With the presidential election, er, silly season, shifting into warp speed, the Chief Marketing Officers at many of the nation’s biggest brands have some unsolicited advice for Messrs. McCain and Obama: Don’t go negative in political advertising.
An August survey by marketing services company Epsilon found that 85% of CMOS and senior marketers are negative on “ads that are critical of candidates.” In contrast, 91% are positive about “ads that show the political candidate sharing his/her position on issues.”
The poll took the pulse of 175 CMOs and marketing executives at some of the largest brands in the U.S.; 27% of respondents work at companies with $10 billion or more in annual revenue.
Those CMOs pining for a positive tone in the presidential election get my vote for wanting to raise the level of political discourse.
But the reality is that negative advertising works.
Case in point: Negative campaigning seems to be working these days for Republicans. They’ve had the upper hand the last few weeks ever since McCain surrogates Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin lit into Barack Obama during their speeches at the Republican National Convention. (Giuliani belittled Obama’s work as a community organizer while Palin strongly suggested that Obama was running for president to appease his ego.)
The Democrats have tried to punch back. Obama’s recent comment about slapping “putting lipstick on a pig” was ostensibly an attempt to mock Republicans’ claims about how they are going to reform Washington; the Obama camp was shocked, shocked, at suggestions by the GOP that the “lipstick” comment was really a veiled dig at GOP veep candidate Palin.
The thinking here is that that’s exactly what it was — a nasty comment aimed at getting into the subconscious of voters (and particularly Independents) who may be asking: “Just who is this Sarah Palin and do I want her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?”
Positive campaigning is the electoral equivalent to singing Kumbaya around the campfire. Negative campaigning is, unfortunately, the hornet’s nest of human nature– and that’s why it trumps “positive” campaigning every time.
Were it only so that some of the CMOs who took part in the Epsilon survey were running the Obama and McCain campaigns.
