During my recent venture into politics, I had a great opportunity to see how politics works from the inside and it wasn't already a pretty trip! I wrote When do you Respond & When do you React? from my time of being in a storefront political office and having people come in off the streets to talk about their needs.
So I've been thinking about political advertising and brand advertising and it's making me ask some questions about the whole process. This isn't about any specific campaign, just what I saw in general working on this one campaign.
- I think that the most frustrating thing that I dealt with is that there's seemingly no "truth in advertising" body that makes sure a campaign is telling the truth about themselves or in what they say about their opponents. If your opponent says you're from Mars, then you have to proof that you're not from Mars. When a brand says something about a competing brand, there's a process for dealing with that and allowing the truth to come out. A brand can be fined and be told to take an ad down if it isn't factually correct. How come we don't have a process like that in political advertising? Why don't we have a neutral body that can verify claims made by one candidate against another? Could this group actually make a candidate pull off commercials that don't
- The political veterans in our campaign told us that candidates don't put out specific plans before the election so that the opponents can't attack the specifics of any plan. Think of this in terms of brand advertising. Could you imagine if you didn't know what a product did until after you bought it? You could look at the slick packaging and you could make some educated guesses based on past interactions with the brand, but you wouldn't know what the specific package you were holding would deliver until after you purchased it?
- And just think about political advertising in general, most if it is pretty negative, more about what's wrong with your opponent then what's good about you. Again, would be a pretty interesting way of doing brand advertising, wouldn't it. Could you imagine if brand advertising was built around this level of negativity? If Coke didn't run ads that told you why you should drink Cokes, but instead told you why Pepsi was bad for you? If people didn't like our advertising now, imagine how they would feel if it were all as negative as political advertising.
- In the US, we have a complete (IMHO) over-reliance on the 2 party system. Here in NJ, the process so favors the 2 parties, that it's even difficult to figure out your placement on the ballots. Chris Daggett, the candidate I worked for, was in a different location in every county. People here know to look for the 'R' or the 'D' column and they just vote that way. If you're outside of the system, it's really hard for people to find you. The question is how to create an "independent" party? Can you create a system for the people not affiliated with the 2 parties that doesn't create just another party and all of its problems? It's an interesting question and one I might be working on in the future.
I guess what disappointed me the most was that this is almost how we expect a political campaign to be run these days. We seem to reward negative campaigns (to a point, to be sure) and since the people running the campaigns know that voters don't really put a lot of thought into voting here in the US, their superficial attacks and statements can be very effective.
I'm looking at whether or not I will continue to work on some aspect of politics in the future, but as I said at the start of my work with the Daggett campaign, everyone should work on one campaign and learn how the system works. It doesn't matter what your political believe, people should be more involved. I hope that I can maintain my level of interest in politics going forward and that Sydney, inspired by her work here, will continue to be involved in making the changes we need to make in this country.
And I hope that some people with better thoughts on how politics should be run get involved in the biz. Political advertising should be critically important to us and it shouldn't rest on the level of negativity I saw during this campaign. It's really much too important to keep running politics this way.