Another fine product from Jane Caro

Jane Caro is a former advertising executive and now a public speaker in Australia.  Her presentations cover many topics but she’s particularly outspoken about politics, education and feminism.  Some of you might remember a former video of hers on how politicians can gain the trust of their constituents.  I think it might be this one where Caro was one of 4 panelists talking about political spin from an advertising branding point of view. Pick her up at minute marker 19:00-ish.*

This latest one is about feminism and not being “nice”.  According to Caro, and our own site statistics, we must have been doing something right in 2008 because the push back, name calling and ostracism was ferocious.  She also makes a point about women on the internet that I have been trying to emphasize for some years now.  When it comes to the blogosphere, the internet is the best friend women ever had.  It is the great equalizer.  Yeah, your potential allies can leave you off their blog rolls and the trolls can be hostile pains in the asses.  But they can’t shut you down.  Nope, you can go on saying one irritating thing after another and if you don’t like the comments you get, well, they’re just pixels on a monitor.  They can not hurt you.

Anyway, enjoy the latest from Jane Caro.

 

I found Caro’s eight rules of political branding.  Before the purists out there get all bent out of shape that using advertising is somehow “dirty” in politics, know that to get elected, you need to advertise yourself and show the voters that your services are worth purchasing for a length of time.  Politicians that do not advertise do not get elected.  It goes with the territory.  Here are the Eight Rules:

1.) Underpromise and overdeliver.
2.) Be voter centered. Convince your voters that you put them first. Take risks in defense of what you believe even if it may cost you personally.
3.) Don’t sacrifice what your core voters always liked about you to buy new voters.
4.) All voting decisions are made emotionally and then post-rationalized. There are two emotions that change behavior: Hope and Fear. If you want to change behaviors, get to know what are the voters’ hopes and fears.
5.) While voting decisions are made emotionally and are post-rationalized, you must give voters ammunition to defend their choice.
Policy is important.
6.) Raise voters’ morale and your own. We want to vote for people who look like they want the job and once they’ve got the job, look like they love the job.
7.) Lower voter anxiety about YOU.
8.) Voters want politicians to love their constituency.

Thursday: Political Brand Loyalty

Busy day today.  This will be short.

Yesterday, I posted a couple of videos featuring Australian Jane Caro, a former advertising creative type, now writer.  Go check out those two videos.  Caro’s take on feminism and religion is really funny.

I found another video featuring Jane where the topic was political spin.  Jane’s background in advertising gives her some insight into brand loyalty and what makes a good politician (extends his/her brand loyalty).  Here’s the video, Jane comes in at minute marker 18.20.

Strange.  The guys who had the idea for Occupy Wall Street were also formerly in advertisment and now make it there mission to debunk the ads…

For those of you who want the short summary, here are Jane’s rules of marketing and advertising for political brand loyalty (paraphrased):

1.) Underpromise and overdeliver.
2.) Be voter centered. Convince your voters that you put them first. Take risks in defense of what you believe even if it may cost you personally.
3.) Don’t sacrifice what your core voters always liked about you to buy new voters.
4.) All voting decisions are made emotionally and then post-rationalized. There are two emotions that change behavior: Hope and Fear. If you want to change behaviors, get to know what are the voters’ hopes and fears.
5.) While voting decisions are made emotionally and are post-rationalized, you must give voters ammunition to defend their choice.
Policy is important.
6.) Raise voters’ morale and your own. We want to vote for people who look like they want the job and once they’ve got the job, look like they love the job.
7.) Lower voter anxiety about YOU.
8.) Voters want politicians to love their constituency.

How does Barack Obama perform according to Jane’s rules?  From my observations of his performance and his supporters’ reaction to it, he has violated every one of these rules.

1.)He overpromised and waaaay underdelivered.

2.)He never takes risks in favor of his voters.

3.)He’s dumping the Democratic base to chase independent swing voters.

4.)He has no idea what our hopes and fears are (hint, it’s not about the deficit).

5.)His policies are crap.

6.)He doesn’t look like he loves the job and he allows his Treasury Secretary to tell the nation that their lives are going to get tougher.

7.)He continually caves to his opponents, providing no backstop to their most radical ideas.

8.)And he doesn’t appear to love his constituency. He’s very cool to the people who sacrificed everything to get him into office and he has no qualms about punching the hippies.

In short, he’s been so bad and has violated so many of these rules, that it makes me wonder what the heck is really going on here.  Is he just a pathetically bad politician who is going to take the rest of the party with him when he goes down?  Or is the party sticking with him because they know that it doesn’t matter how bad he is?  Is it possible that the game is already so rigged that Obama could be videoed in boat shoes on some big bastard’s sailboat, swigging single malt scotch and taking bags of cash and it the outcome wouldn’t matter?  Are the anti-democratic forces in our political system so entrenched that there is nothing we can do to dislodge them so they can act with impunity? Or do they just think they are secure? Contrast the Democrats efforts at building brand loyalty with the Republican effort.

There’s a possibility that Obama could start behaving like he actually wanted a second term.  In fact, he almost has to because this is not 2008 and he’s no longer a historic candidate.  Now, he’s just another guy in the White House.  But given his history, why should we trust him if he makes a U turn?  How many people have married the wrong spouses thinking that they can be changed?  It almost never works out.  If the Obama contingent is hoping that Obama’s second term is going to be better than his first, it should take a look at those 8 rules and ask itself if that’s a realistic expectation.  What I find interesting is that Democrats seem to think they deserve the poor treatment they get while Republican voters play hard to get.  The fact that a popular millionaire’s tax is going to be dropped in the budget bill is proof of this.  Republicans punish representatives and senators who raise taxes and those Congresspersons know it.

