Previous ads from Steyer follow similarly strange patterns. Steyer's super weird ads

Innovative? Or just plain weird?

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer is trying to sway national climate policy and the midterm elections with an ad campaign that is raising eyebrows among independent fact-checkers, some television stations, his political opponents and even a few allies — using an approach that strikes observers as anywhere from groundbreaking to downright bizarre.


In Iowa, Steyer’s super PAC is attacking Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst with 60-second TV ads featuring a pair of cigar-chomping executives cackling in a darkened room, gleeful that an anti-tax pledge she signed will send jobs overseas. The fact-checking website PolitiFact labeled that ad “false,” and fact-checkers have also found holes in Steyer-backed ads that accuse Florida Gov. Rick Scott of benefiting from oil drilling near the Everglades and letting a power company “fleece” its customers. Ernst and Scott have threatened legal action.

Previous ads from Steyer followed similar patterns. One last year portrayed the CEO of TransCanada, the company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline, yelling “Yippee!” and becoming soaked with oil as he slides through the project. A 2012 ad Steyer bankrolled during a California referendum fight featured a suit-and-tie-clad feline as the “Fat Cat” in an old-time carnival freak show.

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He’s also paid for a $1 million, four-part series of 90-second ads in which Steyer traveled the country attacking Keystone, as well as minimalist 15-second TV spots — featuring crickets and chicks but no dialogue — that taunt billionaires Charles and David Koch for refusing to debate climate change.

Steyer’s aides say the ads are meant to be striking and unconventional — and they’re certainly no amateur operation: His more recent TV spots were handled by GMMB, the award-winning firm that worked on both of President Barack Obama’s White House campaigns. The ads are part of Steyer’s pledge to spend $100 million or more to influence seven bellwether Senate and gubernatorial races this November.

But political and media professionals are divided on whether they work.

“They’re unconventional in some cases, a bit bizarre in some cases, a bit opaque, more than the usual amount of snark, visually different in many cases,” said Elizabeth Wilner, vice president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. “The ads taken together are obviously made to stand out in some way.”

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Todd Harris, whose media firm produces ads for Ernst’s campaign, said Steyer’s ads “are a metaphor for the kind of federal government that he wants — which is big, bloated, inefficient and expensive. It’s this mind-set like, ‘Why do in 30 seconds what we can spend millions to do in 60?’”

Even the Republican consultant who infamously lumped triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden in a 2002 campaign ad thinks Steyer’s attack on Ernst goes a tad too far.

But Steyer’s ads also have admirers — in both parties.

“They are first class. Punchy. Clever. Clear. On message,” Republican strategist Mark McKinnon said in an email after viewing a half-dozen Steyer ads flagged by POLITICO. “It’s a competitive environment out there, but these are the kind of ads that will cut through the clutter.”

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That’s exactly what they’re designed to do, said top Steyer adviser Chris Lehane, calling them provocative enough to stand out.

“Campaigns have to buy more and more and more TV because TV has become less and less and less efficient as a way to have your message have any kind of an impact,” said Lehane, a veteran Democratic strategist. Usually, he said, “there’s a ‘cheeseburger, cheeseburger’ element to the ads [that] you can almost regurgitate in any number of states.”

Democratic strategist Jonathan Prince agreed.

“We all know political ads suck, they’ve sucked for a million years,” he said, adding that traditional political messaging can be hampered by limited dollars, a reserved, cookie-cutter style and lack of self-awareness. “But if you’re Tom and Chris and you have the money to spend and you are your own bosses, you have the freedom to be a little more aggressive.”

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Prince particularly admired the “campiness” in the anti-Ernst ad. “You have to accept from the beginning that your audience, generally speaking, is kind of in on the joke,” he said.

That ad, part of a $2.6 million series of TV spots that Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action Committee is running against Ernst, attacks the Republican Senate hopeful for signing an anti-tax-hike pledge promoted by conservative activist Grover Norquist.

“Joni. Signed. On. The line,” one of the executives says in the ad, which is loaded with shadowy lighting, pregnant pauses and a briefcase that some viewers saw as a nod to the movie “Pulp Fiction.” “The tax breaks that thing protects — are gold. Greenlight more outsourcing. China, Mexico, all the way.”

“She isn’t worried about Iowa jobs?” the other executive asks.

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“Oh, never mind that,” says the first businessman, opening the briefcase and gazing into it. “Joni Ernst is with us.”

A Washington Post writer called it “surely one of the most bizarre political ads of the 2014 election — and not really bizarre in a good way.”

