This ad firm is making fundraising ads like you’ve never seen before
Plus: How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal trial
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
This ad firm is making fundraising ads like you’ve never seen before
How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal trial
Arizona’s abortion ruling inspired a major ad buy
Scroll to the end to see: why the U.K. may soon start allowing political ads
This ad firm is making fundraising ads like you’ve never seen before
In his ad “This Day,” former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn walks through a slow-motion reenactment of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as he introduces himself and criticizes Republican lawmakers who voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection.
“Some of the same people who stood behind us when we protected them went back on the floor of Congress and stood behind Trump,” says Dunn, who’s now running to represent Maryland’s third district in the U.S. House in the state’s Democratic primary next month. “They voted to acquit him. And worst of all they denied the violence and trauma that led to the death and trauma that led to the death of some of my fellow officers.”
It’s a different view than we’re used to seeing from campaign ads that reference the Jan. 6 attack using news footage from outside the Capitol, and that was the point.
“People are a little bit tired of seeing the news footage from that day,” says Cayce McCabe, founder of Adwell Productions, which produced the spot. “What I wanted to do was put Harry there talking about it, but do it in a way that people hadn’t seen.”
Adwell, a Democratic firm that was founded last year, is made up mostly of former staff from Putnam Partners, and you can tell their fundraising ads from the movie-style title cards tagged with “An Adwell Production” and local filming location information.
“We make ads that don’t look like other firm’s ads and I think that comes from a place of knowing number one that people are very skeptical of political ads, people kind of get really tired of political ads,” McCabe says. “A good ad tells a story. It doesn’t just hit people over the head with poll-tested information.”
To pull off the slow-mo effect for Dunn’s announcement video, they had him walk and speak super fast so it would appear normal speed when the rest of the video was slowed down. So he wouldn’t sound like a chipmunk, they redubbed his lines in post-production. “It was a very difficult process,” McCabe says.
Adwell also made an announcement video using images generated by artificial intelligence for Peter Dixon, a Democratic candidate for U.S. House in California. The challenge was shooting an ad that referenced places Dixon had been as a U.S. Marine and member of the State Department, like Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mexico, all from his Silicon Valley district.
McCabe says the video was made from four different pieces of software layered on top of each other (Ebsenth, Stable Diffusion, Khyber, and After Effects), and the biggest challenge was making it move like a video and making sure the images of Dixon didn’t look wildly different from the candidate himself. The ad has an “Images Generated by AI” label, and the A.I.-style morphing “Peter Dixon, Democrat for Congress” logo at the end is a clever touch.
These big-budget fundraising ads are aimed at a national audience, which “creates a different fundraising base for a lot of these candidates,” but they’re not for every day TV persuasion, McCabe says. The Clio Award-winning “Doors” ad he wrote and directed while at Putnam Partners for MJ Hegar, a 2018 U.S. House candidate in Texas, for example, was seen by 5 million people in a week, but in three sets of focus groups in the district, “not a single person had seen it.”
“That was a really big reminder that the audience for these announcement videos are a national audience of people who seek politics,” he says.
Political professionals I spoke with last year said they were steering candidates away from pricey launch videos unless they had a pre-existing donor base to activate, but creative ads don’t have to be expensive.
For an ad for Rep. Andy Kim who’s running for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, Adwell just filmed a two-hour focus group he held with constituents he’d never met before using three cameras for “Real.” For Sarah Klee Hood, a New York candidate for U.S. House, her ad “Make It Work” played into the fact she didn’t have a big budget by showing how her family helped film by taping an iPhone onto a Swiffer.
“Good creative is not good production value, good creative is concepts and ideas and thinking about how shots are cut together and how they’re used,” McCabe says.
How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal trial
The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president in history started Monday for former President Donald Trump, but judging by the graphics in digital ads his campaign is running, it’s just another witch hunt: “I’m In Court Again!” several read, almost nonchalantly.
The copy on these digital ads, though, strikes a much more urgent tone, claiming, for example, “I could be locked up for life.”
“I’m on trial AS WE SPEAK!” reads the copy for one ad running on Meta platforms. “My crime? Putting YOU, the AMERICAN PEOPLE, ahead of the COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS, AND FASCISTS that want to see our country DESTROYED.”
Actually, the charges Trump faces in this particular case aren’t related to putting his supporters ahead of communists, but payments made to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their alleged affair ahead of the 2016 election.
The only stormy mentioned in Trump’s fundraising messages is the false claim he “stormed out of Biden’s kangaroo court.”
Trump’s campaign site doesn’t currently offer any new merch related to the trial, but it is still selling an “I Stand with Trump” tee with the date for March 30, 2023, when he was first indicted in the case.
I’m fascinated with the struggle they’re having selecting impartial jurors for this case. Truly, who in this nation does not have a strong opinion of this man?!
Arizona’s abortion ruling inspired a major ad buy
In a new video titled “Kari Lake’s abortion policy,” the former TV news anchor and Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona does a 180.
In 2022, Lake said in a radio interview she was “thrilled that we are going to have a great law that’s already on the books” in reference to the 1864 law on abortion passed before Arizona’s statehood. In her new video, though, Lake now says the law, which Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled last week is enforceable, is actually “out of line where the people of this state are.”
“This is such a personal and private issue,” she says. “I chose life, but I’m not every woman.”
So… you’re saying you’re pro-choice?
Like the dog that caught the car, Republicans who once campaigned in theory on overturning Roe v. Wade are finding that in practice they’re less militantly pro-life than they once made themselves out to be since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling.
“I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices,” Lake says.
In an effort to couch her new position as non-heretical to Republicans, Lake says at the top of the video that she’s in agreement with Trump, who she name checks on five occasions in the five-and-a-half minute video. She spends a portion of the video describing her own experience with motherhood and pro-family policies she says she would support.
Democrats are responding to the Arizona ruling with ads of their own. Per CBS News, the Biden campaign has made a seven-figure ad buy in the state with “Power Back,” in which Biden speaks about the issue as one of freedom, saying “your decisions belong to you, not the government, not Donald Trump.”
The ad from Lake’s Democratic opponent Rep. Ruben Gallego called “Kari Lake’s ‘Great Law’” is a collection of Lake’s 2022 statements on abortion policy. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report reclassified Arizona’s U.S. Senate race last week from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.”
Have you seen this?
Political ads could be heading to U.K. TV screens due to legal loophole. ITV is considering taking paid ads from political parties for the first time during the upcoming general election thanks to a loophole in broadcasting law. Ever since commercial television began in 1955, British political parties have been banned by law from buying television adverts, but the ban only applies to traditional television channels and not to streaming television delivered over the internet. [The Guardian]
McDonald’s scented billboard is a stroke of marketing genius. Who needs to see french fries when you can smell them? [Fast Company]
Democratic Senate candidates rout GOP in fundraising. Just about every Democrat running in competitive Senate races this year significantly out-raised their GOP challenger in the first quarter. [Axios]
A complete set of Virgil Abloh’s legendary Off-White™ x Nike “The Ten” is going up for auction. The set is estimated to sell for between $15,000 to $25,000. [Hypebeast]
A new government came to power in Portugal and its first order of business was changing the logo. The country’s new government under Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, a member of the conservative Social Democratic Party, scrapped a modern state emblem that was designed last year and replaced it with an old logo that includes Portugal’s longtime national coat of arms. [Yello]
History of political design
Shirley Chisholm pamphlet (1972). The copy in this pamphlet for Chisholm’s presidential campaign plays on her “Unbossed and Unbought” slogan by saying she decided to run “without consulting any political bosses” and announcing, “No special interest groups will contribute to her campaign.”
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