Carl Mumpower’s New Campaign Ad

It finally happened. Asheville City Councilman Carl Mumpower has broken the e-mail barrier and started running a TV ad. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first such spot in the NC-11 Republican primary. Thanks are due to Michael Muller, Mumpower’s campaign coordinator, for providing us with a “suitable for blogging” copy.

Personally, I think it’s a good and effective ad. The first campaign ad is supposed to be an “introduce yourself to your potential constituents” affair, and this works nicely. That nice, calming grayish-green Olan Mills background can bring to mind all sorts of positive connotations, such as spring, fertility, wealth and vigor if you take any stock at all in the study of color psychology. The background music works well too. Yes, there’s background music, but it’s used in such a subtle manner that it’s almost nonexistent, like what you’d not even notice in a dentist’s or psychologist’s office. Mumpower gets right in there and outlines his mission, spoken clearly and in a measured yet direct tone. All in all, a good ad. It didn’t look like he spent too much money on it, but it doesn’t look like it was produced by someone with a Wal-Mart PC and a camera phone either.

However, if it were me directing the commercial, there are three things that immediately jumped out at me regarding this ad that I would change:

1. At the end of the ad I would replace the quotated “Independent” with italics. Grammatically, quotation marks are often used incorrectly for emphasis, and the message could be construed as unintentional humor. Like when you see a sign outside of a market advertising “Fresh” Fish, the first thing many people think is “Yeah, right.” People might think the same thing when they see ‘Our “Independent” Republican’.
2. What’s with the glasses? It’s as if the only reason Mumpower put them on was to take them off! For some reason this reminded me of that ridiculous scene from Airplane! where Robert Stack’s character removed his sunglasses to reveal… another pair of sunglasses underneath! The glasses thing may convey some sort of air of authority and knowledge, possibly even superiority, but quite frankly it’s silly and unnecessary. I say lose ‘em.
3. Those are minor complaints compared to the most glaring omission in this ad – compliance with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, particularly the “stand by your ad” provision that legally requires ads paid for by political candidates at the Federal level to include “I’m _______, and I approve this message.” We’ve kinda grown to like Mumpower around here over the last several months; we’d hate for him to get into trouble with the FEC this early into his campaign.

So there you have it. The first ad of the campaign season. We’ll be trying to stay on top of this as everything starts to kick into high gear after the May primary, and as we did in 2006 we’ll try to post as many of these campaign ads as we can for analysis and commentary. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll throw in a goodly bit of snark.