“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” [Tony Schwartz] wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”
Over the weekend media guru Tony Schwartz died in his home (The New York Times obituary is here).
Schwartz was, of course, most famous for The Daisy Spot, an ad for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 that contrasted a little girl pulling petals off a daisy and counting up to ten with a cold voice counting down from ten and ending in a mushroom cloud. The ad, which aired only once, never mentioned Barry Goldwater by name – but made a clear argument that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for global annihilation.
In his first book, The Responsive Chord, Schwartz argues that sounds – not arguments or conversation, but the ambient sounds of our lives – ‘pluck’ responsive chords and remind us of things we already believe. A good ad-man can put the product into that recollection and sell almost anything. The Daisy Spot reminded viewers that Goldwater was nuts (something a lot of folks believed) by contrasting innocence and life with a machine sounding voice and global death. Similarly a Schwartz-created ad for Coke featured a sweating bottle and the sound of soda being poured – viewers weren’t told “when it’s hot you sweat a lot, and often it feels good to have a cold soda to both cool you down and rehydrate you; Coke is a soda that can be served cold; so on hot days consider purchasing and consuming a Coke.” Instead, viewers were subconsciously taken to hot and sweaty, then cooled and refreshed, via Coke.
The core Schwartz’s insight, a lesson not well-enough learned by advocates and candidates, is that the best arguments remind rather than tell. The most compelling arguments find something the audience already believes to be true and puts the issue in the context of that belief.
This is not a new insight – it’s the basis of Aristotle’s enthymemes. There are echoes in Stephen Toulmin’s notion of the warrant and in countless other analysis of rhetoric and persuasion.
And yet…as campaign season heats up and advocates try to make ever more clever arguments with ever more clever data (and at ever increasing volume), as economists construct ever more complitacted charts to show why they are right about taxes or recessions, and as environmentalists create ever more depressing maps about where less and less land will be, it is a lesson that will likely be again forgotten.
Those who are the most successful in the November elections (and in Congress and other legislatures, and pretty much everywhere else) will be those who remember that it’s more persuasive to remind than it is to tell.
