Newt Gingrich: A Gasbag Of Citgoesque Proportions

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Former House Speaker and current GOP presidential neverbe Newt Gingrich (R-Callista) has always been a popcorn machine of bad ideas, but his latest fraud upon the electorate really sets new standards of incredulity.

From MSNBC’s First Read:

The Gingrich campaign today released a new advertisement outlining Newt’s “$2.50 plan” to lower gas prices.

“Since Barack Obama’s inauguration, gas prices have doubled,” the narrator says in it.

As an image of a gas pump appears with a price ticker hitting $4, the narrator adds, “They didn’t go down when Obama bowed to Saudi oil princes. But they can go down under the Newt Gingrich two-fifty-per-gallon plan.”

The entirely delusional ad:

 

Seriously – $2.50 gas will happen around the same time Snooki reads Plato in the original Greek.

(GTL = Greek Too Literal?)

More from First Read:

According to the ad, Gingrich’s plan lowers gas prices by “increasing domestic production, opening up off-shore drilling, building the Keystone Pipeline, cutting red-tape regulation.”

At the end, an image appears of a gas pump nozzle pushed up against a man’s back like a weapon. “The Gingrich two-fifty plan stops the great gas hold up and puts money back in your pocket,” the narrator says.

Not to get technical about it, but Gingrich is trying to pick your pocket.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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Super PAC Mentality

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Politico’s Morning Score on Friday tallied up the Super Tuesday spending spree of the Grand Old PACs in the Republican presidential primary:

SUPER TUESDAY AIR WAR – TV, RADIO SPENDING NOW TOPS $6 MILLION: “Mitt Romney’s campaign and super PAC account for a big majority of the spending. The Romney campaign has shelled out $1,486,960, while Restore Our Future has put in $2,369,244. That totals nearly $3.9 million – massively more than any other single campaign or group has spent in the state,” Alex Burns reports, based on a GOP media-buying source. “The pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future has put in $736,044. Rick Santorum’s campaign has spent just $386,669, while his super PAC has put in $515,937. That means the pro-Romney forces have outspent the pro-Gingrich and pro-Santorum forces, combined, by more than two to one.

But wait – there’s more!

There are other, non-campaign groups playing a role in the state. The Susan B. Anthony List is airing six figures’ worth of ads boosting Santorum. The Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action is running anti-Romney ads in Columbus. And AFSCME has shelled out $327,685 to ding up Romney – nearly as much as the Santorum campaign.” http://politi.co/wLmoHN

So the hardworking staff went looking for the Grand Othah Playahs. And here’s what we found.

The Susan B. Anthony List is currently running this $150,000 radio campaign:

 

Priorities USA Action is running this TV spot with a paltry $60,000 buy in the Columbus market:


And AFSCME is running this ad, to the tune of $327,000:

 

To paraphrase:

That’s the political world. Why would we want to live in it?

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Let The $4 Billion Rumpus Begin! (Self-Serv Index™ Edition)

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

The hardworking staff has always had a soft spot for the quadrennial Shotgun Index, reflecting which presidential candidate voters would rather drive cross-country with. (Never making it into the HOV Lane: Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry.)

But the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls presents a real dilemma in that regard. Santorum would never taking a break from driving; Gingrich would stop every few miles; Paul would keep picking up hitchhikers; and Romney, well, you know . . .

But there might be an alternative via this TV spot from the Super PAC Winning Our Future:

 

And there you have it at the :30  mark:

Newt is the only one who understands what we’re going through today. We’re looking at five or six dollar gas. Romney’s not the type to pump his own gas.

That’s it – the Self-Serv Index™: Who do you see pumping his own gas when there are no cameras around?

Discuss among yourselves.

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Around The World In 80 Product “Plate”ments

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Television shows are increasingly content with branded content, as the New York Times reports:

This Time the Co-Brand Makes It Into the Title

AS marketers increasingly embrace branded entertainment — embedding products in the plots of television shows and movies, making it difficult to ignore them — some denizens of Madison Avenue can recall when the practice was embodied by TV series like “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars,” “The Bell Telephone Hour” and “Lux Video Theatre.”