The Steyer-backed ad has the look and feel of “highly slick public access commercials,” said Lisa Camooso Miller, a GOP and industry strategist and former Republican National Committee spokeswoman. “You may be watching a commercial for a loan shark or a local car dealer.”

And it may be counterproductive, she argued, if turned-off viewers think the ad is tied to the campaign of Ernst’s opponent, Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley. A spokesman for Braley’s campaign — which has not endorsed Steyer’s ads — declined to comment on them.

PolitiFact also called the ad false, dismissing Democrats’ arguments that the Norquist pledge will preserve tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. Conversely, an Iowa TV station rated the ad “mostly true.”

Beyond that, New York-based Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said, the anti-Ernst ad has impressive production values but doesn’t communicate effectively. He said the same is true of a 2013 ad from Steyer’s group — one that several TV stations refused to air — in which an actor impersonated TransCanada CEO Russ Girling as a laughing, lying, oil-soaked executive.

“Good ads communicate with people and don’t yell at them,” said Sheinkopf, a member of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign media team. “These ads yell at people [and] they’re not believable. They’re not going to create a relationship between the viewer and the ad.”

Rick Wilson, the Florida-based consultant behind the Cleland/bin Laden ad, called Ernst an odd target for that kind of attack.

“The classic smoke-filled-room ad has been done a lot over the years, and most of the time it works really well with a well-defined candidate that’s either corrupt or nuts,” Wilson said. But in this case, the Ernst ad is “a little too contrived, too long frankly, a little too cutesy and a little too much of a reach. The real question here is if you make extraordinary claims, they can’t be justified on something tangential like a taxpayer pledge.”

A second Steyer-backed ad launched Aug. 6 uses a much more conventional format to allege that Ernst wants to eliminate Iowa renewable energy jobs because she signed the Norquist pledge. Her campaign called it “blatantly false” and urged stations to take it off the air.

A conventional political ad attacking Scott also generated controversy after NextGen accused the Florida governor of taking campaign donations from a company that “profited” from oil drilling near the Everglades. The nonpartisan organization FactCheck.org lambasted the ad for “bending the facts” but said Scott’s campaign and the Florida GOP also twisted the facts in their rebuttals. Scott’s team demands that TV stations take it off the air, while NextGen said it stands by the piece’s accuracy.

Accuracy might be beside the point if the ads get voters to stop fast-forwarding and pay attention.

“Regardless of whether it is strictly true or not — and it is mostly not true — it is a powerful and brutal ad,” Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt said in an email regarding the initial anti-Ernst ad. “In 2014, that’s all that matters because now Ernst has to spend mucho $$$$ to refute the claim (which in turn will actually call even more attention to the issue of tax breaks for corporations that move jobs overseas).”

Lehane, who wrote much of the ads’ scripts, said they are born from creative sessions after Steyer’s team has identified its target audience and message.

They’re part of what Steyer’s camp calls the “360 Degree Theory,”a three-pronged approach that combines on-the-ground campaigning; a provocative ad style that uses multi-chapter story arcs and recurring characters, actors and themes; and data-driven targeting of a small but important subset of voters at a time when fewer people watch traditional TV.

“We are trying to do something in a way which is really fully integrated,” Lehane said. “Can you actually put content out there that breaks through how viewers watch it, over the course of a series of spots, and do things on the ground in a campaign that puts the opposition in extreme pressure?”

NextGen also employs tactics that Silicon Valley companies commonly use to track not just how many watch an ad but also how many stick to the end or share it with others. Those include running pre-roll ads that pop up before viewers can watch videos on YouTube.

Lehane said the strategy succeeded in causing disillusionment among conservative voters from Southwest Virginia, which helped defeat Republican Ken Cuccinelli in last year’s gubernatorial race. It also allowed NextGen to tie Democratic Senate candidate Stephen Lynch to Keystone in his unsuccessful Massachusetts primary campaign last year, and helped Steyer repel efforts in 2012 to derail California’s Proposition 39, which closed corporate tax loopholes to fund public schools and clean-energy jobs.

NextGen is using GMMB in this year’s ads, while some of Steyer’s earlier ads were handled by the 20-something-dominated, San Francisco-based creative firm Portal A, which got its start producing YouTube videos for companies.

Lately, Steyer has downplayed the importance of TV ads, saying success in this year’s elections will be based on persuading young, environmentally minded voters to go to the polls — not converting more voters to his side. “This is much more about showing up than it is about persuasion,” Steyer said this week at a conference in Aspen, Colorado.

Sheinkopf agrees.

“Ads don’t win elections anymore,” he said. “What wins elections is targeting and turning out people, and ads are only a part of that strategy.”