Many pundits are calling the current Presidential election with too much confidence. Politics in America is war limited to words, but it is war. And the outcome of war often turns on surprise: hitting the enemy hard from a place no one saw coming. From the arrows at Agincourt defeating the French knights to the Scipio beating Hannibal and the Carthaginians at Zama, surprise wins. And this fall, a surprise no one sees coming may make one of the candidates a winner. In my view, a surprise attack on John Kerry led to his defeat in 2004.
More than a decade ago, I was watching a TV and a commercial
for Viagra came on the screen. I was not
paying attention until the warning about side effects came on. Then I could not stop laughing. I called a couple of friends who were in
advertising and we laughed more.
Until that moment, every drug commercial used an auctioneer
for the mandatory health warning at the end of the ad. In this commercial, the side effects in the
middle of the commercial in a deep, slow voice.
“For an erection lasting more than four hours, seek medical
help. Prolonged use may cause blindness.”
Brilliant!!!
Tell a guy who can’t get hard that he may have an erection
lasting four hours! At four hours and
one minute that guy will walk into the Emergency Room and let the whole world
know he has had a woody for 241 minutes—and counting.
Most Viagra customers are older. They are old enough to remember being warned
as I was in the 1950s that masturbating will make you go blind. Here is a drug that will make a limp guy hard
for four hours AND make you blind. It
must be great stuff. In reality, going blind or a 4-hour erection are much less
likely than winning the lottery, but they remind Viagra customers of the days
when they were young and the problem they had was being hard all the time!
The commercial won a national Addy Award, the advertising
equivalent of the Oscars, as it should!
What does Viagra have to do with Swift Boat Veterans forTruth—the ad campaign that torpedoed a Vietnam War veteran and let two guys
who ducked Vietnam War service win the election?
Those ads told a public that was mostly ignorant of military life that
John Kerry was a terrible candidate because he lied about his war record. In 2001, American soldiers went from Zeroes
during the Vietnam War and to Heroes that were defending us from terrorism. By 2004
soldiers were the most trusted people in America.
This Swift Boat ad campaign would have been met with
derision in the decades right after World War 2, when every American family had
a soldier in it and everybody knew many soldiers. Fifteen million soldiers served in World War
2. And some of them told lies so
fantastic they would make Mark Twain blush.
I went to Basic during the Vietnam War and heard some of the most
incredible lies I have ever heard from my fellow basic trainees.
What the Kerry haters really wanted to say was way too
complicated and controversial for 30-second TV ad. They wanted to say Kerry turned on his fellow
soldiers when he returned from Viet Nam.
With Jane Fonda in Paris he came way too close to consorting with our
enemies. I have hated John Kerry since
he testified before Congress in 1970 and I think of him as an unconvicted
traitor.
Attacking Kerry for his real crime would have failed. Jane
Fonda is an icon of film. And for many
people, Jane Fonda did nothing wrong. So
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked Kerry first as a liar. The attack worked. From the first moment I heard that campaign,
I knew they were attacking Kerry in a way that most of the public would
understand rather than attack him for what most veterans were really angry
about.
Both ads worked because they took amplified minor facts to
achieve a major goal: selling blue pills
and defeating John Kerry. The number of
Viagra users who have actually had an erection lasting four hours would fit in
a Boston Subway car. The ones who have actually
gone blind could fit in an old-fashioned phone booth.
As to liars in uniform, the majority of the military
consists of men under the age of 24, far from home, insecure and trying to
blend with an intensely macho group.
Some of the more incredible lies I have ever heard, I heard in a
barracks.
So both campaigns used facts that would reach their audience
to get attention. Once they had that
attention, then they could add in all the other information they really wanted
to convey.
Viagra marketers told their attentive customers how to get
the drug through their doctors. The
doctors warned the patients of side effects that actually might happen. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth amplified every
misdeed of John Kerry through and after his service in the Vietnam War. By the time of the election two guys who
stayed home from the war were Heroes and the actual combat veteran was a Zero.
In mass communication, starting with the most important
message is often the worst strategy for getting your message to your audience.
Viagra made the rare side effects the center of their
message when some bright ad writer realized the warning was just what the
audience wanted to hear.
Like the smart guys who sent the murderer Al Capone to
prison for tax evasion, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth hit Kerry from an
angle he never expected to deny him the biggest job in the world.
Mission Accomplished.
