NATO Takes to the Air(waves)

Posted on | July 29, 2009 | No Comments

Picked up on these very interesting ads at Copyranter – it seems NATO is doing a PR push centered around it’s 60th anniversary, creating three 45 second ads that they posted on their YouTube account. Here’s my favorite:

This is not your father’s freedom rhetoric.  Gone are the soaring speeches and military pagentry – the new face of the free world features torture porn and techno.

I think NATO recognized the shifting terrain of political rhetoric, and made these ads to appeal to citizens in NATO countries that think and interract in radically different ways from 60 years ago.  Instead of talking about freedom as a clash of civilization between nation states, NATO is now talking about how and why freedom matters to individuals, in the most concrete way possible.

This is the type of messaging that progressives need to strive for: edgy, personal and concrete.  Even when working on a  campaign with sure-fire messaging (and who wouldn’t agree with freedom, right?), there’s a clear diffrence between stale appeals to principle, and the type of direct message that gets people fired up.

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