What Makes a Campaign Ad Effective?

The four main aspects of effective campaign ads are emotion, persuasion, truth, and style.  The most impacting ads usually incorporate all four of these ideas in them.  Emotion tugs at peoples' hearts and tries to make them feel a type of way while watching the ad.  Emotional ads usually portray some type of tone throughout the entire thing.  The "Peace Little Girl" ad showed a little girl counting the petals of a flower and connecting that back to the countdown of a nuclear bomb explosion.  It was very powerful and relating a little girl back to a nuclear explosion makes a person feel very emotional and gets the point across.   Persuasion, is in my opinion, the most important element of an ad.  If your ad doesn't explain your specific opinion on something and try and get people to follow your opinion as well, then what is the point of putting out an ad in the first place.  Usually ads are to try and get people to buy something or do something, and in this case it is trying to get someone to vote for them.  It is imperative for an effective ad to contain elements that may cause a person or voter to begin to agree and go along with these new ideas portrayed in the ad.  The idea of truth in an effective ad is also very crucial.  If there are no facts or statistics to back up your opinions on a certain topic, then no one might feel compelled enough to agree with your idea.  However, given a certain amount of substantial evidence on a topic, and given person would go along and vote for you or at least second guess their thoughts and choices.  Style is the last crucial part of an effective ad.  An ad must be appealing to the eye.  It has to capture the attention of the voter or the point stated throughout the ad may not even get across to them.  Music, sounds, pictures, and transitions can all help to make an ad more attractive and interesting to watch.  For example, as mentioned below in many previous posts because it was so fitting, the "Windsurfing" ads against John Kerry was very appealing and comical.  It attracted and interested me to watch it, even if it didn't clearly portray all four of the elements, and mostly contained style and emotion, it was still very effective.  It made me question if John Kerry was a very serious candidate, and it was also very funny.  http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2004/windsurfing