Why you should let your members and supporters tell their stories in their own words.
We’ve all seen them.
The cliché political ads where the candidate walks around a construction site in an ill-fitting hard hat. The candidate at her kitchen table, talking gravely about Really Important Things. Cheesy attack ads using graphics your middle schooler would reject for her latest TikTok.
Why is most political advertising so dreadful? Because it can be. In America, politics is just one more capitalist enterprise where most producers will work just as hard and be just as innovative as they need to be and not an ounce more. Unfortunately, conventional expectations about ad quality are much lower in Democratic political circles than they are in the corporate world. And since consultants make most of their money from placing the “buy” (What you spend to put the ad on TV, digital, etc.) and not production, that means even less incentive to make a compelling ad.
But it is possible to do better ads and win more races.
How?
Stop putting words in people’s mouths.
Instead of hiring a consultant to come up with a few script options by noon tomorrow using the same tired phrases and corny concepts we’ve all seen a million times, hire a firm that wants to partner with you — to know everything there is to know about your organization, your mission, and your people. Hire the right firm to develop a strategy, get out of the way, and let your members and supporters do the talking.
In our work with unions and a wide range of other groups across the country, we’ve found that this approach unlocks a tremendous, untapped resource: You. Your organization, your members, and your supporters are the most powerful messengers you could find.
In our era of media overload, using the same amateurish ad techniques and cringey language as everyone else just doesn’t cut it anymore. Sure, you can still win races with crappy ads if you massively outspend the opposition, but most of our clients aren’t sitting on a huge pile of cash.
What they do have is inspiring missions, great stories, and people who can talk about those things much more powerfully than a guy like me could ever write up in a script.
We began implementing this and many other innovative techniques over a decade ago and while many competitors have tried to copy us, they usually fail.
Why? Because doing political advertising this way is a lot of damn work. You have to do in-depth research, pre-interview members and supporters, set up a successful shoot, and spend A LOT of time combing through hours of interviews to find the couple minutes of footage you’ll use in your advertising program.
You can’t just come up with a quote that you think sounds like something an “average voter” would say and have the “talent” deliver it to-camera. Instead, you have to come up with a story framework of the ideas that you want your audience to embrace and find a way to get real people to talk about those ideas in their own words.
This entails creating a very exhaustive (and many of our clients would add, exhausting) interview methodology that’s more Good Morning America than “I approved this ad.” In our work with conservation advocates, groups fighting to lower utility bills, and unions around the country we spend extensive time learning about our clients’ mission, digesting the research, and putting ourselves in the same mind set and life perspective as our audience.
By immersing ourselves in your world, we see what’s special, what’s unique about you and your audience, and find the right way to get people talking about it on-camera.
On shoot day, we don’t want politicians; we want regular people. Nurses, construction workers, social service professionals, people that work hard for a living. We do full-day, in-depth interviewing of these folks to get the 111 seconds of footage that will anchor your advertising campaign.
Does this approach really work?
The results speak for themselves.
By centering our work on you and your mission, respecting your audience, and letting your people talk about the issues, we deliver advertising that stands apart from all the ads featuring suit-wearing candidates wandering stiffly amongst playground equipment.
Most of all, our approach forms an emotional connection between you and your audience. And in today’s loud and fragmented world, that means everything.
So as you plan your advertising for this cycle, start with this question: “How can we help our people share their stories?”