Last Minute Attack Ads
Last minute attack ad? How to respond quickly and effectively
Effectively managing and responding to a crisis is an essential part of any organization or campaign. Crises never seem to come at an opportune time and are almost always unexpected. The question is, how prepared are you to respond and enact some level of damage control?
Let’s try a scenario. You’re in a campaign for political office and the election is just days away. Out of the blue, your opponent sends out a mailer unfairly disparaging you and your campaign while misrepresenting your message. How would you respond? You have a couple options. You can do nothing and hope the voters see through it, but that’s not too promising. There’s a reason campaigns still spend valuable resources on negative advertising. It works. The other option is to fight back and defend yourself.
With time being an issue as it is close to an election, the options available to you are limited. Blasting your contact list with an email update, doing a few radio interviews, and trying to get an article in the newspaper are a few options, but there likely isn’t time to put together a mailer. One of the quickest and most cost-effective ways of getting your side of the story out would be automated calls. With automated calls, you can direct your message to a similar audience and let them know the truth. Such a project could be conducted within a day if need be, which isn’t an option available for many other forms of communication.
Another tool available would be to direct your supporters to contact the offices of the organization or campaign responsible for the attack with a patch-through call. This serves two purposes. One, it allows your supporters to voice their displeasure over the attack. Two, if it’s directed towards a campaign close to election time, it could force them to use some of their resources towards responding to inbound calls as opposed to their GOTV effort.
In the end, there’s no excuse for not having the resources at the end of a campaign for a last-minute response. Every campaign should set aside a targeted amount of money for the last week of the campaign. This fund should either be used for responses to last-minute attacks, and if they never occur, you can always use those resources for GOTV efforts or positive advertising on your part.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me, Jeff Kubler, at 888-761-3003 or at jeff@actionsolutions.net.
