Bird shit

 Have you seen the TV ad for Obama with Big Bird? (http://bit.ly/Rb0yzL) With mock seriousness, it spoofs Romney as the candidate who knows that the real enemy of the economy is not Madoff and the Wall Street “gluttons of greed” but the yellow-feathered devil incarnate itself.

 I think the ad reeks of ad people being addy.  I think it schtinks (a morphing of “stinks” and “schtick.”) Howard Fineman, in The Huffington Post, did, however, elaborate a bit more than me. He wrote, “It’s not just that crusading for avian rights is silly, or that PBS funding is somewhat indefensible. It is that deficit-reduction is a Republican issue, not a Democratic one. Has anyone told the president that the annual deficits have been more than 13 trillion a year?” The Democrats have more important issues to be talking about.

 Dave Trott recently pointed out (http://bit.ly/SQgbic) that President Clinton, in his speech at the Democratic Convention, bequeathed to us advertisers words to live by. “When people are hurting,” he said, “explanation trumps eloquence every time.” The Big Bird ad team should have been listening. Along similar lines, a teacher of mine at SVA said, “Better to be clear than clever, than clever and unclear.” However you look at the spot, the conceit dominates the point.

 And, it would have been nice if that ad team had thought about the audience. Combining the language from each of those two quotes, here’s a more fundamental one:  “When people are hurting, seriousness about their problems trumps self-indulgence every time.” I said that.

The first presidential debacle

The other day, I had all sorts of clever openings being pitched to the creative director inside my brain, openings that would engage and dazzle with amusement, openings that would perk up a droopy head in need of something uplifting after the first presidential debate. Now that I’m in front of my keyboard, I have no idea to where those words vanished. Whatever.

What happened to President Obama? Instead of being outraged at the clear shift from the hard-right platform that Romney had been running on for two years, Obama kept looking for the right logic to retaliate. When Romney accused the president of “trickle-down government,” a comment not often launched at Democrats and Socialists, Obama cleared his throat and remained in search of the perfect set of facts. When Romney attacked the Dodd-Frank reform, Obama didn’t remind people that the law limits greedy chicanery like the derivatives trading that led to the 2008 crash, he stayed the course, ever rational and professorial.

He’s a smart man, Obama, but you get the feeling that while he obsesses about the substance, all that other stuff, however much a reality, he finds difficult to endure. While he had the facts on his side, he lost the debate. So what happened?

He forgot the fundamentals. The moment Romney claimed he had no plans to lower the taxes of the wealthiest 1% (WHAT?????), I suspect Obama was taken off track; and, being internally driven and focused on the argument, he delved into his notes and thus into a proclivity to neglect the audience. But this is about winning over people’s minds, and in being such, Obama became unable to arouse in the audience the one thing that makes persuasion possible: Emotion. You can have all the facts in the universe, but it is emotion that has the power to modify people’s judgments.

Look, this is 2000 year-old stuff, going all the way back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: If you believe you have suffered a slight from someone who is not entitled do so, from someone who does not have the facts straight, from someone who has just attempted his biggest flip-flop ever, there must be some sort of outrage. The speaker has to highlight such characteristics of the case that are likely to provoke outrage, even anger in the audience.

I keep a quote handy that pertains to this exactly. It’s from an 18^th century writer named George Campbell. He writes, “So far, therefore, is it from being an unfair method of persuasion to move the Passions, that there is no persuasion without moving them.” I keep this quote handy because it reminds me that rational people, like Obama and a whole lot of clients, seem more comfortable with cold facts and juicy RTB’s – while doing what is necessary to move the passions feels like play-acting and fluffiness.
               Persuading people demands that we put ourselves into someone else’s shoes and figure out what the most effective emotional appeal would be for them. It demands style and artfulness as well as the correct rhetoric. It means that perhaps this little post could have benefited from a clever opening.