Five of the best political adverts: Daisy Girl

This week we’re running a series featuring five of the most effective political adverts. Today it’s a trip back in time and across the Atlantic to a US Presidential campaign:

As yesterday’s featured Conservative Party advert showed, often with political adverts a little bit of controversy makes the message go a long way.

That too is true of probably the most famous political TV advertisement, the “Daisy Girl” advert screened but the once by the 1964 Lyndon Johnson Presidential campaign. It starts with a young girl innocently counting the petals on a flower, but then switches to an ominous voiceover counting down to zero. The screen is then filled with a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

The advert played on fears that Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was willing to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The controversy resulted in the advertisement being pulled – but also in widespread media coverage which spread the advert’s message far and wide:

(Also available on YouTube here.)

You can see all the posts in this series on our Political Ads page – and scroll to the bottom of that page for Luis Fishman’s classic. The stretch from 7 seconds in until 22 seconds in is fairly normal. But as for the rest…

Read more by or more about , or .
This entry was posted in Op-eds.
Advert

2 Comments

  • The Little Girl and the Daisy was part of a very effective campaign by LBJ’s team. Some other ads are here
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJrQOEFiuwA (mentions Republican Governor George Romney who was the father of Mitt).
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xov0PWCm_vc
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4bXPHBBJ58 (you have to tolerate the egomania of James Alexander at before the actual ad starts).

    The famous Willie Horton ad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y

    Good ads from a losing candidate (Dukakis ran a similar ad against Dan Quayle but I can’t find it).

Post a Comment

Lib Dem Voice welcomes comments from everyone but we ask you to be polite, to be on topic and to be who you say you are. You can read our comments policy in full here. Please respect it and all readers of the site.

To have your photo next to your comment please signup your email address with Gravatar.

Your email is never published. Required fields are marked *

*
*
Please complete the name of this site, Liberal Democrat ...?

Advert

Recent Comments

  • Peter Davies
    @John Marriott. Not many people think a billion is a hundred million. There are still plenty who think it's a million million (the original meaning). The popula...
  • Joseph Bourke
    ‘Pax Americana' superceded Pax Britannica (the relative peace between the great powers in the time period roughly bounded by the Napoleonic Wars and World War...
  • Simon R
    @Steve Trevethan: Might you possibly be confusing 'Donald Trump' with 'The USA'? :-) What Trump says, believes, and does is in many respects not like what many...
  • nvelope2003
    Steve Trevethan. The Americans are like other colonialists. They established their enormously wealthy Republic by stealing other people's land and property and ...
  • nvelope2003
    Alex Macfie: Re My post, for the avoidance of doubt, in line 2 replace the third word with the word "that". I hope this makes the matter clear. Time to get some...