TORONTO – OPINION – Well, it looks like Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was serious when he promised to stay “positive.”
The Liberal Party’s recent YouTube ad, starring Justin, amazingly doesn’t even mention the Senate scandal swirling around Ottawa.
To a lot of people that might seem counter-intuitive, but if you’re ahead in the polls it actually might be a wise strategy to stay on the moral high road. (So long as you can count on your non-party allies or on the NDP to throw some dirt.)
Yet I have some problems with this ad that have more to do with its style and content than with its tone.
First off, the ad starts with Trudeau telling me the Conservatives are saying he doesn’t have the right priorities.
That doesn’t make sense to me.
I mean, why repeat a Conservative attack?
Imagine a car company airing a TV ad that began: “Our competitors say our car is unsafe, but let us tell you…”
It’s just a bad move.
What if I had never even heard that Tory claim, now suddenly the idea that Trudeau doesn’t have the right priorities is stuck in my mind, thanks to a Liberal ad.
Next, Trudeau utters a series of negative statements: He won’t be indifferent to retired people, he won’t shrug at unemployment, he won’t shrug of lower middle class wages.
This is a mistake because, simply put, it’s bad communication strategy to state ideas in the negative. When you say, “I’m not a crook” the primitive subconscious mind, which doesn’t do well with negatives, only hears, “I’m a crook.”
So in a sense Trudeau is unwittingly saying, “I’m indifferent to retired people”.
Better for him to state his positions in a positive way, i.e. “I care about retired people, I care about the unemployed and the poor, etc.”
But the worst thing about the ad is that its only strong visual, a graph, actually shows the viewer that both economic growth and middle class wages are going up!
Is that really the message Trudeau wants to promote, that the Tories are doing a great job with the economy?
OK, I realize, of course, that his point is that middle class wages are lagging behind, but his graph doesn’t really reinforce the bleakness he is trying to project.
He needs a graph, in other words, with an arrow going down.
I guess the lesson from all this is that just because a political ad doesn’t attack people, doesn’t necessarily mean its effective.
Gerry Nicholls
