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Last week, the NRA put its advertising prowess to work supporting Brett Kavanaugh, the now-controversial nominee for the Supreme Court, with a slick, powerful ad that one expert I talked to placed at the pinnacle of the marketing craft.
I asked an old friend from my days as managing editor of Crain’s New York to look with a professional eye at the Kavanaugh ad. Scott Cullather is CEO of INVNT, a brand and communications agency with seven offices around the world. Its clients include Samsung, Merck, GM and Subway. He said he’d do so without taking a stand on the NRA’s politics.
First, he told me that the NRA, whose relationship with with Oklahoma City-based Ackerman McQueen is one of the longest standing in the ad world, is almost in a league of its own when it comes to marketing prowess. Nike is legendary for its ability to distill its message, from Just Do It to Colin Kaepernik to Tiger Wood’s comeback. “The NRA is like Nike,” Cullather says. “They are a marketing and pr machine.”
The group’s ability to simplify its messages around values, amplify them and connect with its members helps explain the NRA’s disproportionate power , which is something of a puzzle among political scientists. It claims 5-6 million members, a small percentage of America’s 100 million gun owners, and its positions probably are more extreme than most gun owners and even many of its members. (Though there are gun rights groups to the right of the NRA.)
Nevertheless, it’s one of the most feared lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.
“The NRA is very clever because their marketing reframes the actual ‘thing’ into something much bigger, broader, and more emotional. It’s about good vs evil. It’s about a particular set of values that are being positioned as being under attack. This isn’t about one man’s qualifications (or disqualifications) for an open job position – it’s about an entire way of life,” wrote Cullather in an email. “All the best marketing does that. Levi’s aren’t just jeans – they are FREEDOM. Coke isn’t just fizzy sugar water – it’s JOY and TOGETHERNESS. This isn’t about a man and whether he’s a good pick for the Supreme Court or not – it’s about a liberal attack on conservative American values.”
The Kavanaugh ad shows NRA president, Oliver North speaking from a sunny office, interspersed with clips of Democrats doctored to look like fuzzy newsreels from a guerrilla republic. It builds toward a climax: “I didn’t hold dying Marines in my arms defending freedom so corrupt politicians could disgrace their historic sacrifice … We the people will bring dignity back to our democratic process.”
“It could have been trailer for the third season of House of Cards,” Cullather said. Cullather guessed that the NRA's marketers used what’s called predictive analytics software to craft the message. The software analyzes millions of video clips from across the Internet and ranks them based on which are most likely to connect with the target audience, he told me. The words the group uses could likewise be chosen based on software to help the audience identify with the NRA.
What The Clips Say
With the emotional power of video and predictive analytics in mind, I noticed that a few of the clips are truly chilling, including those that show Sen. Cory Booker, an African American from Newark who could run for president. He’s quoting a line from a 1960 Stanley Kubrick movie, Spartacus, in which slaves took part in a rebellion against a tyrannical government.
Booker might be the first character in the lineup because he’s co-opting one of the NRA’s own themes, the little guy standing up to government. But there’s another, more sinister reading based on race and fear: The idea of another African American president could be meant to inflame whatever segment of the NRA’s base that is racist.
Starting out with Spartacus is important because of the way the theme repeats. The ad begins with a Democrat co-opting the role of the brave soldier and ends with an actual soldier in service to the NRA.
Likewise, the clip of California Senator Dianne Feinstein seems designed to strike fear into the heart of an audience whose masculinity is key to its identity: She’s a “woman who wants to confiscate your firearms” who “leaked an unsubstantiated accusation to smear a man because he believes in our Second Amendment.”
The ad never even mentions Christine Blasey Ford, the woman whose presence and powerful testimony could derail Kavanaugh’s nomination.
It’s likely she was not in the ad, I think, because her presence would instantly move the ad from the emotional realm to the intellectual realm: She raises questions that have to be dealt with in the higher brain, like whether she is credible and truthful. What’s also absent here is any compassion for Ford, who undeniably put herself and her family in danger to come forward; all the compassion is reserved for Kavanaugh.
North also refers to an old, terrible incident: the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in a car driven by Sen. Ted Kennedy. “Politicians call a privileged senator who killed a woman ‘a lion,” he says.
That happened in 1969; Kennedy died in 2009. You could look at the mention of this old story as evidence that the NRA is playing to an aging audience.
But groups usually have founding stories that are retold to younger generations; they can get stronger in the retelling. Ted Kennedy’s shocking disregard for Kopechne, who probably drowned slowly in the car, is a totem in the hands of the NRA, symbolic of Democrats’ lack of values.
What’s perhaps strange, or most ironic about the ad, Cullather notes, is that to a person outside the NRA, Oliver North is not a hero, but a tainted political player who helped in an intelligence operation that sold weapons through intermediaries to Iran, with profits going to the contras in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra Affair). The contras were a brutal right-wing group.
“Isn’t it ironic that Oliver North is speaking on the topic of truth and dignity?” Cullather asked.
North is a sign of how broken our common language of words and imagery is. To the NRA’s base, he is a hero, a marine, among the toughest of our warriors. The subtext is that a man can become a hero by being a good soldier who follows orders, does his duty and isn’t afraid to be honest about cleaving to a hierarchical value system. That system is one in which a man like Brett Kavanaugh, a white man portrayed in the ad as of high intellect and good character, stands atop.
To people outside the NRA’s base, North is remembered more as a small player in service to a corrupt system, a man who didn’t question enough what he was being told to do.
North also sheds light on a fundamental conflict at the heart of much of the NRA’s messaging. The minutemen of the American Revolution were both good soldiers and good questioners willing to step outside a hierarchy, the "tyrannical" British government. Conflict is hardly ever simple, though the NRA presents it that way. An inconsistent narrative is a sign of a deeper intent, which Cullather identified.
Overall, he wrote, the ad motivates its base to pick a side. “Which side are you on? People respond to that far easier than sifting through the details on whether this guy is a good pick for a job that most of us don’t fully comprehend. But GOOD AMERICAN? Well I can relate to that. I can side with that. I can buy into that. That’s ME!” he wrote. “Here we have a unprecedented situation where modern tools of communication are being instantly rallied to cause a movement.”
