Meet The Brains Behind Three Of The Most Memorable GOP Ads Of Election 2014
Three ads that shook up the midterms.
— -- The 2014 midterm elections produced a blizzard of political ads, but a precious few have broken through in a big way -- shaking up key races and attracting national attention.
ABC News spoke to three of the ad makers who masterminded the most talked about campaign commercials of this election cycle:
Larry McCarthy
Age: 62
Company: McCarthy Hennings Whalen, Inc.
Party Affiliation: Republican
Number of Years in Ad Making: 33 years
Favorite Ad He’s Ever Made: “Ashley’s Story” in 2004 or “Chinese Professor” in 2010.
Favorite Ad Ever: McCarthy calls his ads “all my children” and says it’s hard to choose his favorite, but for his all-time favorite ad he again picks “Ashley’s Story,” the Progress for America spot, a pro-George W. Bush outside group in 2004. McCarthy notes “probably the nicest thing that was ever said about our work was from John Kerry’s media consultant, Bob Shrum, who said the ad 'determined the outcome of the race…‘Ashley’ probably cost us Ohio and cost us the presidency!’”
Notable Clients:Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Kelly Ayotte, Mitt Romney 2008 Presidential Campaign, Restore Our Future, Romney’s 2012 Super PAC, among others.
Larry McCarthy is one the most influential Republican ad makers in history. He’s known as the maker of the most infamous negative ad in modern campaigns, the 1998 Willie Horton ad that helped to sink Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign.
He’s made scores of ads since and may be known as the go-to negative ad maker, but he’s made many positive spots including one of the most striking of the 2014 cycle, an ad titled “Home” for Mitch McConnell’s re-election effort.
The ad features a mother, Dr. Noelle Hunter, whose young daughter was kidnapped and taken to Mali by her father. The emotional spot shows Hunter looking directly at the camera and saying her marriage ended "after a dark period in my life." She does not mention that dark period included drug use, something she hasn’t shied away from talking about, but the ad does detail how involved McConnell was in her daughter Muna’s safe return.
“When you do political media you don’t often get a chance to tell a story like that, a significant part of a senator’s job is case work and you don’t often get a chance to put them on TV. You mostly see attack ads,” McCarthy said. “This was a great personal story told by a very charismatic person…an incredibly dramatic story, it was a cliffhanger of a movie and you don’t know how it was going to turn out until the end.”
This ad may feature Hunter, but McCarthy has worked with McConnell on other campaigns over the years and says the senate minority leader is better on camera when he’s “speaking with real people than reading a teleprompter.”
--Shushannah Walshe
Rick Wilson
Age: 50
Company: Intrepid Media
Party Affiliation: Republican
Number of Years in Ad Making: 20
Favorite Ad He’s Ever Made: “Dating Profile,” for Americans for Shared Prosperity
Favorite Ad Ever:Budweiser's Superbowl Clydesdale ad in honor of 9/11
Notable Clients: Rudy Giuliani, the RNC, RGA, Katherine Harris, Jeff Atwater, Jim Douglas.
Before Rick Wilson entered the universe of ad making, he was close to being the kind of Washington insider that many in his field spend their time attacking. He was a field director in Florida for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, and after Bush won the White House, Wilson worked in the Pentagon for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as an assistant for public and legislative affairs.
Wilson landed a big break in 1997 when Rudy Giuliani asked him to run the media for his mayoral campaign, and after winning office, Giuliani appointed Wilson as a senior adviser. In 2000, Wilson created his own ad agency called Intrepid Media, which he oversees to this day.
His ad, “Dating Profile,” which currently has over a half million views on YouTube, was derived from a frustration among Republicans about the “War on Women” slogan Democrats have used regularly the past few election cycles.
“We had to punch through the noise and the static, and the fact that [the slogan] has been effectively unopposed by Republicans,” he said.
The ad mimics the vocabulary of online dating profiles, with an Obama voter explaining her disillusionment with a man who made promises to her in 2008 and 2012 but has since broken them. She reveals the man — a guy named Barack, with an accompanying photo of Obama — and says, “I know I’m stuck with Barack for two more years…but I’m not stuck with his friends.”
The 60-second video, which Wilson calls “the most compelling ad I’ve ever done,” was based on “real womens’ insights into what would make this effective.”
“A lot of this came verbatim from research we did, from what real people were telling us,” he added.
--Noah Weiland
Brad Todd
Age: 44
Company: On Message, Inc.
Party Affiliation: Republican
Number of Years in Ad Making: 15
Favorite Ad He’s Ever Made: “It’s like picking between children!”
Favorite Ad Ever: Sprint’s “Sticking It to the Man”
Notable Clients: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, National Republican Congressional Committee in 2010, the “Coach to Cure MD” campaign for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy
When Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor criticized his Republican Senate opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton, for having a “sense of entitlement” because of his military service, the former United States Army Ranger knew just how to respond.
“Tom said he did not feel entitled at all when his face was in the mud doing push-ups at Fort Benning,” said Todd, a veteran of Cotton’s Senate and 2012 House campaign. Cotton enlisted Army Reserve Master Sgt. George Norton for a spot that captured the experience of basic training. Take a look:
The lively-back-and-forth in the ad captured Cotton “in his own skin,” Todd said. “It’s not advertising as much as pulling back the curtain.”
The ad, which became a viral hit, was successful because of its simplicity, the ad maker said.
“All you need for a country song is three chords and the truth,” Todd said. “Campaign ads are the same.”
--Ben Siegel