Obama’s ‘O’ logo is one of the most impressive elements of his political identity – it functions as a condensation of Obama’s message, a badge for supporters, a lucrative branding tool, etc. I love this interview with the designer at the NYT, because it shows a more or less face of the campaign, and reveals so much about how electoral politics works these days -
First, it shows the deliberate, calculating side the the campaign, rather than the exuberent, movement-building face. Axelrod and Plouffe deliberate about what logo serves them best, debate the advantages of different ‘O’s and make a calculated decision. No doubt this is why the interview is happening only after the election.
The logo works because it condenses so much meaning. The ‘O’ itself refers to his name, which signifies him as something different, a ‘change’ – Obama has a ‘funny’ name that sets him apart from other candidates and past presidents. The ‘rising sun’ image also connotes change, the lines imply the open feilds and rural areas that supposedly define America. it implies unity (a full circle), and an accessible simplicity that can be molded to fit any number of messages.
The multi-valent iconicity of the ‘O’, and it’s basis in Obama’s biography (both of which the designers read before going to work) reveals the imagistic and narrativized foundations of contemporary politics.
I’ve already made comparisons between Obama and JFK, then Obama and Bush. But Ron Reagan Jr.’s Obama endorsement makes me thing that perhaps the best comparison is between Obama and Reagan. Check the 1984 Reagan classic “Morning Again in America”
Then check the visual iconography of Signs of Hope and Change (one of the best political videos I’ve ever seen)
Similarities run deep: both use good communication as both a tool and a selling point for themselves as candidates, both have been able to use media to rhetorically outflank their opponents. The other key comparison is in the type of ideological shifts both initiated. Reagan was the king of good stories and the earnest look – he used these tools to set new ideological co-ordinates for understanding government and America’s role in the world. The welfare queen was a thing of myth, but she existed vividly in the public mind because of Ron’s good stories; and those stories served as the basis of how people understood government spending during the Reagan years. Obama is doing some of the same types of things with new defenses of government spending to support job creation, and a re-assessment of how government tax cuts should work. Reagan was wildly effective at starting a rich vs. poor class war, it remains to be seen if Obama can incite anything comparable in the opposite direction.
McCain and the GOP have been rolling hard with their TV spots lately – the last few have been very effective, and if they started with this stuff earlier in the campaign, they had a chance. The last 3 or 4 have been focused on single messages, to the point, and way good
First: “I am Joe the Plumber” – nice everyman type ad, does a good job of subtly otherizing Obama
Second: ‘Storm’ – a good mobile metaphor for experience that gives off a lot of associated meanings, but remains focused clean and simple on the experience issue
Third – “Ladies and Gentleman” – Takes Joe Biden’s words and flips them against Obama – a good move when Biden was selected to bolster Obama’s foreign policy credentials. Also makes a pretty good visual argument about an externally dangerous world.
There’s nothing left to say. McCain tried to co-opt Obama’s frame with the Palin pick, and it ended up sinking him. I think people will look back and say he had a fighting chance as the voice of reason and experience next to the up-and-comer with no real background (think Celeb ad), but as soon as he tried to change tack and go for the mantle of change, he lost momentum on both fronts. It seems like McCain never fully grappled with the fact that Obama’s narrative worked because of who he is, what he looks like, and his story. It wasn’t about reform policies – how many campaign reform bills you backed, times you took on your party – Obama doesn’t look like old politics, McCain does.
Which doesn’t mean he was doomed – or slated to be in a spot as bad as the one he’s in now. The tried and true, steady hand message like the one in McCain’s Storm ad, had a shot at effectiveness – even in 2004, in the middle of the worst part of the War in Iraq, after fucking Abu Ghraib, and people went for the fear and dread over a new face, and McCain had it. But he tried to have it both ways, and Obama out classed him – in all senses of the word.
A little visual analysis, old school. Been reading the BAG again.
Here’s the first piece of compelling visual media the Obama campaign has created in a while:
This spot works because it pushes the focus onto McCain almost exclusively – it doesn’t mention Barack Obama once, and that’s fine. It tries to define McCain at a point when Mac needs an image overhaul – particularly on the issue of financial regulation
Terribly cinematic, it opens with a darkened an obscured clip of Charles Keating in a prison jumpsuit, behind a chain-linked fence, cut to Washington DC and a congressional hearing with John McCain looking younger and uncomfortably guilty, of something. He shifts awkwardly in his seat, holds his hands, then we see him taking an oath – and with the establishing shots previously, there’s a suspicion that it’s not an oath of office.
