The leaders of the DPP's election advertising campaign team said yesterday that it wasn't just creativity that helped them win, but the inability of their competition to effectively use its resources and reshape its image during a tortuous and challenging election.
"Their entire election strategy had problems," said Luo Wen-jia (
In their first public appearance together since the elections, Luo and the DPP's creative advertising director for the elections and head of Fantasy Creative Co, Jerry Fan (
One of the key images the DPP tried to present during its campaign was the youthful, cheerful image of the party. What the party didn't want was to focus on the sorrows of the past -- as the DPP has done in previous elections, Luo said.
To make a break with the past, the DPP had to start extremely early, producing and releasing some of their 21 TV commercials and newspaper advertisements over eight months, Luo said.
"If we had waited any longer it would have been too late," Luo said.
In December -- over two months after the earthquake -- the party's first commercial came out, focusing on the earthquake stricken area. A child who participated in the election advertisement had actually lost her parents during the earthquake.
Ironically, one of the happiest scenes used in several commercials was shot three hours before one the saddest moments in Taiwan's recent history, the 921 earthquake. Several months after the shot was taken, Huang Hsin-chieh (
"The commercial was one of the happiest and one of the last shots of Huang," Fan said. "That was particularly moving."
The DPP's image shift proved to be effective.
The bulk of the DPP's advertisements were released in the last two months of the campaign and some eight commercials were produced during its last week.
During the final week, at the height of the election campaign, the DPP was overwhelmed by many factors: attacks from the KMT; the welcome shift of Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) to support Chen Shui-bian; and threats from China uttered by Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基).
While there are many factors that influence any election and the success of an advertising campaign, the KMT's persistent focus on "stability" left them out in the cold, Luo pointed out.
"Elections shouldn't focus on just one issue, advertisements should seek to show the strengths of the candidate," Luo said.
In the last few weeks of the campaign, when the KMT started to copy the DPP's advertisement style, Luo and Fan knew they had the upper hand.
Once they started to copy us and their "knees began to wobble," it was obvious the KMT had lost its cohesion, Luo said.
"Typically advertisements use creativity to gain the support of voters but at that point they were completely following us," Luo said. "They had lost complete control of their strategy."
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