Tories ahead in tepid pool of election ads

By Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service

U.S. Free trade 1988 Liberal Ad-" erasing" the Canada- U.S. border. (Rod MacIvor/The Citizen)

No one has landed a knockout punch in the advertising or online arenas at this mid-point of the election campaign, experts say, but some serious contenders have emerged.

Thanks to major pre-election strategizing, deep pockets, and a charm offensive clad in a blue sweater vest, the Conservatives are looking like the party to beat in the traditional advertising ring, says Lindsay Meredith, a professor of marketing strategy at Simon Fraser University.     

"Harper and the boys clearly had this ambush planned, and they were ready to hit the ground," he says.     

The Liberals have been "wandering in the wasteland" and have to step it up very soon if they want to make an impression on voters, he says, but the sharpest advertising barbs from all the parties will come in the campaign's final rounds.     

The Conservatives released a flurry of ads at the beginning of the race, but there has been little new advertising from the party in the last week.

The Liberals, on the other hand, got off to a slow start but have since released half a dozen spots, while the NDP released just one English-language ad in the first two weeks of the campaign but has now turned up the heat.     

The fireside spots the Conservatives started airing before the campaign launched have been effective at warming up Harper's "Tin Man" image, and at appealing to middle-class families and female voters, Meredith says.

The attack ads lobbed at Stephane Dion are too vague to have much impact, he adds, but he believes all the parties have learned from gaffes in the past and reined in their negative messages.     

"You're not getting any more stupid ads making fun of Chretien's speech impediment or facial paralysis," he says, referring to an infamous 1993 Conservative ad. "That's how you shoot your own foot off."     

Political ads that fundamentally change the race in any lasting way are rare, says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Reid Public Affairs.

In 20-odd years as a pollster, he remembers only two - the 1993 ad that caused a backlash for the Tories, and a 1988 free-trade ad from the Liberals that showed a hand erasing the Canadian border - that really galvanized Canadian voters.     

"Very little of the advertising has had any big, momentous impact," he says.     

In the online arena, clever Facebook trinkets and a media-sharing site dubbed the Orange Room have made the NDP the clear winner, says Tamara Small, a professor of political science at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, who studies the online presence of Canadian parties. 
  
"There's no comparison to any of the things going on with the other Canadian sites," she says of the Orange Room, which awards points to members for uploading pictures or videos of campaign events. "It's one of the most innovative uses of technology I've ever seen."

Perhaps the most interesting element of the online campaign has been the Internet's role as the closet from which candidates' skeletons are spilling, she says.

Furious statements pour out of the parties' war rooms on a daily basis, denouncing opposition candidates whose past deeds or opinions have been dragged out of an online cache.     

Small points out these indiscretions are usually years old.     

"There is a sense that candidates with blogs or candidates with Facebook sites or YouTube videos are being watched by the Internet," she says.
   
But while the parties jostle to sell themselves and discredit their opponents through the final two weeks of the race, Meredith senses voters simply aren't hungry for another helping of politics - no matter how it's packaged.     

"I think there's a certain amount of fatigue in Canadian politics," adds Bricker.

"We've been though three elections in four years, first of all, and secondly, it's not like we have our own Barack Obama who's inspiring all sorts of people to get involved in politics. This is a fairly workaday type of election campaign. There isn't a lot of inspiration anywhere."