Not Guy Incognito

Did you miss it? Unless you looked for it, chances are you did. That's problem #1 with George Allen's two minute "speech" to Virginia. Basically, he made a two minute pre-prime time address on one station in five markets: DC, Richmond, Norfolk, Roanoke, and for some reason, Harrisonburg. (what? no Bluefield? no Charlottesville? no Bristol?)

Now, I'm not going to go into the Kaine-like creepy eyebrow (although it did make his delivery look forced), or Susan Allen's plastic smile. I think that's just mean-spirited, wrong, and not conducive to a critical analysis.

There is an inherent problem with this approach; he basically lost a whole day of advertising for two minutes that a majority of Virginians missed or went to the bathroom during. If he had carpeted every station in the state with the ad at the same time, AND made cable, DirecTV, and Dish ad buys at the same time, he would have reached a lot more people.

In devoting an entire day's worth of money for one 2 minute ad, he lost out on a lot of opportunities to reach the voters. Think about it, how many other Allen ads did you see Monday? I counted one, and I watch TV pretty much all day. Compare that to the 10-15 we've seen on normal days. Short, punchy, and carpet-bombed ads reinforce the message. Compare it to the Geico "we've hired an actor" ads. They started in late July, but did not become a hit until the middle of September. They built on the message, and the message finally hit nearly two months later.

There are some technical problems with the ad as well. The lighting just was not very good, especially the way too reflective light shined on the Redskins helmet in the background. (I wonder if they were watching the Redskins/Jaguars game to see if they should run the version with the helmet in it.) Also, way too much backlighting that made him look like he had a halo.

And by the way, if he looked comfortable, it's probably because this was highly staged. Taped, not live. Reading the Teleprompter.

As far as the message? Allen would have done a lot better to save his message for this debate on Monday, and save his money for more effective ads.