What are treasurer’s TV ads selling?
Wooden’s spots blur line between public service, campaigning
Sometimes the line gets blurred between campaigning for a public office and serving in it.
In 2018, Shawn Wooden appeared in a 30-second TV ad titled “Pinching Pennies” with his two sons as part of his successful campaign for state treasurer. It played like a miniature family sitcom about an affectionate father trying to instill frugality in his adolescent kids, who sometimes don’t get the message.
“There’s nothing in there,” his younger son says of a flattened tube of toothpaste. Wooden replies, “There’s still some left!” and squeezes the tube hard.
Wooden also turns off a light switch his sons left on, shuts off a running faucet, and lowers a thermostat, all the while shaking his head in theatrical exasperation. “My boys will tell you, I’m kind of a penny pincher,” Wooden says to the camera. “I’ll make smart investments to maximize returns ...”Wooden, a Democrat, won the election and he took office in January 2019 — but here’s where the blurry part comes in.
He has carried on as treasurer with the same father-and-sons advertising scenario he used as a candidate — as if the original family sitcom was renewed — in new TV ads, beginning in June 2019 and aired continually through this month, to promote the Connecticut Higher Education Trust (CHET), the treasurer’s office’s tax-advantaged college savings plan.
Image-making with ads
But the ads sell more than CHET. They also promote the image of Wooden as a nice guy and a jovial, attentive father — an invaluable benefit to a politician who has potential reelection plans or maybe a run for higher office in his future.
And, unlike the father-andsons ad that his campaign committee paid for in 2018, he’s paid nothing to produce or buy time to air them for two years on TV. That’s taken care of by the financial firm that runs CHET under a contract with the treasurer’s office. (In 2019 that firm was TIAA-CREF, which Wooden now has replaced with Fidelity Investments.)
Wooden’s office says that the ads are all about promoting CHET and the treasurer’s programs, not him — and that marketing decisions are made by the CHET management firm, Fidelity, although Wooden controls whether he is in the ads or not.
His office communications manager, Michelle Woods Matthews, said in an email that TIAA-CREF asked Wooden “to participate personally in marketing the CHET program” because it “expressly wanted to capitalize on the fact that for the first time
... they had a Treasurer who was a father with CHET accounts for his kids. The Treasurer agreed.”
Wooden isn’t the only state office-holder who gains political visibility in the course of his job as a public official. But there’s a lot of advertising done on behalf of the Office of the Treasurer’s programs, and those ads give Wooden, in particular, an enviable amount of public face time — especially for an office that handles relatively dry financial matters and isn’t generally in the forefront of the news.
Lately his photo portrait and name/title, “Honorable Shawn T. Wooden, Treasurer of the State of Connecticut,” have been appearing at the top of ads on the internet that invite people to “INVEST
IN CONNECTICUT” and refer them to BuyCTBonds.com. The treasurer’s office says the ads are paid for by Bank of America, the senior underwriter for the general obligation bond sale.
Political campaign to ad campaign
In one of the CHET TV ads that began running in 2019, Wooden looks up from his laptop and says: “Guys! You know the rules. No yelling in the house. It’s only a video game!” In another room the two boys wear virtual reality goggle-masks and feverishly manipulate the game controls as one yells, “No! No! No!” But then Wooden starts yelling, “Yes,! Yes! Yes!” The youths call to him: “Hey, you know the rules, Dad! No yelling in the house!” He responds: “It’s OK, boys. It’s our CHET college savings plan. Look at it grow! Wooo!”
In a second CHET ad, Wooden keeps seeing the two boys around the house, and his eyes flash to visions of them in graduation caps and gowns. “As your kids get older, you start to see things a little differently,” he says. “College, which once seemed down the road, suddenly seems right around the corner. But with a CHET 529 savings account, you’ll be ready.”
Although the folksy family setup is the same as the in the 2018 campaign ad, one difference is the children in the CHET ads, who call him “Dad,” appear to be different from those in the 2018 ad.
Several sources with direct knowledge of the advertising arrangements who spoke on condition of anonymity — including former members of Wooden’s executive staff — said the kids in the CHET ads aren’t his real sons, but are hired actors.
Wooden and his aides wouldn’t confirm or deny that the children in the CHET ads are actors. “The Treasurer is not going to answer questions related to the identity of his kids or family decisions” Woods Matthews said.
The treasurer declined a request during the past week that he speak with The Courant about this.
Wooden wouldn’t even confirm that the “Pinching Pennies” ad had featured his real sons, even though he acknowledged it in 2018, when he posted the ad on his campaign’s Facebook page and thanked people for posting compliments. “The boys are growing up so fast! Saw the ad on TV tonight,” one commenter said. He replied: “Yes, they are definitely growing up!”
An issue of trust
There’s no law against having actors pose as a politician’s sons in a TV ad, but a national political consultant and commentator, Mike Murphy, said in a phone interview he’d never heard of anyone doing it in his decades working for Republican candidates as far back as George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988.
Murphy said it’s a bad idea to use actors, because “when you use fake kids, the whole topic becomes fake kids.”
Rather than have actors play a politician’s family members in an ad, you can “work around it” by doing something like having the politician “walk around a Little League game, talking about his family.” Otherwise, he said, you may become known as known as “the fake kids guy” and “a politician nobody can trust.”
As noted above, Wooden has company in varnishing his public image through his visibility as an office-holder. A number of his predecessors and peers in the second echelon of statewide offices below the governor have also done it.
For example:
The previous state treasurer of 20 years’ service, Denise Nappier, appeared in CHET television ads, albeit without the little family stories we’ve been seeing from Wooden.
Also, the high-powered press operation of current AG William Tong had put out 79 releases this year as of Tuesday, compared to Wooden’s 41. (As to the office of Gov. Ned Lamont, any governor’s office gushes news releases and enjoys unlimited opportunities for TV face time. Lamont’s 2021 press release total was 244 as of Tuesday.)
Back in 1998, then-Republican Gov. John G. Rowland and his wife, Patricia Rowland, appeared in a nearly $1 million state tourism advertising campaign on television, leading Democrats who controlled the legislature to eventually pass a law limiting how close to an election an incumbent official could appear in such ads.
Cost of the ads
Asked how much has been spent on the CHET ads, Woods Matthews said the totals for 2019, 2020, and so far in 2021, respectively, have been $403,000 (which includes ad production costs), $183,211, and $67,128.
“CHET television ad production and broadcast spend[ing] since Treasurer Wooden has been in office is consistent with historic CHET ad costs,” Woods Matthews said. She said the figures for 2016, 2017 and 2018, when Nappier was treasurer were, respectively: $402,821 (including ad production costs), $57,388, and $52,831.
The CHET program manager at the time, TIAA-CREF, hired the Glastonbury advertising firm of Cronin to make the CHET ads, and paid for them as part of its marketing of the college savings program, Woods Matthews said. “No part of the CHET program is funded from taxpayer dollars.”
Woods Matthews also said, “No part of the CHET program is funded by CHET account holders,” because both TIAACREF and Fidelity are private firms with “marketing budgets to support their investment products.”
Woods Matthews, who is paid $85,000, isn’t Wooden’s only public spokesperson. Earlier this month he also hired a $100,000a-year press secretary, Gage Frank, who had been communications director for New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, after serving as Elicker’s campaign manager in 2019.
Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant’s investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@ courant.com, 860-241-6524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, P.O. Box 569, Hartford, CT 06141-0569 and find him on Twitter @jonlender.