Politisk kommunikation: Effektivaste tv-reklamen i valet!

KAMPANJ | ”Stage” var den mest effektiva tv-reklamen under valrörelsen 2012. Detta enligt Ace Metrix, ett företag som analyserar reklam i tv.

Shorr, Johnson, Magnus producerade videon för Priorities USA, en pro-Obama Super PAC.

När Mitt Romney valde att inte besvara attacken gjorde man ett av sina stora strategiska misstag under valkampanjen.

Jane Mayer skriver i The New Yorker:

”I’m a big Frank Capra fan,” Saul Shorr, one of S.J.M.’s partners, said […]. “And in this campaign Romney was the Edward Arnold character, the wealthy authority figure in several of Capra’s films, like ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ and ‘Meet John Doe,’ who’s not looking out for the little guy.”

[…]

When ”Stage” first aired in Ohio and other battleground states, in June, ABC News called it ”the Brain ad that Romney should fear most.” And, on Election Night, Sarah Palin singled out S.J.M.’s ads as among Romney’s biggest problems in Ohio.

[…]

Andrea Johnson, another of the firm’s partners […], described the team’s approach. “We’re really trying to capture the person we work for, so that the ads feel authentic, and we often do that by telling stories,” she said. Because  the firm was working with a small budget compared with its opponents, Adam Magnus, a third partner, said, “we had to maximize our throw weight” and focus on only one theme-Bain Capital. Bill Burton, of Priorities USA, said that poll testing indicated that Romney’s Bain record had the potential to define not just his résumé but his character. Focus-group participants were angered by the idea that private-equity companies like Bain could profit while breaking promises to fund workers’ pensions and health-care plans.

[…]

By midsummer […] internal research showed that, in areas where S.J.M.’s ads aired, Obama had an eleven-point advantage over Romney in “trustworthiness,” compared with a five-point lead in places where the ads had not run. In October, an Ohio focus group showed that “Stage,” which by then hadn’t aired for a month and a half, was one of the few political ads that people remembered. Burton said, “Not answering those attacks was the biggest strategic mistake of the Romney campaign.”

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Strategi: Hur Obama tänker definiera Mitt Romney!

KAMPANJ | Mitt Romney har haft det tufft den senaste tiden. Han har varit under ständig attack för sin tid i riskkapitalbolaget Bain Capital.

Parallellt har man också angripet honom för att han vägrar offentligöra alla sina deklarationer.

Kritiken är i och för sig inte ny. Vad som är nytt är att demokraterna verkar ha bestämt sig för att fokusera på Romneys tid i näringslivet.

Man skulle gissat att det var mer fruktbart att inrikta sig på hans ständiga byta av åsikter i olika sakfrågor. Listan över alla gånger han har flip-floppat är nämligen lång som en måndag.

I artikeln ”Can the Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC Game?” har Robert Draper beskrivit hur strategin har tagit form bland Barack Obamas allierade.

Bill Burton och Sean Sweeney har grundat en s.k. super PAC. Deras Priorities USA Action är en av de ledande på den demokratiska sidan.

Last December — specifically, on Pearl Harbor Day — Burton and Sweeney met with a few other Priorities advisers in the Dupont Circle office of the pollster Geoff Garin to decide just what their Romney story would be. They quickly discarded the Romney-as-flip-flopper leitmotif. To say that the Republican lacked a firm set of positions was to concede that he couldn’t be defined. Better, they concluded, to assert that Romney in fact possessed beliefs — very extreme ones.

Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing. What became clear was that voters had almost no sense of Obama’s opponent. While conducting a different focus group — this one with non-college-educated Milwaukee voters on the eve of Wisconsin’s April 3 primary — Burton and Sweeney were surprised to learn that even after Romney had spent months campaigning, many in the group could not recognize his face, much less characterize his positions. Compounding the Republican nominee’s strangely persistent obscurity is that, as Garin told me, “Romney is not a natural politician in the sense of embracing opportunities to talk about himself.”

That left an opening for the Democrats to tell Romney’s story, and over the spring they figured out how to do so. Obama’s opponent was not an ideologue per se, the Priorities team decided, but instead someone who knows and cares only about wealthy Americans. Burton describes the distinction as “a top/bottom rather than left/right approach” — also known in Republican circles as class warfare.

The best explanatory tool for this narrative would prove to be Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. In this recasting of Romney’s self-described chief qualification to be president, the candidate may well be someone who understands how the economy works but cares only about making it work for rich guys like himself. As one participant in the Priorities focus groups told me, “Businessmen are often highly admired, but there’s no real template for somebody with Mitt Romney’s type of business experience getting embraced.”

Läs mer: ”Romney’s Midsummer Test” och ”Status of Bain and Romney’s Tax Returns”. Båda av Mark Halperin på Time. ”After missteps, Romney adds to communication team” av Sam Youngman på Reuter. ”Democrats Pounce On Poll Showing Attacks On Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital Career Are Working” av Jon Ward, The Huffington Post.

Bild: Tidskriftsomslaget är The New York Times Magazine den 8 juli 2012.

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Strategi: Barack Obama skall krossa Mitt Romney!

MED HJÄLP AV negativa kampanjmetoder tänker Barack Obama krossa Mitt Romney. Hans karraktär och bakgrund inom näringslivet skall smutskastas.

Romney är idag den republikanska presidentkandidat som ser ut att ha strörst chans gentemot Obama.

Han är den republikan som troligtvis får lättast att locka över independents d.v.s. väljare som inte ser sig som primärt demokrater eller republikaner. Denna väljargrupp kan ofta avgöra ett val i USA.

Enligt Ben Smith och Jonathan Martin på Politico har högsta ledningen inom Obamas kampanjorganisation studerat strategin som president George W. Bush använde sig av 2004. Det året lyckades Bush – trots låga opinionssiffror – besegra John Kerry genom att tidigt definiera honom i negativa termer.

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic srategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

[…]

The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

“He was very, very good at making a profit for himself and his partners but not nearly as good [at] saving jobs for communities,” said David Axelrod, the president’s chief strategist.

[….]

“People already knew that he’s a political opportunist of the highest order — changing his positions to suit the day’s polling,” said Bill Burton, Obama’s former White House deputy press secretary who now heads Priorities USA, an independent group expected to lead Democratic attacks on the Republican nominee. “But the last couple weeks, this lack of principles has translated into a total lack of leadership on issues like the debt ceiling.”

Svaret från Mitt Romneys kampanjstab kom snabbt. ABC News rapporterade följande:

 “It is disgraceful that President Obama’s campaign has launched his re-election with the stated goal to ‘kill’ his opponent with an onslaught of negative and personal attacks,” said Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades in a written statement.

“President Obama will say and do desperate things to hold onto power because he knows he has failed. Neither despicable threats, nor
President Obama’s billion dollar negative campaign, will put Americans back to work, save their homes, or restore their hopes. On November 6, 2012, this will change,” Rhoades said.

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