Emotional Impact

A Message from CRAFT

CRAFT | Media / Digital is a partnership of like-minded political operative innovators in the media and new media communications space. It is our mission to provide comprehensive communication consultation and media, digital and print services for the political and issue industry. CRAFT creates new approaches and produces integrated communication strategies for clients, so that the delivery of their message becomes a seamless, thought-provoking experience that engenders action. CRAFT is the first company in the political consulting and services industry to marry traditional media and online social media. If you want the most creative, fastest and cost effective political and issue strategic media firm in the industry, then you’ve come to the right place.

Case Studies

This video was created for the Bush campaign as a memorial to President Ronald Reagan upon his passing. It uses photos of President Reagan as well as sound-bites and sound-bites from President George W. Bush. It was featured on the homepage of GeorgeWBush.com as part of the campaign’s remembrance and celebration of the life of President Reagan. The video won both a Pollie award and the Golden Dot award for best online video.

Man in the Arena was created more with a feeling in mind rather than a definitive script or concrete theme. It’s an abstract visual and audio celebration of what it means to be a leader. It took a full week to complete. The backbone of the video started with the music, selected after listening to hundreds of tracks. From there inspirational sound-bites were gathered of Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt and of course John McCain. Celestial imagery was added to bring an expansive, larger than life ethereal quality to the video. Man in the Arena went viral once it was released, and remained the number one most viewed McCain video for several months. It was picked up in thousands of blogs, many of which tried to decode the meaning behind the piece, including Time and Ann Althouse. The video had over half a million views.

Courageous Service was one of the most important videos or ads produced for the McCain campaign. In the late summer/early fall of 2007 the McCain campaign had very little money and had been beaten up in the press. It was time to get back to basics — blocking and tackling — and that meant it was time to tell John McCain’s story. Previously the campaign had shied away from fully embracing the Senator’s amazing story, but starting in the fall of 2007 that was no longer the case; his courageous service would become the cornerstone theme of the campaign moving forward. With almost no budget, I managed to be a one man band: interviewing, shooting and editing. The result was a 12-minute bio film that cost the campaign $5,000, whereas a similar project on Bush-Cheney ‘04 cost $100,000 to make. Courageous Service became a central feature of our Web site for not just the primary but the whole campaign. It also became part of the field program with DVDs made available at events in Iowa and New Hampshire. The video was viewed over 800,000 times and generated a great deal of earned media including this article in the Concord Monitor.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Case Studies, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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CRAFT is not only dedicated to serving clients' needs but sharing tools of the trade. Our blog, Framework, is an outflow of the thoughts, ideas and opinions generated from the CRAFT team. It's an examination of the political industry and our tactics. No longer should best practices of running a winning campaign be shrouded in mystery. We hope that by sharing our ideas here we can contribute to the ongoing dialogue of politics, the development of the industry, and the overall improvement of the political landscape.