Ad Wars: who’s laughing now?

After the first presidential debate the Obama attack machine went into overdrive.

Up to 10 new commercials a day were rushed out in an attempt to mitigate the damage of the president’s lacklustre performance.

Their aim was to portray Romney as an extremist whose performance in front of the cameras was just that – a performance.

Three separate ads turned the spotlight on Romney’s infamous 47 per cent gaffe in an attempt to persuade viewers that the secretly filmed footage, not the debate, was the real game-changer in the election.

Another ad accused Romney of inconsistency and mendacity “when the cameras rolled”.

Following the second debate the Obama team released President Obama Won (top) crowing about the president’s “clear victory”. Such triumphalism would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago.

The Romney camp has also tried to amplify points scored during the presidential and vice-presidential debates by recasting them in the form of TV commercials.

Fiscal Discipline (above) shows Paul Ryan, in split-screen, stressing the enormity of the problems facing America while in the other half of the screen Jo Biden rolls about laughing.

The intention is clearly to show up Biden as a buffoon. However some viewers might end up siding with the affable-looking vice-president rather than the poker-faced Ryan as he lectures the audience about the need for “serious” leadership.

As the race goes down to the wire both sides have sought to maximise airtime by compressing their communications into 30-second spots.

A favoured format is the side-by-side comparison (above) contrasting the failure, incompetence or mendacity of the opponent with the unique credentials of the contender.

Occasionally, the Romney team will resort to fear tactics. Healed (below) ran on the eve of the third presidential debate about foreign policy.

The ad uses pixellated, black and white footage of Senator Obama in 2008, made to look like a latter-day Martin Luther King (or Malcolm X?) as he proclaims “I am absolutely certain that generations from now this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.

The ad then cuts to scary music and flickering newsreel footage of the Middle East to stress that, far from healing the planet, President Obama has made it a more dangerous place.

In contrast, the Obama campaign ran Foreign Policy. It features luminaries like Madeline Albright and John Kerry praising Obama’s four years of “serious accomplishments” while expressing concerns about Romney and Ryan’s “zero experience in national security”. In its way it also seeks to instil fear about the prospect of the other guy winning the Oval Office.

Of course, even scare-mongering can turn viewers off. A more potent weapon might be humour.

Mitt Romney has shied away from the use of humour in his advertising, perhaps because he cannot afford to come across as flippant or lightweight.

Obama, on the other hand, has seized every opportunity to cut through the barrage of attack and counter-attack with a well-aimed jest.

Big Bird (above) starts off with a rogues’ gallery of corporate malefactors. “Bernie Madoff… Ken Lay… Dennis Kozlowski… criminals. Gluttons of greed. And the evil genius who towered over them? One man has the guts to speak his name. Big Bird… Big. Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about… it’s Sesame Street.”

The ad has already racked up almost three and a half million views on YouTube.

Prize for the best use of humour goes not to Obama, however, but to the Democratic National Committee.

Romney Tax Plan is an online ad that invites viewers to click a red button to find out how Romney and Ryan can give a $5tr tax cut without exploding the deficit or requiring tax hikes on the middle class.

Contrast the simple use of wit in this ad with Obama’s laborious attempts (below) to attack the “bad maths” of the Romney-Ryan tax plan.

Election ads are now running virtually back-to-back in the swing states. Latest estimates suggest that ad spend could hit $2bn by polling day.

Is all this advertising having any effect on voters? That’s the $64,000 – sorry, $2,000,000,000 – question.

In a recent large randomized experiment, communications consultancy Evolving Strategies found that Obama ads were more effective in persuading weak partisans and undecided voters. Their effect was particularly notable among women.

However, the Romney ads significantly increased enthusiasm among Republican-leaning voters, which could translate into a much higher turnout for Romney on 6 November.

In short, the two effects could cancel each other out.

That won’t stop either side from launching a last-minute tsunami of ads.
From 15 October 15 to 6 November, an estimated 1 million political commercials will hit the airwaves, or around 43,000 a day.

To withstand that kind of deluge, voters are going to need a few laughs.

James von Leyden is a brand consultant and copywriter