—Max Valiquette taking a senior communications role with Justin Trudeau got Éric Blais thinking about ad folks and politics. His advice: "attache ta tuque”—
Back in 2000, I was briefly involved in Jean Chrétien’s third re-election campaign in Québec, and had a front-row seat to the head-spinning reality of developing ads for an incumbent Prime Minister (photographic evidence below).
Here’s what I learned in a nutshell: advertising can play a key role leading up to election day, but planning and creating it is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. There are so many known unknowns at play—anxious stakeholders, expert opinions, competitive attacks, and unforeseen developments—that most of what one has learned about commercial and advocacy advertising doesn’t apply.
The recent announcement that Max Valiquette will soon step into a significant role as the executive director of communications in Justin Trudeau’s PMO got me thinking about that experience.
Valiquette is widely recognized for his strategic planning, consulting, and deep understanding of consumer behaviour. His personal website describes him as someone who helps “companies, organizations, and brands figure out solutions to their problems, usually by understanding their consumers or citizens.”
Based on what’s been reported so far, his role will be to reverse the Liberals’ declining support, and help lead Trudeau to a rare fourth mandate.Valiquette’s qualifications include his expertise in understanding Millennials and Gen Z, and the depth of experience he gained after founding youth market research firm Youthography. He’s held senior strategy and planner roles at Diamond, Publicis and, before that, Bensimon Byrne—an agency that has done election ads for the Liberal Party of Canada and the Liberal Party of Ontario.
In an interview with the Hill Times, Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research, described bringing Valiquette onto the PMO team as a smart move. “His position will include [dealing with] all kinds of hot potatoes on a daily basis. …The branding has to be carefully interwoven with a renewed policy vision. It has to be bold, because you’re not going to disrupt the current thing with tinkering around at the edges, or with just coming up with better branding.”
Valiquette's talent and impressive track record in advertising and market research will be crucial, but he faces significant challenges. Not because of Canadians’ general fatigue with his new boss, or the growing appeal of a made-over Leader of the Opposition. But because positioning and communicating a political brand for an unforgiving one-day sale (voting day) requires a unique set of skills. One that advertising professionals in the commercial sector often find challenging to transfer into the political sphere.
Here’s my argument—and feel free to disagree. It’s easier for seasoned political strategists to create effective ads and shape public opinion, than it is for ad people to acquire the unique skills of seasoned, battle-ready political strategists that are needed to shape public opinion in politics.
Whenever I listen to political consultants talk about political messaging, I am reminded that they have expertise I have never seen in my 40 years working in ad agencies. That’s not to say there haven’t been extremely influential advertising professionals in politics.
Dalton Camp ran for Parliament twice, and was active in politics before and after launching his ad agency Camp Associates. Jacques Bouchard, often called the father of advertising in Quebec, worked on several campaigns for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and played a key role in triggering “Trudeaumania.”
David Axelrod is most famous as Barack Obama’s chief campaign architect, though he also shaped Ontario politics. His Chicago consulting firm did election preparation work for eventual Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty from 2000 until the end of 2002.
While some MPs reportedly weren’t comfortable with Axelrod’s recommendation that the Liberals use the words “working families”—What about families that aren't working? Don't we care about them, too?—Axelrod and his firm had a definitive impact on that election’s outcome.
While reading his 2015 autobiography, I was struck by how the Chicago Tribune political reporter turned political strategist wrote slogans and created ads himself. He wasn’t briefing “creative people” in ad agencies. He did it all based on his deep knowledge of the zeitgeist, voters’ mood, and his candidate’s views and values.
To put this in an ad agency context, he was the quant/qual research expert, the data analysts, the account planner, the creative copywriter, the director, and editor. And he was the presentation skills coach agencies hire for important pitches.
There are, undoubtedly, many similarities with the commercial sector, though some deep-pocketed supporters from the business world at times view political image-makers as high-priced charlatans. In his book, Axelrod tells the story of Steve Jobs calling to yell at him about the 2008 campaign, saying, “What your industry does, if you call it an industry, is bullshit… you guys don’t know anything about communication.”
And as someone with tons of experience in Ottawa told me back in 2000, I needed to “attache ma tuque”—an idiomatic expression from Quebec meaning to hold onto one’s hat, to buckle up.
In my experience, political strategists recognize and rely on the talent of advertising agencies’ creative folks. But many are not as fond of ad agencies’ strategic planners. They feel it’s their job to craft the messaging strategies and, unlike ad agency folks, they understand how to combine campaign ads with the make-or-break ground game.
So, congratulations on your appointment Max. And buckle up.
Éric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing, a consultancy that helps marketers build brands in Quebec. He can be reached at feedback@headspacemarketing.
