'Art' of advertising is hard to pin down

Communication specialists are scratching their heads over the attorney general's race. First, the popular Republican incumbent, Mark Shurtleff, agrees to be part of a joint statement with Democratic Greg Skordas in opposing Amendment 3, which prohibits same-sex marriage. Not only does this anger Shurtleff's conservative base, the well-publicized action also elevates Skordas as his peer. Then, while enjoying this boost, Skordas agrees to defend Nancy Workman in her felony trial. Liberals, pleased with Shurtleff's courageous opposition to Amendment 3, are irritated that Skordas would help the disparaged Workman. PR experts believe the confusing messages from Shurtleff and Skordas are dampening support from their own party faithful.

Webb: It's fun to second-guess campaign advertising and communications strategies, especially when you don't have any responsibility in the campaigns.

Political campaigns, including communications components, are part art and part science. The "science" comes from smart and careful research, both polling (quantitative) and focus groups (qualitative), along with careful targeting and segmenting of audiences. Procedures for good research and good targeting are fairly well-established and reasonably easy to execute with a little experience and smarts.

The "art" is more difficult. It is correctly interpreting the research data and targeting results, putting it in the context of other campaign factors and pulling it all together to create nuanced messages that really connect with the right audiences. The art is also manifest in the production values and quality of the resulting TV and radio spots and print ads.

Campaign communications should not be driven entirely by research, but research is an absolutely crucial component. No one is good enough to instinctively know exactly the right message to deliver to various audiences. Candidates and campaign workers get too obsessed in the crisis of the day or what the opposition is doing to be able to step back and think like a typical voter who may barely be paying attention to politics. Although campaigns do it all the time, I would never spend large amounts of money on a TV spot unless I had carefully tested it with a demographically selected focus group or two. Shooting from the hip is awfully dangerous. A bad ad can severely damage a campaign.

In the 1992 gubernatorial campaign we produced a beautiful spot featuring Mike and Jackie Leavitt sitting on a porch swing in the late evening talking about Utah's deeply held values. It was adroitly scripted and beautifully produced with perfect soft lighting on their faces, flowers all around and crickets in the background. The candidate, a guy with political instincts as good as they get, loved the spot.