Positivity and resilience overcome political attack ads – these are the traits you need to rise above negativity and mean spiritedness.
Hours after he was appointed the new Liberal Party of Canada leader, Justin Trudeau (and Canadians) faced a barrage of attack ads paid for by the Conservative Party of Canada. The ads criticized Trudeau for his lack of leadership experience. They made fun of his career as a teacher, and then mocked his “seriousness” and masculinity with old b-roll footage of him stripping at a charity event.
The ads were expected. Indeed, the Conservative party had launched similar attacks against both Stephane Dion and his successor Michael Ignatieff The attack ad campaigns had different themes (‘not a leader’ and ‘just visiting’, respectively), but were both effective in branding the “story” of both Liberal leaders in the collective consciousness of Canadian. They also rallied the base and framed the each individual in a negative light for many less informed voters. The ads are credited by many analysts for playing important roles in both Dion and Ignatieff’s eventual electoral defeats.
The latest wave of attacks, this time against Trudeau, have kicked off an old debate about whether going negative is an effective method of communicating and whether the attacks are moral (in the context of the current anti-bullying sentiment in Canada, many would argue they are not).
Many wondered how the Trudeau campaign would respond. Unlike previous Liberal leaders, they’d arrived in power not burdened by leadership debt but buoyed by millions in donation surplus. They could afford to hit back and respond they did.
Approximately a week after the original Conservative attack ads aired, the Trudeau campaign released their own ad which deliberately acknowledged the current Conservative ads and went on to rebut them. The irony of opening a positive “leadership” ad with the original negative ad served to turn the tables on the Conservative attack machine.
This ad campaign judo isn’t only being used at the federal level. In BC the BC Liberals and NDP are both campaigning very hard in the lead up to the May 15 election. For months prior to the writ being dropped, a third party group called the Concerned Citizens for BC (CCBC) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attack ads labeling NDP leader Adrian Dix as risky and dangerous. They pointed to what they felt was a “disastrous” term of NDP government in the 1990s. Their message mimicked Premier Christy Clark’s own narrative, painting any NDP government as a plague to the business community and the general economic health of the province.
Clark and CCBC’s negative narrative was answered on April Fools’ day with a clever and simple video released by the Dix campaign. Titled Adrian Dix: Risky in a 90s Kind of Way, the tongue and cheek clip overlaid ominous music with a menacing voice that blamed Dix for everything from the Asian Financial Crisis to bad facial hair. Its humour was a clever acknowledgment by the NDP of the charges being leveled by the BC Liberals, but also that they held little credence. It provided an excellent opportunity to directly respond to the attacks of the opposition without “going negative” themselves.
It will take some time to see whether the Federal Liberal and BC NDP’s positive and humorous responses will effectively blunt the other side’s attacks. If they do, humour may increasingly become an effective and frequently used arrow in the political communicator’s quiver.