Attack Ads
I Enjoy Making Attack Ads
I remember being excited when my boss told me we were about to start releasing attack ads. Up until then, we were focused on building name recognition of our candidates, meaning most pieces I did were logos, official documents, and web graphics meant to familiarize voters with who they were and how they planned to legislate. It was mostly positive and inoffensive work that mostly adhered to a specific aesthetic. Designing attack ads takes all of that in a different direction.
Attack ads need hyperbolic imagery to sell the point. A politician who has a past of nepotistic behavior, abusing their power to enrich friends and family, could be portrayed as an imposing puppet master, a greasy card sharp, or any other number of goofy caricatures that identify scandalous behavior. The creative approach to designing attack ads has always been something I’ve enjoyed. It’s a graphic genre that is completely unique to politics.
It’s not something I particularly feel bad about (or feel a need to feel bad about). The people who exercise power should be criticized. A good man making complicated decisions makes no difference to me. The target has every opportunity to defend themselves or debunk the attack, or give a reasonable explanation. The voters will decide what the attack’s implications do to their vote. A candidate unable to recover from a weak attack shouldn’t be running in the first place, and should run only after they’ve at least worked on their statesmanship.
Naughty or Nice?
Before Christmas of 2019, I was asked to make an ad that would be passed to potential clients. It had our contact info on the front, and a scathing naughty list of Santa’s less-talked-about scandals. If Santa was a politician, we’d speculate as part of the Christmas canon that these issues would be ones he’d have to answer for first
The whole point of this Christmas themed smear was to demonstrate that somebody as universally loved as Santa, who brings gifts to the children of the world with magic, can have doubt cast on their character.
Now that doesn’t mean I condone or am ruining good people’s reputations by deceiving voters. It very well could be that Santa has a perfectly reasonable explanation for what he’s being accused of. In that case, he’ll issue a rebuttal, and the attack can backfire. The same principle applies to all of our targets. It’s important that attacks are backed up, clear, and true if we don’t want to get egg on our face.
