by Cindy Hennessey
Erin in Media told me about a story she heard on NPR this morning. The Museum of the Moving Image has a website called "The Living Room Candidate" that's an archive of political ads from 1952 to 2008. Museum curator David Schwartz told NPR, “Early political ads were innocent, sweet and straightforward — with the candidates just talking to the camera.” Ads got a little more sophisticated in 1960, he said, when John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon. The ads for JFK were snappier and more visual, while the Nixon ads were all about experience and knowing what to do during tough times. Watch the ads and you’ll see what he means.
I have to admit, I was particularly intrigued by the Kennedy/Nixon ads because of the AMC show, Mad Men. For the uninitiated, Mad Men, which is set in the early 1960s, is about a prestigious Madison Avenue advertising firm, Sterling Cooper. Last season, Sterling Cooper worked on the Nixon campaign.
Looking at all these ads is a fascinating history lesson in advertising. You can even view what the website calls “the most famous of all campaign commercials” – the “Daisy Girl” ad, created by Doyle Dane Berbach for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Funny enough, the ad never mentioned Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater. Instead, it showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy before the camera cut to a nuclear explosion and the ensuing mushroom cloud. The ad ran only once.
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