Doran banking on TV jumpstart for governor bid

10/25/2005

Patricia Lopez, Star Tribune
Last update: October 24, 2005 at 9:17 PM

If you haven’t tuned in to the 2006 gubernatorial race—the election, after all, is 13 months away—you probably don’t know who Kelly Doran is.

But over the next three weeks, you’ll probably see the DFLer’s square-jawed mug on TV more often than reruns of “Law and Order.”

In an attempt to develop sudden name recognition, Doran has launched an ambitious $500,000 ad campaign that will flood the airwaves between now and early November.

All the money is being spent on a single commercial, “Pretty Good Coach,” that introduces Doran, a multimillionaire real-estate developer, to Minnesotans. It will air primarily on news-oriented cable channels and around network newscasts.

“Whew, that’s a lot of money,” said veteran adman Lee Lynch, who founded the ad agency Carmichael Lynch. Lynch said he talked to a local executive for McDonald’s on Monday and “they can’t remember a local buy that big even for them.”

As a political newcomer, Doran “undoubtedly wants to break through the clutter,” Lynch said. “But he could become the clutter.”

Dean Barkley, who managed the 1998 gubernatorial campaign of upstart third-party candidate Jesse Ventura, noted “that’s more than we spent in our whole campaign.” A former wrestler who already had name recognition, Ventura relied on quirky TV ads to set him apart from opponents.

By contrast, Doran’s initial ad is low-key. The visuals are mostly words being typed on a screen interspersed with a few photos that tell his story: “raised by a single mother”; “paid his own way through college”; “as a businessman, created thousands of good-paying jobs for Minnesota workers”; “pretty good soccer coach.”

Toward the end, the screen reveals Maria Doran, the candidate’s wife, sitting at a kitchen table, tapping on a laptop, telling her husband that she’s writing his first campaign ad. The ad ends with the tagline, “More Principle, Less Politics.”

A political unknown, Kelly Doran has said that while he will raise funds, he also is prepared to stake a sizeable chunk of his personal fortune on his bid for the governor’s office.

A television ad campaign of any size one year before the election is unheard of in Minnesota. But Doran said the unusual move is needed to level the playing field against the likes of DFL Attorney General Mike Hatch, who announced his own candidacy on Monday, and Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Doran’s ad also makes a subtle but definite attempt to position Doran as something of an independent, saying that “as governor he’ll be an independent voice for people.”

Barkley said that’s clearly a bid for “the swing voters who elected Jesse Ventura. No doubt about it. And that’s a smart move.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a leading scholar of political advertising and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the payoff of an expensive ad blitz might not be as large in Minnesota as in other states. “Minnesota has a high level of political literacy,” she said, “so the effects of big-money campaigns are still somewhat muted there.

“It’s a state with lots of substantive coverage and an electorate that pays attention.”