• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 1, 2007

It's mourning again in America. What are we grieving? The loss of simpler times when options were few, competitive claims were straight to the point, and we could be swayed by simplistic campaign slogans, catch phrases, positions and a unique sales proposition. At least that's the nostalgic view of a media marketplace that appears to have run amuck, giving us so much choice that it often feels like too much.

Yes, we are in control, sort of. But we frequently feel overwhelmed by the abundance of information at our disposal. It's become a fact of life for people dealing in the world of consumer products marketing, and we're about to find out how it will impact those involved in the world of political campaigning. And if my hunch is right, the next 12 months will reveal some surprising developments in the role media plays in electing our next president.

Big media - both paid and unpaid - will continue to be a factor, but the real influence will come from the micro-media marketplace: blogs, user-generated content, e-mail and viral campaigns that will sway popular sentiment and steer big media coverage in the process. Political marketers will learn what consumer marketers have already learned: The most powerful form of media ultimately is human beings themselves.

Word-of-mouth and personal endorsements have always been the most influential sources of persuasion - for products, services or political candidates - but we're about to learn what happens when individuals are given the same tools of mass communication that the most savvy political media maestros have at their disposal. It might be a cacophony. It will definitely be different than anything we've ever experienced. Let's all hope that it leads to a more informed, involved and mobilized populace. I think it will.

Twenty-five years ago when I first began covering media for Adweek magazine, one of my beats was politics. I covered the formation of Ronald Reagan's so-called "Tuesday Team," an elite band of Madison Avenue's most talented ad execs who helped him get re-elected as President in 1984. It was old-school political ad spinning at its best. It focused on the kind of simple themes and primal archetypes that cut through all the party rhetoric, appealing to the most basic human emotions. Phil Dusenberry laid the foundation with his "Morning Again In America" infomercial. Hal Riney closed the sale with his "Bear in the Woods" TV spot that preyed on voter anxieties over a still restless Soviet Union. Walter Mondale never had a chance.

It was political advertising and media strategy at its best, but I would also argue it was the end of an era - an era when a simple campaign, or even a single commercial like Tony Schwartz's "Daisy" commercial for Lyndon Johnson - could turn voter sentiment and win an election. If you want to see such work, you can access most of them at a special online exhibition on the Museum of the Moving Image's Web site:
http://www.livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us. Ultimately, that's where they belong, in a museum.

The campaigns, which stretch from the 1952 Eisenhower/Stevenson battle to 2004's Bush/Kerry bout, will be remembered, if you ask me, as the Golden Age of presidential TV advertising campaigns. TV will play a role over the next 12 months for sure, and it will likely be one of the biggest budget drains on the presidential campaign coffers, but the real impact of 2008 campaign media will be in what the populace does with social media.

And it may not be something our Founding Fathers might have envisioned (as if they might have foreseen big TV advertising campaigns either), but I have a feeling that the social media marketplace is more in the true spirit of what they were getting at when they set up the whole process in the first place. Now if we could just get them to fix the Electoral College.

Joe Mandese,
Editor-in-Chief