The Angry Video Guy on Election Day Advertising
Full disclosure…I hate politics. Love my country…but hate the political divide. If you feel the same…enjoy the rant, I promise it does tie into video marketing somewhere.
It's Political Commercial Season. Lucky Us.
Oh joy. It's that time again.
The junk mail started a month ago, just in case you don't watch TV. A full-color glossy photo of someone I've never heard of, promising to fight for me, delivered right to my mailbox alongside the pizza coupons and then heads right to my recycling bin. Then the lawn signs appeared. And now…the commercials. Then more lawn signs. Then more commercials. Then my social media feed, which used to have clips of AI cats doing funny things, now has became a battleground for people who hate each other.
Election season. Can't wait till it's over. This time of year should be all about Halloween, but no.
I'll be upfront here. I've produced exactly one political commercial in my career, and it was for a judge running for local office, so not exactly the bare-knuckle stuff. He won by the way. I was approached once by a state senator's campaign “people”. They wanted a commercial produced and told me, very casually, that they could pay me if their candidate won.
If he won. Ummmm, really? Way to care about the working class.
That takes some nerve. I passed. He lost. I'm not saying my commercial would have saved him, but you never know.
Anyway. I really haven’t had the change to do much political work. I’m not all that upset about that. Partly because of experiences like that one, and partly because I genuinely cannot stand what political advertising has become. As someone who thinks about video production and marketing every single day, political commercials are a special kind of frustrating. Bad on purpose, it seems. Often almost cringe-worthy. Let’s dive in!
The Country Came Together Once. Remember That?
I'm going to get a little personal here for a second.
In the days after September 11th, something happened in this country that I don't think we fully appreciated at the time because we were in shock…the kind of shock that for many of us will always be present for the rest of our lives. People came together. Genuinely. Flags went up on houses that had never flown one. Strangers were kind to each other (yeah even in NY). There was a real sense that whatever divided us was smaller than what connected us.
That lasted for a while. And then, gradually, it didn't.
I don't know exactly when the switch flipped but somewhere in the last fifteen years or so, the United States sorted itself into two tribes that seem to exist primarily to despise each other. Right vs. Left. Every issue, every candidate, every news story runs through that filter first. And nothing puts this on display quite like turning on your TV during election season and not being able to skip the commercials.
It's ugly. And it's everywhere.
Do These Things Even Work?
Honest question. Do political ads actually change anyone's mind? They certainly invest enough money into them.
The research is...complicated. Some studies suggest that political advertising does move the needle, particularly in local races where name recognition is low and voters genuinely don't know much about the candidates. A well-timed ad in a competitive district can shift a few percentage points. In a close race, a few percentage points is everything.
But there's also solid evidence that negative advertising, which is roughly half of what you see out there, mostly just depresses turnout. It doesn't convert voters from one side to the other. It makes everyone feel like both options are terrible and some percentage of people just stay home. Which may or may not be the point, depending on who's running the campaign. Kinda sad, if that’s a goal.
What I can tell you from sitting on the couch watching this stuff is that political commercials make me want to not vote for anyone who has one. That's probably not the intended effect.
Half of Them Are Just Anti-The-Other-Guy
Here's what gets me. Candidate A runs a commercial telling me that Candidate B wants to destroy everything I love. Candidate B runs a commercial telling me that Candidate A wants to destroy everything I love. Both commercials cite sources. Both sources appear credible at a glance. Both are saying the exact opposite thing.
I have no idea who's telling the truth. Neither do most viewers.
And then at the end there's that tag...paid for by the Committee to Elect So-and-So, or the Citizens for a Better Whatever, or some other name that tells me absolutely nothing about who actually wrote the check. That's supposed to make me trust this? None of that builds any sort of trust with voters, does it?
You know what would be refreshing? Just once, a candidate who gets on camera, looks directly at the viewer, and says here's what I believe, here's what I'll do, and I'm not going to say a single word about my opponent. No attack lines. No scary music. No dramatic pause before the opposition research drops. Just a person telling me what they stand for.
I'd watch that.
OK Fine, Here Come the Teaching Moments
I spend a lot of time thinking about how advertising works and why some of it doesn't. Political commercials are a masterclass in wasted opportunity, and some of it is genuinely instructive for anyone running any kind of advertising campaign.
Why the heck am I seeing ads for candidates I can't even vote for?
This one drives me absolutely crazy. I live in a specific town, in a specific county, in a specific state. I can only vote for candidates on my ballot. So when I'm seeing commercials for a congressional race in a district I don't live in, or a senate race in a state I've never been to, something has gone badly wrong with the targeting.
That's not just annoying. It's a symptom of how most political campaigns approach advertising. Spray it everywhere, as loudly as possible, and hope it sticks somewhere. That's not a strategy. That's wasted money and opportunity.
And here's the crazy thing…the tools to fix this have existed for years. Streaming advertising lets you target by congressional district, by ZIP code, by voter registration status, by issue interest, by demographic. If a candidate is running on lowering property taxes, that message can be served specifically to homeowners in the districts where that candidate is on the ballot. If the platform is improving schools, target households with kids in the right age range in the right geography. Ya know…voters that actually have a real interest and can do something about it.
The technology is right there. Not enough campaigns are using it, and the ones that aren't are wasting a significant chunk of their budget talking to people who couldn't vote for them even if they wanted to. I guess politicians just like to waste money, but it’s not a good look.
The messaging should match the audience.
This goes hand in hand with the targeting point. A generic commercial that tries to speak to everyone usually speaks to no one. The most effective political advertising, the stuff that actually moves numbers, is tailored to what a specific group of voters actually cares about.
A streaming campaign can run multiple versions of a commercial, each one speaking to a different concern, each one served to the households most likely to care about that specific issue. The same candidate, different messages, different audiences, same budget. That's not manipulation. That's basic communication. You talk to people about what matters to them. Political campaigns that understand this run better campaigns.
Almost nobody puts a QR code in a political commercial. Why?
This is a genuinely missed opportunity. A QR code in a streaming commercial lets a viewer go directly to a website, a donation page, a voter registration link, where the candidate stands on issues or even a landing page ties into the commercial’s message, with one scan from the phone that's already in the viewers hand. That's a direct conversion tool sitting right there in the commercial, unused by most political advertisers.
Instead most political spots end with a web address in 12-point font that disappears in two seconds. Nobody writes it down. Nobody remembers it. The moment is gone because most don’t care enough to go google it.
Anyway
Election day will come and go. The lawn signs will stay up through the first snow because apparently that's just the level of lazy these days (or maybe just proof of how “tribal” we’ve become). My mailbox will return back to the usual junk that will just end up in the recycling bin. My social media feed will move onto the next wave of annoying content that I don’t care about because it’s not a properly targeted campaign (or more AI created funny cats).
And then, about eighteen months later, it'll start again. Maybe they’ll learn for next year, but probably not.
If you're a candidate or a campaign manager who somehow ended up reading a video production blog, the offer stands. We know how to make a commercial that actually looks like someone put thought into it. We know how to target it to the right voters in the right districts. And we'll even put a QR code in it.
Pay us upfront though.
About the Author:
The Angry Video Guy is the alter ego of Mike Meyerson, founder of Absolute Motion, a commercial video production company based in Mahopac, NY, serving restaurants and businesses throughout the Hudson Valley and NY Tri-State area for over 25 years. He has strong opinions about video marketing and will not apologize for any of them. Read more from The Angry Video Guy.
