Summary. Mitt Romney has the looks, financial backing, and connections that should result in a first-class winning campaign. Surprisingly, some of the videos being produced for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign seemed to have been intentionally degraded in quality by the company they hired to produce them. That problem seems to have been resolved, yet the poor quality videos remain on the Romney campaign website. This article evaluates and compares some of the Romney/Ryan campaign videos, and addresses the Democrats’ assertion that advertising can’t help Romney win the election.
Example #1. The America’s Comeback Team campaign video is one of the best videos visually that the campaign has produced. There are some good examples of time-lapse video (see the sunset clip at 11 seconds). The soundtrack music has the potential to be absolutely amazing. The music is motivational and sounds like something composed by Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky (Transformers). However, the music is over-modulated which makes it sound distorted (00:00 – 00:30). The lens flair effect is used repeatedly at the beginning of the video on each clip, so rather than creating the sense of authenticity of raw candid video clips where lens flare happened naturally, it looks like someone obtained some stock footage and overused the lens flare effect. A professional wouldn’t do this, or, if they did, they would be intentionally trying to make Romney’s videos appear to be of poor quality. What’s disappointing about this is that even someone who isn’t highly skilled could have quickly and easily ducked the volume of the soundtrack and chosen some different video effects. What could have been an exceptional campaign video was ruined. An example of a similar Romney campaign video that was done well is The Promise of America, which doesn’t have the problems described above.
Example #2. In the video The Right Kind of Leadership, the beginning starts out strong, but then at 15 seconds into the video, the left channel of the audio drops out, the volume practically doubles, and Romney is only talking out of the right audio channel. Then at 19 seconds, the volume drops so low you can barely hear what Romney is saying, yet it’s panned back to the center again (left and right audio are equal). Then at 24 seconds, Romney is only talking out of the right audio channel again and the volume is way up. By contrast, videos such as Only In America are of much better quality in their presentation and in the content.
Video Embed Feature Disabled. One interesting comparison between the Romney campaign media and that from the Obama campaign is that the Romney campaign has disabled embedding on YouTube, so the videos can’t be shared in blogs, which is unfortunate and weakens the potential spread of their popularity.
Democrats Misunderestimate the Power of Advertising. A recent campaign video from the Obama campaign (shown below) presents an analysis of how promoting a candidate is similar to selling a product. The video makes the point that limitations or drawbacks can be glossed over in advertising, but in the case of Romney it won’t work and people won’t buy it, according to the Obama campaign.
In the video above, the message seems to be that the media repackaging and rebranding of a candidate can’t work. In this regard, the Democrats seem to be misunderestimating* the power of the media as is conveyed in the clip below.
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*Misunderestimating is a word that George W. Bush created and has now become mainstream.