John Heilemann Interviews Hotline creator and former political consultant Doug Bailey on why the best ads are the worst.
__ Thirty years after starting a political consulting firm back when they were practically unheard of, and nearly a decade after leaving the business as a legend and diving headlong into a new-media venture, Doug Bailey has achieved something fiash-in-the-pan partisan advertising gurus can only fantasize about: lasting relevance. Bailey is chair and co-founder of the American Political Network, parent company to a clutch of online services whose fiagship is The Hotline, a daily digest of political news regarded as more than merely indispensable by people immersed in the presidential campaign. Out on the hustings, The Hotline is the drug of choice; as afternoon rolls around, the hacks and handlers who haven't had their fix yet start muttering and pleading with their fellow travelers to help them score a hard copy.
Bailey is an addict, too. His memorabilia-strewn digs in Alexandria, Virginia, sport headlines from the 1976 presidential race, in which Bailey and his old partner, John Deardourff, nearly engineered a miraculous comeback for the fatally lame Gerald Ford. There are photos of Lamar Alexander, whom Bailey helped elect governor of Tennessee in 1978, partly by coming up with the idea that Alexander should parade around in a red plaid shirt. There are mementos from races that Bailey helped orchestrate for Bob Dole and Dick Lugar.
But by 1987, he'd had enough. Burned out by the nonstop madness of campaign life, and dispirited by the harshly negative turn the game had taken, Bailey left Bailey/Deardourff & Associates. Sensing that the 24 hour news cycle imposed by innovations such as CNN would explode the traditional market for campaign coverage, Bailey launched The Hotline. Bingo. Distributed at first largely by fax, The Hotline established itself with astonishing speed. By midway through the 1988 primary season, ABC's political director, Hal Bruno, had posted a sign on his door warning people not to enter unless they'd read that day's Hotline.
This year, Bailey took the inevitable plunge, teaming up with the National Journal to create a political Web site, PoliticsUSA (politicsusa.com/). John Heilemann tapped into Bailey's unique perspective on the current negative-ad firestorm, and on what the future may hold for a form of communication that often seems as archaic as the political system that spawned it.
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Wired: People always complain about negative advertising. But in this campaign, there seems to be even more complaining than usual. Why?
Bailey
: I don't think the advertising is much more negative, but what's changed is there is much more of it, partly because of Forbes and partly because many candidates were pretty well funded in the early going. Also, in the absence of a positive campaign that would ignite people out there, it's the negative advertising that tends to dominate. And it has, obviously, turned a bunch of people off. That doesn't mean it hasn't been effective.
Was it responsible for the supposed backlash against Forbes?
I don't think negative advertising was the only reason for Forbes's collapse, but it was one significant reason. Remember that nobody knew anything about Forbes a few months ago. He ran some positive advertising on the fiat tax. Then, the next thing anybody knew he was running all these negative ads against Dole. If you get known as a negative person, you have really hurt yourself, and you'll lose votes. That's particularly true in a multiple-candidate field. If Forbes runs a negative ad against Dole, it may hurt Dole but it also hurts Forbes - and it helps somebody else, whether it's Buchanan or another candidate, who picks up the vote because he wasn't hurt either by the ad or by running the ad.
In 1964, Democratic adman Tony Schwartz made the seminal "daisy spot," in which a little girl picking flower petals turned into a countdown to a nuclear explosion. The ad never mentioned Barry Goldwater, but by evoking fears people already had about him, it was one of the most powerful negative ads ever.
Absolutely. And the most effective advertising of all, I suppose, is an ad that leaves you with a negative impression of your opponent, without saying the words - or without voters ever recognizing that there was anything negative about the ad. That is, of course, sinister and effective advertising at the same time. The '92 Clinton campaign was very creative, very subtle, and very effective in its advertising. Clinton said a number of devastating things about George Bush, but he said them with a smile on his face. One of the reasons the '96 ads thus far appear to be so negative is that there's nothing subtle about them. It's like sledgehammer advertising.
But you're not seeing the kind of serious public rejection of negative advertising that would force consultants and candidates to alter their behavior?
