All the rest of the Kerry campaign paid media should be about the debates."? The debates were reality, a comparative commercial that more people saw than any debate before, even more people than those who saw the final episode of "The Bachelor." The idea that the debates were Kerry's only hope is, of course, debatable, but what wasn't debatable was that should have been the only way to spend advertising money in the last month of his campaign.

Instead, the Kerry campaign got suckered into doing windsurfing ripostes and stratégies du jour. The oddest thing it did was not blow the entire ad budget. They have $14 million left over. I guess for this month's media plan.

Tom Messner started working in the ad business in 1967. He started his own agency in 1986, which continues today under a different name, EuroRSCG NY. He's worked on two winning Presidential campaigns (1984 and 1988) and one losing Senate race (2000, New Jersey).