This week’s page 7 feature by reporter Emily Vines focuses on the "Only You Can Silence Yourself" campaign for the nonprofit organization Declare Yourself. Designed to drum up the young adult vote in the upcoming presidential election, the three PSAs—directed by David LaChapelle of bicoastal HSI Productions for Benenson Janson, Studio City, Calif.—are jarring, creatively engaging and offer food for thought.
However, most importantly, they aren’t your garden-variety brand of negative political advertising, which has sadly gained prominence in the presidential campaign, on both sides of the aisle. The negativity is seemingly justified by the notion that such advertising works. The end justifies the means.
Certainly the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault has taken a piece out of the Kerry campaign. At press time, a group sympathetic to the Democratic Party, Texans for Truth, had launched a counter volley contending that President Bush failed to perform his service in the Texas Air National Guard.
Indeed it’s amazing that so much of Decision ’04 has focused on a war that ended decades ago. Democrats would argue that the Swift Boat campaign is a cunning underhanded piece of political strategy, diverting us from the war at hand to the scars of Vietnam. Republicans might claim that Kerry was the first to play the Vietnam War card by trumpeting his military service and valor.
No matter what your political inclination, it’s a sorry state of affairs. Negative, ugly advertising has caused the real issues to take a backseat—the war in Iraq, terrorism, education, the rising cost of health insurance and the number of Americans without it, the economy, the environment, the increased ranks of the impoverished, the plight of senior citizens and the future of our kids.
And, oh yes, in our little pocket of commercialmaking, the reputation of advertising is further sullied. Unfortunately, negative advertising has been front and center in taking us away from what’s truly important. Though there are positive ads in the political landscape, particularly in the area of building participation in the election, they are overshadowed by the high profile, divisive crapola that’s allowed to persist.
Yet I stop myself in mid-thought, realizing that such crapola is part of free speech—albeit free speech that’s funded by big bucks. Perhaps what’s most dismaying is the lack of speech regarding the situation from the captains of the ad industry who should be speaking out against this foulest use of the art form they so value.
Ironically, Advertising Week in New York is fast approaching. The weeklong celebration of ad creativity was designed in part to give this industry its due—for its positive contributions to society artistically and financially. There is a need for such events in that our business and its creativity often go under- or unappreciated, unable to shake the amoral huckster stigma. However, that stigma is perpetuated seemingly every major election year, getting exponentially uglier under the guidance of political spin-doctors.