Now, a branded entertainment deal for a reality culinary competition series on the Bravo cable channel will give the presenting sponsor billing as a co-producer and add its name to the title — the official title, anyway.

The series, scheduled to begin in May, is formally known as “Around the World in 80 Plates Presented by Chase Sapphire Preferred,” which is a credit card from the Chase Card Services unit of JPMorgan Chase. Although the show will almost always be referred to as “Around the World in 80 Plates,” the acknowledgement in the title is another sign of the growing interest in branded entertainment, also called branded content.

But wait – there’s more!

Coincidentally, another deal in branded entertainment, also for a reality culinary competition series, is to be announced on Wednesday.

That deal is centered on plans to expand to markets around the world a Canadian show, “Recipe to Riches,” in which a national supermarket chain sells products based on the recipes from home cooks that win the competitions held each week.

It’s all about “opportunities for consumer engagement,” according to one marketing exec. But there are limits, according to Kevin McAuliffe, senior vice president for cable branded entertainment at Bravo Media:

“There’s always going to be guard rails,” Mr. McAuliffe said, to prevent crossing the line from entertainment to peddling, because “driving people nuts” is “not what we strive for here.”

Of course, striving and achieving are two different things.

 

Originally posted on the Newer! Improveder! Sneak ADtack!

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Scott Brown Joins Obama Worldwide Apology Tour

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R-Totally, Like, YouTubular) has inadvertently attached himself to the GOP-manufactured Bow to Foreign Dictators debate.

Via techPresident:

Spotted: Scott Brown Ads on YouTube

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has begun advertising his campaign online beyond Massachusetts using the Google ad network, including on YouTube.

Describing himself as “an independent voice”, he urges viewers of the ad to “donate today.” According to new figures released by the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, the number of independent voters in the state continues to grow as membership in the two main parties are shrinking. The latest figures show that the number of voters not enrolled in any party has topped 52 percent, up from 2004, when slightly less than half of all Massachusetts voters were independent. The number of registered Democrats has dropped more than a full percentage point from more than 37 percent of all voters in 2004, while the proportion of Republicans has dropped from 13 percent to 11 percent.

One particular ad appeared beside a YouTube video in which a young woman says she is following President Barack Obama’s lead in apologizing for recent Koran burnings by U.S. troops.

Said video, titled “My Apology to President Karzai on Behalf of Americans.”

 

The hardworking staff is not sure Brown shares the same sentiments, but Internet ads mean often having to say you’re sorry.

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MassGOP Video HiJacks WBZ’s Williams

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

The Massachusetts Republican Party has released a web video targeting presumptive Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren:

As Elizabeth Warren prepares to jet off to Hollywood tomorrow for a fundraiser with the rich and famous, the Massachusetts Republican Party today released a new web video called “The Elitist” that calls into question her supposed commitment to class struggle.

The video highlights Warren’s elitist hypocrisy as she touts herself as the “intellectual founder” of the radical Occupy protests while seeking big campaign contributions from her rich and famous 1 percenter friends in Hollywood.

Said video, which is a cross between Oscarthrob “The Artist” and an old-fashioned newsreel:

 

The video features not only Warren, but WBZ newscaster Jack Williams as well (:11-:18) along with his colleague Diana Perez (:19-:25).

In an email, Williams told the hardworking staff :

I doubt anything can be done about it . . . It doesn’t make me very happy . . . but I did say it.

We also contacted WBZ news director John Verrilli and asked him what he thought, and whether it made a difference that the MassGOP video was web-only, versus a paid TV spot.

At post time, Verrilli had yet to respond. But we’ll keep you posted.

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Let The $4 Billion Rumpus Begin! (Paul Mauls Romney Edition)

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Lately GOP presidential sort-of wannabe Ron Paul (R-It’s the Delegates, Stupid) has been depicted as Mitt Romney’s wing(nut)man, consistently attacking Ron Santorum and Newt Gingrich but not Romney.

New narrative, thanks to this TV spot Paul is running in Washington state (via Politico’s Morning Score):

Granted, labeling Romney a flip-flopper while calling Gingrich a serial hypocrite and Santorum a counterfeit conservative is kid-glove stuff.

