Campaign ads at marketing forefront

WASHINGTON – You will never find George Bush or John Kerry on a supermarket shelf next to the Tide, Pop-Tarts or Huggies. Even so, campaigns sell their candidates much as companies market their products, according to one expert.

Though modern political campaigns have borrowed heavily from Madison Avenue over the years – from direct mail to databases – campaigns have developed a few tricks that today’s marketers could learn from as well, said David Mark, editor-in-chief of Campaigns and Elections magazine in Washington.

For instance, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns have been adept at creating ads in a matter of hours, exhibiting remarkable speed and flexibility. Advertisers, he said, could do the same to respond to consumer demands, based on “real-time marketing information.”

Speaking to a crowd of marketing association members on Wednesday night, Mark said political operatives also have been extremely adept at leveraging television commercials into wider media exposure.

For example, he said the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ads which initially ran in only a few states, were covered widely by the news media.

Super Bowl ads also have been used in the same way, said Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Policy at Colby College in Waterville. Word of mouth about the ads reinforced the message, he said in a telephone interview Thursday. “There’s your parallel.”

The problem with the swift boat ads – as well as others – is that the media only repeated the claims, without putting them into context, which just “plays to the strategies of the candidates,” Maisel said.

But campaign coordinators definitely have benefited from the experience of advertisers.

In his talk, Mark said that while Howard Dean was credited with using the Internet to advantage, he also raised more than $10 million through creative, targeted, direct mail. “It’s a time-tested [retail] strategy that has shown its durability.”

Maisel, who teaches political science at Colby, said that advertising executives also were the first to perfect the technique of a candidate repeating an ad over and over again, pulling it, and then bringing it back later.

“It reinforces the old message,” he said. “People think it’s never been off the air.”