The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders's 'America'
Last edited Fri Dec 30, 2016, 11:45 AM - Edit history (1)
The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders’s ‘America’
Lynn Vavreck
New York Times
A few 2016 campaign ads stand out for how happy and hopeful they made people feel, and one ad in particular dominated. That ad was Bernie Sanders’s minute-long spot called “America.”
By far, Mr. Sanders’s “America” was the ad from 2016 that made SpotCheck’s raters the happiest and the most hopeful. Nearly 80 percent of viewers said the ad made them at least a little bit happy and hopeful in the week it debuted — including over half of the Republicans who saw it.
Mr. Sanders’s ad also made people feel better about our democracy and lifted his favorable ratings compared with those who saw a nonpolitical ad or the spot from Mrs. Clinton.
We asked people to think like an ad maker who was advising candidates. Would they tell the campaign to “run the ad a lot” because it was “good at accomplishing its goal?” Was it “good, but not great?” Or worse, did the ad need to be shelved because it “just doesn’t work?”
Here again Mr. Sanders’s “America” did better than any other ad. More than half of the people who saw this ad said they would advise the campaign to run it a lot — including 51 percent of Republicans and almost 60 percent of independents.