But it’s a start, right?

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Facebook, Twitter Dump Display Ads For Sponsored Posts

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

The Problem: Virtually no one on (especially) Facebook and (also) Twitter wants to engage in commercial activity while engaging with their social media circles.

The Solution: Make the ads not ads, but social media content.

Via Poynter:

As Facebook and Twitter roll out the latest advances to their business models, they’re clearly turning away from the Internet staple of display advertising.

Facebook is pushing marketers to create Facebook native-content — a post on their brand page — and pay to promote that post to a wider audience. Today, for the first time, Facebook will begin placing those sponsored stories in the user’s main News Feed.

But wait – there’s more!

“This [the News Feed] is the place where marketing on Facebook is going to feel like the rest of Facebook,” Mike Hoefflinger, director of global business marketing, said on stage at the Facebook Marketing Conference today in New York.

“We are evolving from ads to stories,” Hoefflinger said. “Ads are good, but stories it turns out are better.”

Likewise, Twitter’s marketing strategy involves marketers paying to place Twitter-native content — a tweet, a hashtag — in front of a larger audience.

The Result: Mixing social media content with marketing content makes them indistinguishable from one another.

In other words, the apex of stealth marketing.

Welcome to the Brave Noose World of advertising.

Originally posted on the Newer! Improveder! Sneak ADtack!

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MoDo Gives Boston Herald A Shoutout

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

It’s not often our feisty local tabloid gets to rub elbows with the Gray Lady,  but New York Times Op-It Girl Maureen Dowd made that match in today’s column, which says the GOP (Gone Old Party) has essentially packed it in and started prepping for a post-Obama world.

Not even because Obama is so strong; simply because their field is so ridiculously weak and wacky.

John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy.

“It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble.

But the Herald’s looking very smart, no?

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Super PACcadillos (Mitt Romney Edition)

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Campaign Outsider

Blowback on the smashmouth Romney GOP presidential primary campaign.

1) Via ABC’s The Note:

WATCHDOG GROUP ACCUSES PRO-ROMNEY SUPER PAC OF BREAKING THE LAW. ABC’s Matt Negrin notes that a group that fights for campaign finance disclosures formally filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, claiming that the “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney is illegally showing an ad from the candidate’s 2008 run for president. Last week, the PAC, Restore Our Future, began rerunning an ad from 2008 about Romney’s effort to help find a missing 14-year-old girl in New York City. The only difference between the two ads is that in the old one, Romney says at the end, “I’m Mitt Romney, and I approved this message.” In the new one, a woman says, “Restore Our Future is responsible for the content of this message.” The overlap is an example of the muddied rules that are supposed to govern super PACs, nominally independent groups that can spend and raise unlimited amounts of money for candidates. The FEC says that super PACs are forbidden from “coordinating” with campaigns over details on how to spend money for ads, but the regulation is difficult both to enforce and explain. http://abcn.ws/Apm7Q2

(See also Campaign Outsider’s post here.)

2) Via Politico Playbook:

NEWT’S PREEMPTIVE DOCTRINE: “Gingrich Campaign Advisors Issue ‘Call to Conscience’ in Letter to Newspaper Editors in Super Tuesday States: Say Romney False Attack Ads Could Corrupt Politics for a Generation, Cite Romney’s ‘near Pavlovian reflex of lapsing into falsehoods in order to rearrange reality to his liking’ … Two senior advisers to NEWT 2012 [retired U.S. Reps. Robert Walker and J.C. Watts, on ‘NEWT 2012’ stationery] sent a letter [yesterday] to [publishers and editorial-page editors] of several newspapers in five of the upcoming primary and caucus states [Washington, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Ohio] calling on newspaper publishers and editors to critically evaluate the impact that Governor Romney’s campaign is having on the integrity of America’s political system. … ‘The purpose of this letter is to ask you to look at the facts we include, … and if you agree about the threat they pose to the integrity of the electoral process we ask that you use the mighty voice of America’s newspapers to warn voters about Governor Romney’s attempt to use money and mendacity to secure the Republican nomination.'” See the letter. http://bit.ly/wlW6vh

File under: Rubbing Their Face with a Brick.

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