Critique: 'We' Could Do It -- With Better Ads

CLICK HERE FOR BARBARA LIPPERT'S PODCAST. "Free us," the spot begins, with the words spelled out on screen in a typeface so fluid and beautiful that it made me sit up and watch. "Free us from our addiction to oil. Free us from $4.00+ gas. Save us from this climate crisis. Give us truly clean energy. Use the wind. Use the sun. There is a solution. There is no time to waste."[jwplayer gdThhpSr-1kT9Z8rj] Wow. These are compelling statements, spoken by William H. Macy, (everyone's favorite character actor) with cadences (and words) suggestive of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream'' speech. And all of it is underscored by urgent music supporting expertly shot, almost WPA-style portraits of ordinary Americans and troubled landscapes. I saw the spot on television and genuinely got excited. Could it be that one of the presidential candidates had gotten so serious about environmental change that his team had finally crafted an ad with the sort of sophisticated take on populist politics that really resonates?No such luck. The spot is the latest in a series for the Alliance for Climate Protection, a.k.a. the "we" movement, based on the name of the Web site wecansolveit.org. Lines like, "We the American people are no longer asking, we're demanding," got me fired up. The music indeed ends with a grand climax, but the solution portion of the ad is pretty anti-climactic -- all that's offered after that mighty call to action is the eco-green, M&M-like "we" logo and a wecansolveit.org Web site listing.We can move from "asking" to "demanding" all we want, but if there's no one at the top to listen, it's just wind whipping around without a power turbine. Maybe, these days I'm crankier and more disappointed than most, but as a citizen watching all the sad goings-on in Washington for the last four years, the ad made me feel even more politically impotent.OK, so I went to the Web site and signed up. Now what?Let's back up a bit. This is a real brain buster of an assignment, taken on by the hugely smart and talented folks at The Martin Agency. You might recall that wecansolveit.org is founded by former vice president and now Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore, based on the success of his presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth," which was turned into a film and book. The budget is a liberal $300 million over three years, some of it donated by Gore himself from "Truth" proceeds. Still, it's a nonprofit organization and, unlike the wind and sun, Gore's money is not a renewable resource. I know it's heresy to even suggest this in media circles, but is advertising the smartest way to spend the money?It would seem to me that rather than running commercials to get private citizens to demand action from the man behind the curtain, it might be better to spend it on lobbyists who are as powerful as the folks now working on behalf of big oil, gas and coal. Then again, presumably Gore knows how Washington works and obviously thinks there's value in advocacy advertising. Maybe people have been resistant to this message because the advertising medium itself seems a bit flimsy as a way of conveying information of such global importance. But perhaps with enough media weight behind it, the repetition could eventually bear fruit.Certainly, while it was running, I found an earlier stage of the campaign, bringing odd bedfellows together like Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, sitting on a love seat in front of the Capitol building in the pouring rain, rather cringe inducing. (She faced him, stiffly saying something about "not often seeing eye-to-eye, Newt" and all I could think of was eye of Newt.) But at least it established clearly that this was not a partisan issue. (The one with the two reverends, Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, was nominally better because Sharpton manages to jump off the screen with anything he says.)So even if it was too cutesy, it ingratiated itself with power players and was memorable. Why forfeit that undeniable equity so quickly? I appreciate that they wanted to move "from a request to a demand." But are viewers aware that the time for requesting has past?"Switch," the other spot that ran during the Olympics, is visually confusing. It shows a giant white switch (that looks like a Claus Oldenburg sculpture) set in the land as old, young, upper- and working-class people discover it and worship it or touch it or, as in the case with people in a city, move it. It's a literal reference to switching away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy. But it doesn't work. First of all, the switch looks like it's made out of big, shiny, toxic materials-definitely not eco-friendly. Secondly, the switch gets thrown and nothing happens. It seems like an unconscious metaphor for political impotence.People are still getting to know what the initiative is. Whereas T. Boone Pickens is in our faces, perhaps Gore has gone too far in the other direction.I understand the impatience, but with no real context, it seems as if the demands are blowin' in the wind.

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Critique: 'We' Could Do It -- With Better Ads

Barbara Lippert

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Barbara Lippert