Those shots lead to our current economic downturn, represented by nervous stockbrokers, folks losing their jobs at Lehman. Another clip of nervous, shifty McCain followed by a Phil Gramm shot (Texas is the center of everything good in politics), some testimonial from economist-man, and then the ’screen’ shatters and ‘Keating economics’ appears.
I like it because it makes a clear association between McCain and criminality, much like the association McCain is trying to make with Obama-Ayers. However, this has the visual goods: McCain on trial, performing the body language of the guilty (in his stiff, bizarre fashion of course), and the associated imagery of someone in prison fatigues. The visual tone is on point: dark, with the lined-filter that suggests we’re watching re-mediated clips of the established public record, a televised event that itself suggests scandal.
McCain’s demeanor in the spot takes him on his core quality of certainty and poise. He looks unconfortable throughout, the clips in the spot show him looking around, making jerky , quick movements with his hands, manifesting him as shifty and uncertain – quite the opposite of the straight shooting maverick he wants us to see.
Folks really need to think about where they place their ads. This one, in the middle of Chinatown only makes a little bit of sense because it happens to be overrun with tourists, but it still seems a bit ham-fisted.
Leaving the Ikea Good-Bad debate aside, we can agree the company aims for a pricey demographic – which, to the degree that it remains a working class immigrant community, Chinatown doesn’t really offer. In fact, with an average income around 20-25k a year, “weaning yourself off takeout Chinese” would take roughly a tenth of a Chinatown resident’s yearly income. That also assumes they have access to housing they can remodel, which probably isn’t true considering rising rents and vast illegal housing set-ups in the first place.
Second – “Chinese delivery” I’m not even sure what to make of this line. But considering the location in the middle of a historic Chinese enclave, it might have been better to dodge the ethnic-food bullet entirely and just kept it at ‘delivery.’ I don’t know why ‘Chinese’ has become the quintessential delivery-greasy-pathetic food of note, but I’m pretty sure the reasons aren’t exactly complementary.
Speaking of fish in barrels:
I forgot these “no sharing used newspapers’ bins existed.
Bins in Grand Central.
Attention newspapers: when your business model relies on preventing sharing between your readers, prepare for the end.
I swear, walking around New York with a camera in your pocket is an enlightening experience. More absurd ads to share with the world:
FIRST: Stupid Liquor Ads!
Originally, I planned to critique the Absolut ad along with the one to the right, but I figure the “In an Absolut World” pitch fails pretty much on its face without any comment, so I’ll just move on. The second ad is from Cabana Cachaca, a Brazilian rum company trying to introduce ‘cachaca’ liquor into the American market. Apparently, they decided the right way to do this was via American Apparel style pornographic imagery – this time with a promise of “uncensored photos, footage, and more’ at their stupid over-Flashed website. They follow through on their promise to be sure, but lord knows why anyone seeking out ‘uncensored’ anything on the internet would go to a liquor company’s website, and not, say, Google Image search.
As for the ‘censored’ photo on the street, pretty much nothing is left to the imagination. The “Brazilian” pun gets some play, and everything does look somewhat… bare in the photo. I still don’t know why nipples are so damned titillating they must be hidden, despite near total exposure otherwise. (regarding Janet Jackson I’m still confused – the nipple didn’t do anything really, it just sort of… was there. That’s all there really is to it.) I think this ad proves that puritanical-censorship approaches to sexuality fail by making the censored bits all the more interesting – potentially for the worse. Instead of a comfortable, sensible relationship to our nipples, we have a hypersexualized ad for alcohol, with all the really bad things that entails.
Second! Not really an ad but infuriating still!
I mean, this is old-hat, but these damned things have been wheatpasted all over Lower Manhattan and they frustrate me to no end. Basically, the most important strategy of the pro-life movement involves instilling doubt in the ability of women to make self-determined choices about their pregnancies, masking their real intention (compulsory pregnancy) behind a humanistic mask of regretful women. This kind of bullshit inspires the use of waiting periods and the forced viewing of near meaningless sonograms.