Not enough to overcome the potential pluses of running the negative ad in the first place. It is just a plain fact of life that you can move more numbers with negative advertising than you can with positive advertising. Twenty years ago you had to think long and hard before you ran a negative ad, because there was going to be a predictable backlash. But television overall has become so negative that negative political advertising fits in with everything else you see.
Is it possible to overrate the power of a really effective negative ad?
Oh, sure. But here's the point: If I'm trying to win a vote, people have to know my personality and quite a number of issues about me in order to feel so positive that they are going to vote for me. But I can also win a vote for me by getting a vote against you. To get a vote for me, I've got to give them 10 or 15 reasons. To get a vote against you, it only takes one 30-second ad with a silver bullet. Positive advertising is a much more complex and difficult thing. One negative ad can do wonders.
It almost makes you wonder whether positive advertising serves a purpose.
Oh, absolutely there's a point to it. Particularly if the candidate, like Forbes or Alexander, is introducing himself. But I suspect that in most of the political world, the positive message is sort of nodded at and not really given much credit. Is it possible in this day and age for a candidate to get from here to there without running any negative advertising? Probably not. In fact, if you don't run some confrontational advertising, you're probably not considered strong enough to hold public office.
The media are increasingly interested in the inner workings of the campaign process, and now even the candidates are talking openly about the mechanics - so much so that some people are saying that in 1996 the mechanics is the message. What effect does this have?
It's self-defiating in a variety of ways. When politicians talk about tactics and how you're going to win rather than why you should win, it feeds public cynicism toward all of politics. If you're talking about political process - about your polls or about your opponents' deficiencies, about how you're going to drive somebody's negatives up or how you're going to drive your positives up - you're not talking about a positive vision of the future. Any candidate only has so much time, whether it's a 30 second ad or eight seconds on a sound bite or whatever it is, to communicate via mass communication to the public. And if you are "off message," then you're not doing the best you can. It is off message, in my judgment, to talk about the how of your campaign rather than the why of your election.
So why are candidates doing it?
All campaigns ask, How are we going to get onto the nightly news tonight? And a good way to get on the nightly news tonight is either to attack your opponent or to get into political process and strategy and tactics, which the media just love to cover. Secondly, it's easier to create a little sound bite about the horse race or about your opponent than it is to create a sound bite - eight or nine seconds - that expresses a vision of the future.
It's clear that there are at least two audiences for every ad - that is, the people at home and the media. When consultants set out to make an ad, which audience is actually the dominant one?
Well, there are a lot of audience objectives. There are the primary voters, there are the media, and there are the general election voters. When you send an ad, whether it's intended for the media or the primary voters, you are making a big mistake if you think it's not going to be seen by general election voters, because this is how they get a first impression of your candidacy. Beyond that, campaigns these days make many ads that will never or almost never run. They are made in order to have a press conference about the ad, to show it to the media, hoping that the media will pick it up and put it on the nightly news. But the campaign doesn't put any dollars behind it. This frequently happens in Washington - they run the spot there and the media are supposed to assume that it's run throughout the world, which of course it never is. And then there are the ads that the campaigns produce hoping the media doesn't see them.
You started out by saying that there is more advertising than ever, partly because of Forbes. Actually, in New Hampshire, Dole out-advertised Forbes in the end. The ABC affiliate in Manchester was airing 150 to 200 ads a day. In an already media-saturated environment, is pouring all those dollars into ads still an effective strategy? You can't help but notice that Forbes did rotten in New Hampshire, and Dole didn't do nearly as well as he was supposed to. Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan, who won the primary, bought maybe a tenth of the gross volume they did.
The irony of those massive advertising buys in Iowa and New Hampshire is that they are the two states where substantial, on-the-ground campaign and organization is going to have as much, if not more, impact than advertising. I mean, in New Hampshire most voters have the opportunity to meet the candidates personally. But except for those two states, the power of advertising is overwhelming, and therefore the power of dollars is overwhelming.
But doesn't the level of media saturation raise the overall stakes? This is a question that product advertisers face all the time - how to break through the clutter.
The challenge becomes how to grab somebody's attention without being really weird - you don't want to be known as an oddball. But the days when you could stroll down the banks of some river, with calm music in the background, to demonstrate your commitment to the environment - those days are gone, because the couch potatoes with the remote control are going to turn you off. If you don't grab their attention in the first three or four seconds, they're gone before they even know whose campaign it is.
