Every campaign season, Americans complain about the level of noise stemming from political ads. If you live in a battleground state like Ohio (where we are), then you know it is almost impossible to escape campaign advertising. Watching the Reds game on FoxSportsOH, there are ads from the two presidential candidates, the Senate candidates, as well as the affiliated SuperPacs.
Television advertising has been a staple of presidential campaigns since the birth of television. Dwight Eisenhower cut a number of ads, produced by his dream team crew of Madison Avenue advertisers, that showed a down to Earth, homespun candidate (The Man from Abilene).
Of course, we all know that the birth of the negative ad (or so says conventional wisdom) came in the 1964 campaign, when the advertising team working for President Johnson produced the 30 second “Daisy Ad“, featuring a little girl plucking flower petals from a daisy, while counting down to 10. When she gets close to 10, the voice is from a man counting down the liftoff of a nuclear rocket, ending with a nuclear explosion, and the voice of President Johnson who extols: “We must either love each other, or we must die.” Robert Mann has produced a fascinating, behind the scenes book that takes us through the decision by the Johnson team to run the ad, titled “Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds.”
Since 1964, the volume and tone of campaign advertising has gotten greater and nastier. But what separates those ads from the advertising of today is the addition of new players in the campaign, as well as the campaign’s exploitation of any medium where voters may be found–thus we get advertising on TV, Radio, and the Internet. You can even get advertising on your cellular phone. So Americans have been crying enough, and been crying out for some way to respond to all the ads.
Enter this nifty application for smartphones titled the “Super Pac app.” The Super Pac app works a lot like Shazam, the musical identification application that allows you to hold your cellphone to a musical source, and the application will identify the title and author of the song, as well as direct you to Itunes in case you wish to purchase it.
The Super Pac app allows you to hold your phone up to your television set when an advertisement comes on. It will then provide you with who is behind the ad, “third party objective information” on the veracity of the ad, AND the ability to rate the ad!
You can find more information about the Super Pac app by going here.
MU Department of Political Science 