Sadly, the pro-choice left hasn’t really marshaled a powerful image to counter this type of inanity – the most prominent visual image of a bloody coathanger kinda conveys the message, but I prefer something along the lines of the Manhattan Mini Storage ads, which force you to look in a women’s face when talking about the right to choose. We need to remember what is at stake first and foremost: not a theoretical life, but real people. Women’s empowerment is always the answer.
Obama doesn’t interest me that much as a candidate, but I think he gives off symbolic sparks that are really fascinating. As the first black candidate to make it past the primaries, he receives a lot of attention as a symbol (racism is always about symbolic meaning making, turning skin into something more), but I think there’s more to it.
I finally finished reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and it reminded me of the Obama- JFK analogy, which I think deserves more (critical) attention. What set me off was the prolifictweaking of John McCain’s poor internet skillz, a focus of internet blogs in particular. The JFK comes in to the picture with the now classic 1960 presidential debates, between Kennedy and Nixon.
The conventional wisdom was that the debates turned the tide for Kennedy because of his television appearance – the television audience believed Kennedy won the debates, those listening on radio thought Nixon bested JFK. In the same way, Obama embraces the internet aesthetic in a way John McCain doesn’t – for better or worse.
I think the twistup over McCain’s stupid ads proves the point – the original intent of the ad, got lost in the fray of detailed analysis on blogs (perhaps in some cases reflexive television shows, but I won’t name any), cutting apart the ad into a million pieces then about each one. The point is this: instead of undermining the Obama-fervor, which is a very salient tactic, a very cinematic ad - full of Moses and subtle Hitler analogies – turned into a YouTube ad, where folks got the chance to argue about it, turning it back around into an argument for rallying the troops again. It took the attention off more flip-flops (offshore oil anyone?), and put the attention on the scourge that is McCain.
The McCain campaign seems to forget that bloggers are force multipliers, but they only fall in line when piqued by a campaign running ads that suit the YouTubeaesthetic – standing up to substantive critique via the internetz, that doesn’t rely on mere scare tactics, but with particular attention to campaign environment that will talk not just about the ads (right, wrong, etc.), but about the attitudes and dispositions of the makers of that ad, talking about them as strategy in the first place. That’s the real insight: in a world of the desktop pundit, some of the most mobilized citizens will take up the issue of how and why campaigns run, not just debate the facts of talking points.
The one tripping point for the Obamaniacs: in the JFK-Nixon debates, the TV audience was large enough to swing the election to JFK. In this election I’m not convinced the same is true for the Obama camp. I think the McCain ads will reach enough people in the right way to require a more hard-hitting old-media strategy from the Obama camp to make the magic happen in November
The above ad reads “MYNYPD is a 75% crime reduction in 15 years. That’s a job resume we can all be proud of.” Saw this on the subway heading out to Brooklyn last night. The NYPD attempt at new media relevance is sort of laughable, as if sticking a “MY-” in front of the name would suddenly convince people that the NYPD isn’t a vast, corrupt bureaucracy that regards its new recruits as something between shit and dirt. The ads plastered an entire side of the train – other images lauded new-recruit pay raises (to ’still not very good’ pay); the others were un-memorable “build your resume!” type appeals.
The crime reduction figure is misleading, and arrogant. Of course they don’t tell you about the increase in the prison population occurring in the same period, and the assertion that crime reduction resulted from NYPD policy alone seems misleading as well.
In Prospect Park
I passed this last night walking near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and it could be the least appealing ad I’ve ever seen.
First, the image: the girl looks like she’s been force-fed barbecue for days, and is losing her will to live. Looking into her oversized face on the street was somewhere between shocking and terrifying, and does nothing to encourage anyone to consider buying ‘BBQ’ in the ‘Prospect Park you didn’t know.’
Second, the text: “Don’t just make BBQ… Buy BBQ‘ Good thing this ad is here for those hungry Park Slopers looking for their next meaty treat. Now, I thought ads like this were supposed to convince you buying shit was a good idea – this one seems to assume you already want to buy yer BBQ, but just can’t quite figure out how to. “I just love spending money, but if only I knew where to do it…”
I have no idea how anyone could have even thought this was a good idea even conceptually, but somehow it made it onto the streets of Brooklyn as a finished product.
Shoutout to Copyranter for fostering my appreciation for shitty New York advertising.
