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(Attention: Luddite Alert)
Man, that was painful. If you have a land line, your phone was hijacked by GOP presidential candidates for two weeks before South Carolina’s primary. By my count, the phone rang approximately 637 thousand times an hour, and only 422 of those calls was my mother-in-law.
Almost all of the calls were pre-recorded and went something like this: “Hello, this is Mitt Romney and … CLICK!!”
I mean, really, how would I know what they sounded like? My wife and I broke land speed records racing to turn off the answering machine.
The first few days, before we realized we were being invaded by uncivil discourse, we actually listened to the messages. They said:
Hello, this is Republican icon Robert Taft. If I weren’t dead, I’d be voting for Rick Santorum because, well, I can’t think of anything positive to say about him, but that Newt Gingrich has revealed his epidermis in public and openly engages in social intercourse with women who are not his wife. And Mitt Romney admits to being a homo sapien and his wife has acknowledged being attracted to thespians. So remember, vote Rick Santorum, because he’s not those other guys.Two weeks as a phone hostage set the two of us to wondering — does this stuff really work? Hanging up on that drivel was a service to the candidates, whom we don’t necessarily hate only because we didn’t hear them excoriate each other. Does irritating the electorate uninterrupted for a fortnight really convince them to vote for you? (And make no mistake, this isn’t a partisan problem; we’d expect the same from Democrats if they had a primary.)
Consider the marketing implications for ordinary products and services!
I’m thinking about the top, say, 5,000 advertising campaigns in history and I can remember just one that annoyed the buying public into submission. It was Tide’s “Ring Around the Collar” campaign, which suggested that women nationwide were spousally-challenged by failing to adequately clean the dirt and sweat from their husbands’ shirt collars. The remedy was obvious: women by the millions joined the workforce and told their husbands to wash their own damn shirts.
Beyond that, I don’t see a real-world corollary to what the candidates perpetrated on us and have now taken on the road to other states. Do all their experienced and well-compensated campaign managers truly believe that interrupting voters’ dinner hours with phone spam is effective marketing? They must, or they wouldn’t do it, right?
Imagine if every time you logged on to the Internet, a pop-up ad for Budweiser appeared regardless of your settings. Wouldn’t the irritation factor eventually reduce Budweiser sales? It would certainly disincline me towards their brand of suds.
So if denigration doesn’t sell toothpaste or cars or tax preparation services, but it does sell candidates, what does that say about us? Is electoral politics the marketing of distrust, hatred and fear? Does annoying people work harmonically with those emotions? Say it ain’t so.
Just in case it is, I want to be on the cutting edge. So I’ve devised a negative campaign to boost revenues for my employer, Trident United Way. It’s a plan whereby computers would call 50 houses at a time with the following pre-recorded message:
Hello, this is Darius Rucker. Are you considering a donation to the Red Cross? Why would you contribute to an admittedly Communist organization? Has the Salvation Army requested your support? Ask yourself, when have they ever fired a shot in defense of America? Instead, contribute your hard-earned dollars to your local United Way. Why, our great nation and this venerable organization even share a first name, just like General Petreaus and General Motors, two mom-and-apple-pie Americans if there ever were any. So remember, why bail out the Lowcountry Food Bank when it was banks that caused this economic cataclysm. Invest instead in good old United Way.I’m Barry Waldman and I approved this message.
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