A Nader Action Figure? Ad Maverick Signs On to Team

The political candidate who hires media consultant Bill Hillsman better be ready to pose shirtless. Or ride a snowmobile. Or play dead inside a chalk outline. Because Hillsman insists that’s what it takes to get attention on television. And that, he says, is what it takes to get elected.

Hillsman designs campaign commercials. And they’re not the sort where the candidate intones about health care at a nursing home while words like “fighting for you” crawl across the screen.

His sometimes wacky ads have worked in Minnesota’s two biggest modern political miracles, launching former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura into the governor’s seat in 1998 and sending college professor Paul Wellstone to the U.S. Senate in 1990.

Today, Green Party nominee Ralph Nader is scheduled to name Hillsman his campaign media advisor, providing the 46-year-old ad maverick another chance to prove his point that traditional political ads are pablum.

In Minnesota, Hillsman’s shoestring-budget victories suggest his style gets candidates more bang for their buck. He’s helped pull disenfranchised voters back to the polls. And he’s championing the cause of humor as an advertising genre where deadly serious and deadly dull are de rigeur.

“The worst thing in advertising is to be boring,” said Hillsman, a devotee of Rolling Stone and jazz clubs who splits his professional time between political wanna-bes and commercial clients such as the Mall of America, the nation’s largest indoor retail shopping center, in Bloomington, Minn.

A teenage radical in the 1960s, Hillsman is drawn to outsiders and has worked for his share of quixotic losers. But the longshot candidates often match his personal disdain for career politicians, fueling the regular-joe flavor of his ads.

Advisor Knows How to Win With Little Cash

Hillsman’s reputation for winning on the cheap started after 1990, when he joined Wellstone, then a college professor with zero name identification.

He did a commercial that was a knockoff of the movie “Roger and Me,” which he called “Looking for Rudy.” In the spot, Wellstone wanders into the campaign office of incumbent Republican Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, irritating his rival’s staff and dramatizing Boschwitz’s refusal to debate.

The two-minute ad aired only once that Hillsman recalls. But it generated a torrent of media coverage--often a key to Hillsman’s campaign strategies. Wellstone became the only Senate candidate in the nation to unseat an incumbent that year. And the readers of Campaign magazine voted “Looking for Rudy” the best political ad in history, beating out Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” spot in 1984 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” ad in 1964.

Hillsman also worked with a shoestring budget in Ventura’s 1998 gubernatorial campaign, where analysts say he had voters laughing all the way to the polls with two of his TV spots.

In one ad, a send-up of a toy commercial, two telegenic kids are shown playing with a Ventura action figure. They pretend to have Ventura fend off the “Evil Special Interest Man” doll and reject a wasteful bill as an announcer shouts: “You can make Jesse battle special interest groups!”

In another spot, Ventura appears bare-chested as he bends in the pose of Rodin’s “The Thinker” while an announcer reels off his credentials as a father and volunteer football coach.

Ventura narrowly defeated the more established Democratic and Republican candidates in an election that posted a 60% turnout, the state’s highest in a nonpresidential election in nearly two decades.

In the afterglow of Ventura’s win, Hillsman and his offbeat style enjoyed a brief flash of fame. But, like his candidates, Hillsman is an outsider in his own industry, where other consultants often scoff at the impact of his work. The feeling is mutual.

“The goal here is to signify to people that they are getting real and reliable information,” said Democratic consultant David Axelrod, who is working against Hillsman’s current Democratic client in Minnesota’s Senate primary. “I think he better make sure the contraption can fly before he markets it.”

Hillsman’s ads for Ventura “were interesting and entertaining and I think it would be very hard to prove they had an impact on the outcome,” said Bob Shrum, who is making ads for both the Democratic National Committee and the Al Gore campaign. “I don’t think making the ads cute for cute’s sake necessarily works.”

Academic observers credit Hillsman with creative commercials that break through the advertising clutter and reach out to disenfranchised voters. But they also say the effect of Hillsman’s sometimes wacky work may not be ready for prime-time candidates such as the major party contenders: Democrat Gore and Republican George W. Bush.

“A lot of people think you have to get people angry to really move votes,” said political scientist Kerwin Swint, a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who wrote a book that examines political humor in ads. While praising Hillsman’s creativity, he noted that “what’s funny to younger people might not be funny at all to seniors. It may fall flat with a whole demographic that you need.”

Indeed, in the annals of campaign advertising, political historians say, humor hasn’t performed consistently. It’s a risky approach, as Texas Sen. Robert Krueger learned in 1993 when he aired a widely panned spot in which he made attempts to imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” character. (One of the consultants behind that ad was Mark McKinnon, now media advisor to Bush.)

Moreover, the whimsical approach tends to work mostly in good times, experts say. Humorous ads were popular in the go-go 1980s but dropped off the screen in the early 1990s as the economy sputtered.

Minnesota political scientist Steven Schier, a professor at Carleton College, credits Hillsman’s ads with helping Ventura. But he added that Hillsman “cannot do it for everybody. . . . If you’re selling a really unusual candidate, then wacky ads can work.”

Hillsman has also found that his rebellious style isn’t always popular with incumbents. Up for reelection in 1996, Wellstone brought in a Washington insider, Mandy Grunwald, to run his campaign and aired ads that were more conventional.

Wellstone’s office did not return calls to ask about the switch.

Hillsman said a major factor preventing consultants from crafting more creative spots is greed. Most media consultants receive commissions of up to 15% of the amount spent on air time. They lean toward making poor quality ads and then saturating the airwaves with them, he said, resulting in an air war that drains campaign coffers and turns voters off.

“If [viewers are] willing to give you their valuable 30 seconds of time, you owe them something back,” he says. “It could be a laugh, it could be a piece of information that they think is valuable, it could be touching them emotionally.”

Seeking to Connect on an Emotional Level

Some sort of emotional connection, he says, holds more persuasive power than ads seeking to win over voters by showering them with policy details.

“Voting is more an emotional decision than it is an intellectual one,” he said. If an ad doesn’t offer a payoff and resonate with viewers, he adds, “you’ve failed. To political consultants, the way you overcome that failure is to [air the spot] more. It defies any common sense.”

Hillsman is jaded enough about politics to say it keeps the best people out. “Those people don’t even run anymore, and I don’t blame them.”

Ultimately, however, voters’ disaffection is just another way to market to them.

“If the voters perceive politicians to be liars, I’m going to work with that misimpression,” he said.