In almost every case, however, the attacks were rational, fact-based arguments. Goldwater’s attacks against Johnson in 1964 were unrelenting. Kennedy attacked Richard Nixon’s record as vice president in the 1960 campaign. Stevenson’s spots attacked Eisenhower in 1956. Dwight Eisenhower ran negative TV spots against his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, in 1952, subtly tying him to alleged corruption in Truman administration officials. It’s not that previous presidential campaigns had only been polite affairs. Viewers had never seen anything like this. In another spot, DDB mocked Goldwater's statement about privatizing Social Security by showing a pair of hands ripping up a Social Security card. Goldwater had once bragged that the nation might be “better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” So, DBB served up a humorous 60-second spot of a saw slicing the East Coast from a Styrofoam model of the United States. DDB mocked Goldwater’s vote against the nuclear test ban treaty with a spot showing nothing but a girl licking an ice cream cone as a female announcer spoke ominously about the fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing and how it might enter the food supply. The firm capitalized upon Goldwater’s reckless statements by providing viewers with indelible images. Inspired by Bernbach’s philosophy of relying upon instinct as much or more than research, DDB produced an extraordinary and memorable series of spots for Johnson. I don’t want people who do the right things. “It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art,” he brashly told his then-employer, Grey Advertising. He often reminded his employees, “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have an impact.”įamously dismissive of advertising driven purely by research, Bernbach had written a revolutionary memo in 1947 that laid out the philosophy that would eventually characterize his firm’s work. They didn’t set out to revolutionize political advertising what they wanted to do was to break the established rules of political ads-then dominated by stodgy 30-minute speeches mixed with shorter policy-focused spots-by injecting creativity and emotion.īill Bernbach, the firm’s principal founder, had long maintained advertising was an art, not a science. Daisy became the iconic spot of its era not because it was the first Johnson ran in 1964 we remember it primarily because of its brilliant, innovative approach to negative advertising.ĭaisy and the other ads were made by Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), an eclectic group of ad men at a medium-sized Madison Avenue firm with a stellar reputation for groundbreaking campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis. And there were two dozen other ads from LBJ’s camp-humorous, informative, dark, and neurotic. And finally, by the time the ad ran, Goldwater’s chances against LBJ were slim, even though the ad is often falsely credited with assuring the win. Secondly, it didn’t even mention Goldwater’s name. First, though it is a famous ad, Daisy Girl, as the ad is known, only ran once. Half a century later, we live in the world of negative political advertising that Daisy Girl pioneered, but there are some curious aspects to the story. Two months later, President Lyndon Johnson won easily, and the emotional political attack ad-visceral, terrifying, and risky-was made. The message was clear if only implicit: Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was a genocidal maniac who threatened the world’s future. Her words were supplanted by a mission-control countdown followed by a massive nuclear blast in a classic mushroom shape. A 3-year-old girl in a simple dress counted as she plucked daisy petals in a sun-dappled field. On September 7, 1964, a 60-second TV ad changed American politics forever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |