Obama Needs Better Ads
One of the more disappointing elements of the Obama campaign has been their advertising, which has tended to focus on fairly conventional, 30-second, issue-based spots. Their ads have been neither creative nor attention-grabbing, in contrast to both their reputation for being a media-savvy campaign, and some of the relatively creative spots put together by the McCain team.
I suspect that the next 2-3 weeks are probably the most important point in the campaign for advertising. Once the debates begin, it will probably be too late to fundamentally redefine either the candidate's message or the opponent. And advertising is difficult in the two-week home stretch between the debates and the election, with campaigns usually constrained to conventional biographical spots or hail mary negative attacks. So now is the time for the Obama campaign to go all out and spend some of those hundreds of millions of dollars in donations they have collected.
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The other campaign I'd do is not one ad but a series of them. During the final night of Democratic Convention in Denver, the Obama campaign had seven or eight 'ordinary' people speak to the assembled crowd at Invesco Field. They were working class, middle-aged white and Hispanic voters, who conveniently all happened to be from swing states. But they were actually pretty persuasive, and produced some of the more moving moments of the convention
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/obama-needs-more-better-ads.html