"Politicians learned this lesson quickly: negative advertising works."

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How The First Political Attack Ad Changed Politics
By Avi Dan, July 24, 2016

When I was a card carrying member of the advertising trade I always used to start my way into a new campaign in the same place: the archives. When I ran the Crest account I dove in to 1960s America and started my journey for a new campaign with a “Beaver” Cleaver-like kid holding a dentist report card exclaiming, “Look Ma, No Cavities.” I worked once with a Jungian anthropologist who believed that archetypes are formed at young age, and that to become successful advertising must discover the brand imprints. I’m not sure I buy into all of this because brands need to evolve as culture changes, but I don’t think that a brand’s DNA changes and I always found the journey back in time stimulating.

If you go back in time you’d find that political advertising is different from product advertising. Most political advertising is negative while product advertising extols the subject matter. The reason marketers don’t use negative ads is they could end up disparaging the entire category.

Some people think that the advertising that The Tuesday Team, a bunch of top notch ad people, who created the advertising for the Ronald Reagan re-election campaign in 1984, came up with the best political ads. The commercials were indeed exceptional in that they assumed a product posture — they praised Reagan and showcased his achievement rather than attack his opponent.

For me, the greatest political ad ever was the famous “Daisy” ad run by Lyndon  Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. The aim of the one-minute spot, widely known as the first political attack ad, was to frame Republican Barry Goldwater as a reckless warmonger. No one had attacked anyone like that before. It was an implicit charge – that Goldwater is undisciplined and a hot tempered politician who will start a nuclear holocaust. The spot never even had to mention Goldwater or show him for people to get it.

It aired only once on NBC’s popular “Monday Night at the Movies.” However, it almost didn’t air at all. The Johnson campaign was worried about the reaction and sat on it until Bill Bernbach, head of the agency that produced it, Doyle Dane Bernbach, wrote to Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary a letter begging him to air it.

Doyle Dane Bernbach understood that you can’t give people enough facts to make them by a product — or a candidate.  You got to move them so they respond . The only way to do that is to make the advertising emotional.

And one of the most prevalent emotions in September 1964, less than two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a few months after Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove came out, was fear, and in particular fear of nuclear war.

Goldwater tried to appeal to the fear of the public of the threat of communism  and a dangerous world and talked about the use of small nuclear weapons as a possible way to defoliate parts of the Vietnam jungle and destroy key infrastructure used by communist guerrillas. He tried backing away from those comments, saying he wasn’t necessarily advocating such tactics. But the Democrats had already seized on the language to help drive part of their narrative against the candidate.

Doyle Dane Bernbach joined the fearmongering enthusiastically. It bet that people were more afraid of nuclear war than communism and set out to exploit it. They were right. Bernbach thought that Goldwater is a dangerous man and went on a crusade determined to stop him from becoming president.

The agency was originally hired by the Democratic National Committee to work on a series of commercials, some of which focused on nuclear warfare. Sound engineer Tony Schwartz was listening to soundtracks one day and came across sound of a child counting from one to 10. That image of a child counting, then a nuclear missile melding into the child’s voice – it was a stunning way to show that this is what just could happen. It was a classic Doyle Dane Bernbach ad: take a product, and tell the truth about it, but in an unusual way.

The commercial was inspired by a 1954 French film, “The 400 Blows,” by director François Truffaut. To show that a child had died in the movie, the director froze the shot on the child and zoomed into the child’s face.

The Daisy ad was actually shot in a residential field in Manhattan. It took about two hours and 15 to 20 takes to get the shot they wanted from the little girl.

The Republicans protested what they considered, perhaps accurately, a grossly misleading attack against Goldwater. That tussle, in part, helped spur media coverage, with all three news networks airing the ad. It was a commercial that went viral before there was a viral.

Politicians learned this lesson quickly: negative advertising works. Johnson won and won big: his margin of victory was 22% points, the fifth largest in U.S. history.
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