From 50,000 Feet

This is a business, not political, blog. Advertising and public relations are, however, an important part of business. The biggest traveling carnival of PR and advertising rambles around the country every four years–calling itself a presidential election–and it’s hard for an old PR man not to talk about it.  So let’s talk.

On New Year’s Eve, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tried a PR stunt. He held a press conference about his latest political ad, a hard-hitting attack on his biggest rival in Iowa, Mitt Romney. Showing an ad at a press conference is an old tactic designed to give ads far more exposure than the campaign would have to pay for. Candidates routinely flog new ads that they only plan to show for two nights on Washington, D.C.’s cheapest cable channels, expecting that news coverage will, like magic beans, expand the reach of its message.

Huckabee added a seemingly fresh wrinkle. He showed the press corps a highly negative ad pointing all of Romney’s flaws — but announced he wasn’t going to use it. He didn’t want to stoop so low as to buy time for an ad reeking of such censure. Here’s a clip of Huckabee’s press conference:

To Huckabee, this stunt must have sounded like a great way to have his cake and eat it too. Here, take a copy of our terrible ad with you so you can put it on TV. But make sure everyone knows, Huckabee does not approve of this ad!

The Hillary Clinton campaign is alleged to have done something similar, if less elaborate. We have damaging information about Obama, but we’re not using it, is what Clinton operatives were supposedly telling Democratic officials, according to columnist Robert Novak.

It was a deliciously mixed message. To voters, it was Hillary’s way of touting her own virtue.  I know something about Obama that would change your mind about him.  Isn’t it great that I’m too good to use it? But to Democratic insiders, it was a way of saying Danger!  Don’t go too far out on a limb for Obama.

This was classic FUD — Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt — with Hillary playing the role of IBM.  What’s the worst news you could imagine about Barack Obama? Each person would have their own response to that question, and the way Hillary Clinton’s team has set it up, every response is correct. But as soon as a campaign operative spoke on the record about a specific allegation, Clinton immediately fired him.

The mistake both campaigns are making is trying to portraying their candidate innocent of making slanders. They’re both standing right out in the open, the bloody knife in their hands!  Huckabee tries to draw a big line in the sand between negative advertising — boo, hiss — and what he’s doing, showing the negative ad at a press conference. That’s marketing illiteracy. There is no moral or material difference between negative campaigning messages exclaimed through paid advertising, and negative campaign messages that insinuate themselves through viral processes like the news media.

It’s all a matter of tactics. Marketers choose which mode, PR or advertising, they want to use, depending on what mix of media will reach their respective target audiences. Huckabee miscalculated, thinking he could place himself above criticism by shunning just one tactic, while using others.

In the business world, lots of companies hardly advertise at all, and not because advertising’s expensive. It’s because they think people will pay more attention to what they learn through word-of-mouth, or in a news article by a trusted reporter, or by discovering it on YouTube. Lower-cost media, but not necessarily worse results. Sometimes better. If you say it yourself in an ad, it comes off as self-serving. PR messages are spread by others, and those “others” might be more believable to you than a company extolling the virtues of its own product.

PR sounds great — cheaper, more credible — but it’s also much more likely to backfire. Cleaning up the mess you’ve made through a stupid PR ploy usually costs much more than the original campaign — something left out of most PR budgets. And it takes time, something Huckabee doesn’t have. The Iowa caucuses are Thursday.

Tags: advertising, Barack Obama, FUD, Hillary Clinton, Iowa caucuses, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, negative advertising, political advertising, PR, public relations