Or, it can wait until Iowa when we find out who the Republican nominee is going to be.  The Republicans may not like their current choices but they always come around by the end.  And if that person is Romney, all calculations say that Obama will lose.  Maybe he should have spent more time cultivating brand loyalty.

Disdain, part deux: How NBC finally got busted as the Faux News of the Obama Campaign

To add to Gary’s post about Obama’s disdain for free speech below, NBC lost whatever credibility they had left: 

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama‘s campaign has bought $5 million worth of advertising time from NBC Universal to run TV spots during the Olympic Games, a source familiar with the deal said on Wednesday.

The package, believed to be an unprecedented political media buy for the Olympics, includes commercials that will run on the NBC network and cable channels such as USA, MSNBC and CNBC during the August broadcast of the Summer Games, the source said.

Both NBC and Obama’s campaign declined to comment.

That payoff was sure sweet, especially for the fellatio work on MSNBC.  I wonder how much were the bonuses Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann got for getting on their knees without kneepads for 6 months?    

But wait, there’s more!  The “former media darling” John McCain noticed something in the milk wasn’t clean with all this Obama love.  (Note:  I do not endorse or will endorse John McCain as president, I just think this video is TOO AWESOMELY “good to be true”): 

UPDATE: Pat Johnson & Carol Diamonds, your sugarbear Ed Rendell is in this clip!

Is this how the NBC/Obama/GE love marathon went down? :  You scratch my back a little by saying I am the second coming of JFK & MLK, Jr., and I scratch you $5 million dollars for your Olympics.  Then you continue to scratch my “Obama is a God”  message and I’ll scratch you some love by giving you full and unlimited permission to build nuclear plants EVERYWHERE once I become the Galactic Emperor. < /snark >

So, NBC/Universal = MSNBC = GE = Nuclear Plant Builders = Exceleon Energy = David Axelrod = Obama.

It’s no surprise that backroom dealing was de riguer in the NBC/GE boardrooms, that 99.9% of NBC news personalities (and notice I did not call them “anchors or journalists”) were just overly and unobjectively FAWNING over the Precious.  With this $5 million dollar ad buy, this is further proof Obama has bought the campaign and has ZERO interest in keeping the tenets of “free press” and “Democracy.”  

There is an “ism” word that begins with an F that describes this very thing.  Mussolini would be proud.

PUMA all the way to Denver!

 

UPDATE 2:  This is an image for the Scratching Post Confluence/HireHeels Cocktails:

Can we cut the “Now, I’m no Hillary fan but…” crap?

Jeez, I see variations of this phrase all over the media and the blogs. Margery Eagan does it today in the Boston Herald as an example. It’s like you can’t say anything in Hillary’s defense without disclaiming it in the next sentence.

Group dynamics are pretty frickin’ powerful. I swear people never graduate from High School in their heads and the meanest popular kids go on to brilliant careers in pundit journalism. It’s probably because they know how to emotionally manipulate their audience to make them feel worthless if they don’t ascribe to the popular clique’s likes and dislikes. It’s so easy to make people feel left out, stupid, unattractive.

How many times in this election season have we heard Obama supporters described as “young”, “college educated”, “creative class”? They sound like Cancun during spring break or the bright young things that inhabit the fashionable millieu of “The Devil Wore Prada”. Every Obama supporter looks like Anne Hathaway in Dolce, latte in hand, Blackberry in the other, taking calls from very important people and sleeping with the pouting gorgeous thing in the Calvin Klein skivvies. And how many times have we heard Clinton supporters called “working class”, “women”, “older voters” or even better “older working class women”? What kind of image do you get from that? I see Rosy the waitress in the Bounty paper towels commercial or an aged version of Roseanne. Oooo, yeah! I wanna be like HER!

But then primaries come along and Hillary wins. How is it that all those “No Hillary Fans”, hereafter identified by the acronym, NHF’s are in such a minority? Why are there so few brilliant nubile Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and quarterbacks pushing the Obama button in the privacy of the voting booth? It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Or just MAYBE the whole thing is a media construct, enhanced by clever advertising and signed onto with great enthusiasm by the Obama campaign. Yeah, that just might be it. Obama understands the concept of a media image and that reality may have little in common with the concept. Obama is a golden, shimmering, irridescent bubble inflated by his handlers in the media and blogs who are slaves to their ad revenues. The more they push the sex and youth of Obama, the more money they rake in. But bubbles are fragile.

Here in the real world, Hillary supporters *are* young and smart and professional. And they are also women and asians and hispanics. And elderly and working class. We come in all shapes and sizes, ages and genders, degrees and non-degrees. Obama seems to forget, if he ever actually knew in the first place, that a lot of women Hillary’s age didn’t have a choice as far as education was concerned. Their parents may not have had the money to send them to college or what money there was sent their brothers instead. So, they were channeled into careers as secretaries and data entry clerks or marriage and children. Or, if they were lucky, went to nursing school or teacher’s colleges. This happened to every single one of my aunts. Only one ever went to college. And there was at least one who desperately wanted to go but couldn’t afford it.

These bright young women with capable and elastic minds became the “older working class and suburban women” that Obama spurns in order to appeal to the young Greek coeds. Or for the generation that came after them, we professional women with degrees and accomplishments have been prematurely aged and put out to pasture. No wonder there is a surplus of NHF’s running around. It’s almost like they’re desperately trying to prove their tits don’t sag yet and that they too could dance at a Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Party.

But in the cool quiet of the voting booth, cold logic prevails. And we stand there with the choices arrayed before us: a vote for Obama means another era of the stereotypes, fewer options at work, less mentoring, more of the same; a vote for Hillary could mean something completely different.

Only the young and foolish fail to see the real agent of change.