The last thing Mitt Romney wants right now is more advice. But here is one simple thing that would make a difference.
Peggy Noonan was right about Romney’s ads when she said they are “mostly boring.”
They are.
So why not do this: Instead of creating yet another TV ad that screams politics, make a few ads that look and feel different.
One idea would be to create ads using the regular folks who starred in those Republican convention testimonials.
In case you’ve forgotten, they included
…Grant Bennett, a former assistant to Romney who described how Romney, as a Mormon pastor in the late 1970s, devoted 15 to 20 hours a week visiting sick members of his congregation, delivering meals or shoveling snow for the elderly.
There was Ted and Pat Oparowski, an elderly couple who recalled how Romney befriended their 14-year-old son David in the seven months before he died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1979, when Romney was a pastor at their church.
And there was Pam Finlayson, who described how Romney sat with her in the hospital when she feared her premature daughter was on the brink of death.
“His eyes filled with tears, and he reached down tenderly and stroked her tiny back,” Finlayson recalled, trying to hold back her own tears as she told her story to a hushed crowd at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
Maybe it’s just me, but my guess is that some well-produced ads featuring these testimonials would have a tremendous impact.
Romney has a lot of money, but what good does it do to spend that money running bad ads that don’t inspire or move the numbers?
Yes, the quantity of ads matters — but so does the quality. Running ten bad ads isn’t better than running five good ads. (As comedian Ron White says, “It isn’t that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”)
The principle works with paid media, as well.