Thursday, November 09, 2006

Politics Gives Marketing a Bad Name

It's hard not to have politics in your head right now, and writing about it seems apropos since campaigning is marketing sans the checks and balances.

But as Bill Maher points out, those vying for office give the world of marketing a bad name. On Larry King live last night he said that campaigns should be required to follow the same rules as traditional advertising. Namely, you can't lie about your competitors or boast things about your product that are untrue. Nike can't say in its ads that Adidas uses slave labor, and politicians should pay a sizeable fine if they allege similar scandalous things about each other. If candidates misbehave, we have bloggers to call them on the carpet. We should requite that 75 percent of a candidate's ads can not mention their opponents.

If you consider voter turnout as a goal of campaigning, then these folks couldn't do any worse to sabotage themselves. Let's spend all our dollars saying how awful everyone is, but come Tuesday, please use your valuable personal time waiting in line.

If having fair and open elections are a way to market the ideal of America to the world, then we need to fix the problem of voting machines. Several friends around the globe have remarked how laughable it is that in the tech capitol of the world, we can't make voting machines that work as well as an iPod or Xbox.

Some of this (and I blame both parties) is intentional, but let's forget the clowns (Diebold et al) of today, and hire companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple Microsoft and Intel to design a machine that is reliable, has a sleek interface, and leaves a paper trail. Open source the initiative, and let the tech competitors do the QA on the machine. These things happen only every two years, so these "surprises" of machines not working is pathetic.

Sadly the billions that are wasted in scandalous ads likely will never end because the media (print, TV, radio) does not want to see the biennial revenue stream dry up.

Posted By John Gartner at 05:22 PM
Permanent Link: Politics Gives Marketing a Bad Name | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on Politics Gives Marketing a Bad Name

I don't agree with any of these ideas.

A requirement that political ads tell "the truth" would lead straight to the situation in present-day Singapore, where any criticism of the government leads to prosecution and/or imprisonment.

The Democratic Party selected Dieblold as a convenient scapegoat for its electoral losses. You'll note that since they won this election, there hasn't been a peep about "unreliability."

Any and all voting systems suffer glitches. Sometimes these glitches are real -- punchcard machines, mechanical machines, and even manual counting -- and sometimes they are blatantly manufactured, such as during the recent election here in Cook County in good ol' Chicago.

Political attacks against opponents have a long and glorious history here in the US, starting from the very first elections, and if the ability to blister an opposing candidate for his actions is ever legislated away, the process of voting will become utterly meaningless.

Comments by Moshe Yudkowsky : Monday, November 13, 2006 at 06:05 AM

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