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…
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2 Comments
I’ve no doubt most modern Brits would be objective enough to see nothing wrong with this kind of advert in Britain 2010, at least nothing technically or legally wrong. It’s the stuff of propaganda, and I imagine we would consider connecting images together in that way more as a politically cynical move than a socially outrageous or offensive one.
The irony is that an advert like this put out in Britain 2010 – assuming it were a good man trying to find a way to communicate the truth – wouldn’t have that same effect; rather we would assume the motives of the political leader behind it are less than pure.
Have we become so numbed by political cynicism of this sort that we forget that we have politicians in government who care deeply about such issues of nuclear disarmament, civil freedoms, and education?
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).