Advertising Strategies

Within the political realm, advertisements are used for various amounts of ideas. Some candidates use ads to build up the positive image of themselves and also to attack a candidate’s opponent. I believe that both ways can be proven affective in differing situations. When going to research advertisements of Jeb Bush throughout his political career, I was surprised by my results. I was only able to find one direct advertisements of him, and just a couple of examples where he was apart of another political advertisement.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4519922/jeb-bush-governor-1998-ad 

The advertisement that was put out during his running for governor in 1998 I most definitely see as a complete candidate-positive ad. The way he talked about who he is, what he has done thus far, and what he wanted to do if became governor, all really displayed it as a positive advertisement for his campaign. Another strategy at play in this specific ad was the idea of building his image through it, which also goes back to the candidate-positive type of ad. At that point in his career he needed to build his image more than ever because not a lot of people knew him just for himself, instead of being the son or brother to a major political figures. The point that he made in the ad about things needing to change could be considered as a slight challenger strategy, but overall I think he was more trying to focus on whom he is and what he had to offer.

I generally view this ad as a simple and for the most part direct advertisement, which is why I saw no gender strategies at play in it. I believe Jeb Bush chose to do a candidate-positive and image advertisement at that point time because he really needed to create awareness to the voters on who he is individually. Then after forming that basis he would have a greater and more successful chance at doing more complex ads in the future, if needed. I also think Jeb stayed away from the gender strategies and/or differences because at that time it was one of his first major political elections, and he probably did not want to leave a bad first impression on the voters. Overall I feel like this ad was decent one for its time, but if shown today it would need some improvement.

http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/10/06/jeb-bush-spanish-cory-gardner-chamber/

Although the second advertisement I found did not evolve around Jeb Bush, it did however shed light on how he is seen and who he is. The first major and obvious aspect to take into account was that he was speaking in Spanish within this ad. Jeb was able to help create the candidate-positive and image ad strategy for Cory Gardner. Focusing specifically on Jeb’s role in the ad though, I believe it shows he can easily relate to the Latino voter population, which we may see in his own future ads for the 2016 election. As a whole, advertisements play a crucial role within any political campaign, and more importantly so do the strategies behind them.