The NDP’s DIY attack ad
There is almost literally nothing to the New Democrats’ celebrated “Enough” ad, which debuted on YouTube last week. This, of course, is its genius. The ad is little more than a parade of Conservative Party of Canada ill-doers — Brazeau, Carson, Sona, Duffy — culminating in a brief video of a manacled Dean Del Mastro shuffling from the courtroom to the meat wagon. “Stephen Harper’s ethics spokesperson, sent to jail,” a voiceover intones. “Have you had enough? It’s time for change in Ottawa.”
Horse-race politics reporters seized, as they always do, on the tone of Enough. It is technically a negative ad from a party that, when its chances of attaining power were more remote, always tut-tutted and tsked at such stuff. This, goes the narrative, is a preview of the new, serious NDP — still preaching a Laytonian gospel of optimism and civility, while becoming more willing to wriggle through the mud and barbed wire of mass electoral politics.
But the makers of Enough wisely chose not to ladle too much creative goo over their accuse-a-Tory propaganda. It is mostly a recitation of names: the time-honoured techniques of showing opposing politicians with film grain, desaturated colour and ominous music applied, but with a light touch.
The Conservative style of political ad making is to go for the low blow and the belly laugh. Michael Ignatieff gets wacky Russian silent film background music. Justin Trudeau is covered in sparkles. The NDP’s approach is terse, disapproving, gently moralizing. Dean Del Mastro is already a creature from a nightmare. He doesn’t need an extra layer of production values.
The Hill Times parliamentary newspaper, to its credit, went beyond the purely tonal analysis in a Monday discussion of Enough. A new feature of this New Democratic ad, it turns out, is that it was made by New Democrats. The party is in-sourcing its advertising rather than depending on a familiar gang of creative and technical suppliers, as big political parties traditionally have. Even as freelance consultants appear to proliferate and gain more control of our electoral campaigning process, the Hill Times suggests by implication that the writing may be on the wall for them.
Economists reading the Hill Times’ piece will immediately catch the scent of a “theory of the firm” problem. Businessmen resist the socialist idea that society should operate as one big firm, but they create little pockets of socialism we call companies or partnerships. There is a whole field of economics that looks at firm “boundaries,” or problems of insourcing versus outsourcing. When should businesses — and when it comes to ads, a political party is a business — outsource a function? When, empirically, do they actually choose to do it?
It’s clear that technology has changed the environment for political ads. One person can now cook up a pretty effective ad on his laptop, cutting up news clippings and footage according to the legal “fair-use” doctrine. The Enough ad might easily have been made entirely by one person. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, given the right software and a modicum of training, is certainly clever enough to make a decent 30-second political advertisement.
That doesn’t mean outsourcing would not still be right. Mulcair can probably cook a hamburger, but I’m sure nine of every 10 burgers he eats are made by someone else. Insourcing decisions depend, not on absolute costs, but on the relative costs to the suppliers of services and the buyers of them. There must be reasons, at least hypothetical ones, that it is becoming relatively more efficient for the NDP not to buy advertising-related services from somebody else.
Certainly the whole pseudo-profession of “media buying” seems to be on the way out. The media are converging, such that a newspaper story like the one you’re reading can contain embedded video in the web version. Old media companies are concentrating, huddling together for survival. And when it comes to Internet advertising, algorithms can handle the targeting better than any human. (Why hire a middleman when there’s Google?) At the same time, parties are investing more in data crunching, which means they have large costs sunk into an apparatus that can help them quantify the effectiveness of ads and approaches without help.
One of the facts the “theory of the firm” crashed into pretty quickly was the existence of “complex creative goods” like symphonies or motion pictures, which are often made by collective enterprises — studios, repertory companies and the like. Propaganda may not be art, but manufacturing propaganda has some of the salient qualities of running an orchestra or a theatre company. And don’t church choirs make music just as nice as, or nicer than, professional outfits?
Outsourcing a function is most attractive when the inputs from various individuals combine in a neat, linear way. By contrast, and it is not as though we needed math to tell us this, people often choose to work together in firms, companies or bands when the finished whole is in some way more than the sum of the parts. Political ads in the heat of a campaign also have what economist Richard Caves calls a “time-flies” property. If you need a commercial prepared fast, it is easier to shout across the office at your own Final Cut guy than to coordinate with outsiders who may need to be bargained with, and taught the nuances of your political message.
Propaganda may not be art, but manufacturing propaganda has some of the salient qualities of running an orchestra or a theatre company