Political Ads Used to Suck. Not Anymore.

A brief tour of political ad history, from lame to great.

Photo by Vanilla Bear Films on Unsplash

Since you’re no doubt drowning in takes about Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic convention, I thought I’d offer something a bit different today. If you watched the convention, you may have noticed how good the videos Democrats presented were. Some were just 30 seconds or a minute long, and others were as long as 5 1/2 minutes (including one we’ll get to below), but there was one moving video after another. 

Younger people find this unremarkable, since they’re used to campaigns — not just presidential campaigns, but campaigns at all levels — producing well-made videos and ads with good production values, slick editing, inspiring music, and the all the elements that we as viewers have been conditioned to have an emotional reaction to. But if your memory goes back aways, you may recall that political ads used to suck. 

For most of the history of televised political advertising, which starts in the 1952 presidential race, the ads were often shoddily produced, utterly lacking in creativity, and numbingly repetitive, even by the standards of the day. Here’s what passed for the state of the art in those early days:

There were exceptions here and there, but for many years — especially when candidates for sub-presidential offices started advertising — most political ads were simple and uninspiring. I was chatting about this with a friend who like me studied political advertising in grad school, and she pointed out that until recently any political ad involved a significant investment in booking TV time, which led to real risk-aversion; campaigns and the people they hired to make ads for them didn’t want to sink a lot of their budget into something unusual that might fail, so they made the same things over and over. 

And they believed, correctly in many cases, that it didn’t much matter how well-produced their ads were. To illustrate, let’s consider these two, both of which were meant to convince voters in 1988 that if Michael Dukakis were elected, hordes of dark-skinned predators would erupt from the nation’s prisons to murder you and rape your wives and daughters. The first was produced by something called the National Security PAC, basically a pop-up organization created for the purpose of making this ad; the second was produced by the Bush campaign:

This ad couldn’t be more low-tech; they just took some still photos, slapped some text on it, and boom, you’ve got all the murdery, rapey fear-mongering you could ask for. Now let’s look at the Bush campaign’s version, which didn’t mention Horton by name, but it didn’t have to, since by then his tale had been told in hundreds of news stories:

This one was highly produced — they built that revolving door, got actors to walk through it, hired the right voice-over performer, everything you could want. The Bush campaign’s ad genius was Roger Ailes, who eight years later would create Fox News, going on to poison our political culture while terrorizing the women who worked for him. But did it accomplish more than the low-tech, explicit one? It’s hard to know.

For many years, Republicans were understood to be far more adept at all kinds of political stagecraft; Democrats believed their opponents were master manipulators, mesmerizing the public with hypnotic imagery that swung elections. Which is why, when Bill Clinton got his friend fellow Arkansan Linda Bloodworth Thomason to make a 17-minute video titled “The Man From Hope” for his 1992 convention, it was hailed as revolutionary. 

Bloodworth Thomason, who created the hit sitcoms “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade,” brought what today look like pretty standard Hollywood techniques to the production — soft lighting, a combination of interviews and archival footage, and skilled editing. Take a look; after an introduction from Clinton, the real video starts at 2:50:

If you want to skip ahead, I’d go to about 15:30, where there’s a succession of images that brings it in for a landing — a home video of Chelsea Clinton curtseying adorably, the shot of a young Bill meeting JFK, and the train depot in Hope, Arkansas — perfectly timed with the swelling score and Clinton’s voice-over to communicate that Clinton was both a relatable everyman and a man of destiny. When they showed this video, people were absolutely blown away. Nobody had seen anything like it. 

The golden age of political advertising

Today, even the most underfunded campaign has access to the hardware and software to make ads that look terrific. You don’t need to hire a professional firm that will charge you an arm and a leg; a great ad can be filmed on a phone and edited on your cousin’s laptop. You can even throw up a drone to get sweeping overhead shots if you want, where 20 years ago you’d have to hire a helicopter. And not only are the tools to make better videos more widely distributed, so are the skills. People who have grown up watching and making videos understand the video vocabulary that has evolved over time and can duplicate it easily. If you pay a lot of attention to politics and you’re very online you’ve probably seen dozens of great political videos, but let’s take just one example: In 2018, an unknown congressional candidate from New York with almost no money put this video out: 

I don’t know much Ocasio-Cortez spent making that video, but it was probably peanuts. And it helped make her a star.

Now let’s look at the first ad Kamala Harris’ campaign put out after she got in the race, which you could use as a teaching tool in a class on video editing. The quick cuts are meant to communicate energy and urgency, and they’re timed perfectly with the Beyoncé song, so that each beat of the song is another cut. The effect is to pull the viewer along with the momentum of the ad; if you aren’t bopping along by the end, there’s something wrong with you:

It’s obviously created by highly paid professionals, but the distance between that and the AOC video doesn’t seem all that large. Finally, let’s look at something slower, a 5 ½-minute video that was shown at the convention:

This one isn’t about Kamala Harris, who is never mentioned. It doesn’t have any fancy editing, or a moving camera; it’s just people against a white background. The music is so understated you barely notice that there’s music at all. It’s about the viewer, who is supposed to see themselves somewhere in that tapestry of Americans talking in colloquial terms — no soaring rhetoric here — about what freedom means to them. It’s a little sneaky, because the sentiments being expressed are very broad and mostly universal — freedom to create and sustain a family, freedom to love, freedom to prosper — but it expresses a profoundly liberal vision of freedom itself and of America. If Donald Trump or JD Vance watched it, they’d be gritting their teeth. 

There’s a lot that’s wrong about American politics today, but take comfort in this: No population in history has had higher-quality political advertising poured into their brains than we have right now. What a time to be alive.

Other things I wrote this week

At MSNBC, I wrote about Tim Walz’s version of patriotism, which understands the nation as a community of common fate and obligations of care.

At Heatmap, I examined the relative dearth of discussion of climate change during the Democratic convention, and explained why that’s actually okay.