But the electorate’s affection doesn’t come that cheap. A Boston Globe/CBS4 poll from late October had Mihos ranking third in the “Which candidate has the most effective television ads?” category, behind Deval Patrick’s Fog Machine commercials and Kerry Healey’s Freddy Krueger spots. That’s just wrong, if Bill Hillsman is your ad guy.
For someone who’s been an absolute chatterbox throughout this race, Mihos — or at least his campaign — is uncharacteristically mum about this topic. Asked about the advertising, Mihos mouthpiece Nicole Nionakis said, “I’m not gonna be able to comment on the specifics of our ad strategy.” Nionakis did say she was aware of Hillsman’s other work this year, but declined to compare any of it to Mihos’s ads. “I’d have to review it more closely,” she said.
And what about the biggest question of all: why is there no Christy Talking Action Figure? “Because we decided not to use one,” Nionakis said.
For Christy’s sake! The guy actually has retail outlets where he could sell the things! That’s more than Ventura or Friedman could say. Plus, Mihos was born to be a talking action figure. Wasn’t he?
Not so much, according to Hillsman. “It made so much sense for Kinky Friedman. It was just an excuse to get 25 of his one-liners out there.” On the other hand, “there’s no need for a Christy Mihos Action Figure.”
Ouch.
Okay, but what about the poll results for Mihos’s ads? “Those are a function of the number of ads they’re seeing,” Hillsman said. “You need to do recall tests and play back copy points to really know who has the most effective ads.”
As for any comparison between his work for Mihos and his work for Friedman, Hillsman said, “every campaign is different. I’m not a consultant who thinks there’s one way to win a campaign.” Even so, he conceded that the television spots don’t really convey a sense of Mihos as a character.
“The camera loves Christy,” Hillsman said by way of prologue. “It’s not always the best-looking guy — some just have a natural enthusiasm and joy for retail politics. Christy has that.”
But, Hillsman said, the Mihos camp “wouldn’t do one ad we felt would strongly capture that sense of him as a character.” It would have highlighted Mihos’s status as “the only candidate who was Massachusetts born and bred, who went to school there, built his business there, raised his kids there, and eventually will die there.”
But they didn’t go for it. “Sometimes you can convince them, sometimes you can’t,” Hillsman said. So what was the objection? It couldn’t have been the message — Mihos has used that Native Son gambit in every debate so far. It must have been the execution, right?
“There was a lot of trepidation [in the Mihos camp] about the Big Dig ‘Heads Up’ spot,” Hillsman said. “Now they think it was a great commercial to run. But they didn’t want to be perceived as too edgy or too humorous after that spot.”
They got their wish, didn’t they?
“We wanted to do more with him than we ultimately did,” Hillsman concluded.
Yes, well, we would have liked that too.
John Carroll is a mass communication professor at Boston University and a correspondent for WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press” edition of Greater Boston. He can be reached atjohn_carroll@wgbh.org.
