Federal election 2016: Don Draper comes to Liberals’ rescue
DENNIS ATKINS: Just when it looked like the Turnbull Government may have a dug a black hole for itself over Labor’s spending, the gifted hands of a Don Draper came to the rescue.
Analysis
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THERE’S a simple rule for measuring the potential effectiveness of a political ad and that’s to size up the audio impact.
The Coalition has jumped into the advertising game with a cash register spot that is as old as a Don Draper pitch.
It’s simplicity itself. Audio grabs of Labor politicians announcing spending plans - $100 million here on roads, half a billion on Medicare, $800 million on foreign aid - are punctuated with the sound of cash register.
It’s the aural equivalent of the money shot: a sharp curr-ching we all recognise.
To give the spot a little spice there’s a grab from Bill Shorten which was supposd to be an in-joke for the travelling media.
“Put that on the spend-o-meter,” says Shorten.
The guys at Coalition campaign HQ put on the ad reel and waited for the earliest opportunity to roll it out.
This week was that opportunity.
Treasurer Scott Morrison and Finance Minister Mathais Cormann came out on Tuesday with an attack on Labor’s spending that made as much sense as the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first” sketch.
The size of the black hole they were claiming took on a significance that would require a new paper from Stephen Hawking who published his latest work on the black hole information paradox just five months ago.
Hawking reminds us that all information that crosses a black hole boundary - known in the quantum physics business as an event horizon - is lost forever.
Everyone who left the Morrison/Cormann press conference on Tuesday could attest to this thesis.
Everything they thought they knew when they walked in was lost forever by the time they walked out.
The gifted hands of a Don Draper came to the rescue and put it all back into context. It just needed a curr-ching.
Originally published as Federal election 2016: Don Draper comes to Liberals’ rescue
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