What have been some of the seismic changes in the last 20 years?
It is generally true today that if you run competent negative advertising, and your opponent does not answer it immediately with ads of his or her own, then your ads will be believed. That's exactly the opposite of the way it was 20 years ago. Back then, even the most competent negativespot tended to be disbelieved - the perception was you were so desperate that now you were going to throw mud. Today, you run a negative ad and if the other guy doesn't answer it, it's sort of proof that you must have been right. That is also one reason why there is such a fast change in ads these days. Yourun them for two days, then you change ads because your opponent has put up something to answer you and you have to answer that. And he has to answer you, and you have to answer him.
What does that do to the accuracy issue?
Remember that with television advertising, your audience is everybody who watches television. These folks are not necessarily going to get information elsewhere. They're not going to hear that something in your ad was bogus - and therefore you leave it on. Or it's not going to matter. I'm sure you remember, in 1988, Bush's ad against Dukakis, with Dukakis in the tank Š
He popped out of the tank, wearing a combat helmet and trying to strike a leadership pose, but instead he looked patently ridiculous.
Yes - and in the Bush ad, there was a crawl across the screen with an announcer saying things that were absolutely wrong about Dukakis's positions on defense. One night, on the national news, ABC did an analysis of that ad which said, in effect, "Bush is wrong on this, wrong on this, wrong on this - it is a false ad." The Bush campaign had a big meeting to decide whether to keep the ad on the air or not. And they decided, "Well, to heck with it. ABC is going to run that report once. We're going to run the ad 2,000 times. So let's keep it on the air."
What changes do you foresee for political advertising?
The technologies of online and the technologies of television are going to merge more and more. Video-on-demand will be a part of our lives. I will be able to say, I want to know about Dole's views on NAFTA in the two-minute version, or, I want to know his views in the 10-minute version. The public demand is going to be there, and the technology is going to be there, and that's a vastly different politics. Although you might ask yourself who on earth would want to know the 10-minute version of Bob Dole on NAFTA.
Can you give some examples of what the future will look like?
The fact of the matter is, 10 years from now, people are going to register to vote online, and they're going to vote online. In 10 years' time, a member of Congress will be able to hold a town meeting with all of his or her constituents in their own homes, and the congressperson can say, 'Tomorrow, I'm going to vote on this bill. I'm going to describe it to you, and you tell me how to vote.' There will be those who abuse this system, but it is a magnificent means for people's involvement in the process. The political community is not fast to understand this, but online is as powerful a new communications vehicle as, in its own ways, television was in its day. Think of the power of communicating specific messages to specific constituencies through computerized direct mail, for example.
Wasn't this supposed to have been the first online campaign?
Every campaign wants to have its own Web site in order to seem technologically advanced and because everyone else is doing it - you can't be a modern candidate without having your own Web site. The public can find commentary and information on the candidates' positions at PoliticsUSA and other media sites. But I don't think online has a significant impact at the moment. It really is an irony that in today's world, older-age people are disproportionately the largest share of voters, while younger people are disproportionately a small share of voters and at the same time the major users of online services. As the younger generations move into voting age, I think that you'll see more voting. And these future voters will be better informed, or at least have the capacity to be better informed, than any voters in any generation at any time.
What's the biggest single change you've witnessed in political ads over the years?
Probably that it's become very difficult to see an advertising strategy from beginning to end, because we live in this world where you've got to answer the other guy. So you throw up new ads, and Tuesday's ad may have nothing whatsoever to do with what was up there on Monday. It's very difficult to see any of these campaigns as having a common thread. Twenty years ago, you planned an advertising campaign and had different phases of the same kind of message so that you could build to a crescendo. The value of doing that, of being able to set a strategic course and follow it in your advertising, is that you could give the candidate a mandate for what he was talking about, make it possible for him to enter office with enough positive support that he might actually get something done. He would never have had to squander that support by having to run lots of negative ads. Today, what we are doing is creating a political campaign process that so injures the winner that he can't be an effective president - where he enters office having been sullied by the campaign process, both by his opponents' advertising against him and his own in response.
