The Origin of Persuasive TV Campaign Ads

When did television advertisements for campaigns really become important or influential? Many would agree that it all started with the "Daisy Girl" ad that aired only ONCE on behalf of incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. In it, a young girl is standing in a field picking the petals off of a flower. She is counting the number of petals as she goes. When she reaches nine, there is a loud noise and the camera zooms into the blackness of her pupil where there is the image of a nuclear bomb and the Johnson shouts, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” This shocked audiences like no ad before it had ever done. The most interesting element of this ad is how it fits in to the Downsian models of persuasive and informative campaigning. To read a little more about the history behind the ad, click here!

As the Downsian model explains, a persuasive advertisement increases the probability that every voter will vote for the candidate. It tells you that there’s something you might like about this candidate or something that you won’t like about the other. The distinction between informative and persuasive campaigning is how it affects the probabilities that groups of voters will vote for the candidate. An increase in persuasive campaign expenditures for Johnson would increase the probability of democratic voters for him without decreasing the probability that republican voters will not vote for him. In this case, Goldwater was painted to be a dangerous extremist who wanted to use nuclear bombs in Vietnam therefore. Johnson won with 68.1% of the popular vote and 44 states. The subject matter of the ad and the voting numbers show that this ad would be classified as a persuasive campaign expenditure using the Downsian model and likely one of the most successful ads in campaign history.