This is just an attempt to start some brainstorming about effective ads. Please don’t take any of it too seriously or precisely, since the goal is simply to encourage some creative or lateral thinking. I could easily be wrong on various details — again, not the point, so if so, just mentally fill in the correct ones.
Some background:
The overall idea is to pick a handful of focused themes, then hammer them relentlessly, with visuals. I don’t know if four themes is too few, or if seven is too many, but somewhere in that range. Each block is a distinct ad within a theme.
Prefer actual videos, but when effective use AI to fill in visuals, as long as they can be even remotely be supported by events of the day they allude to. Don't be afraid to stretch things here: complaints about precise accuracy would just give such ads more visibility.
Include a running theme of Trump leaving flaming bags on Biden's doorstep.
THEME 1: COMPETENCE
Supercut of 40 of Trump's own administration officials, including his secretaries of state and defense, saying he's a fucking moron, dumber than a bag of rock, and is completely unfit to be President.
Fantasy(?) version: Actually get as many of them as possible in a room together, have a few introduce themselves and remind viewers of the role they played in Trump's administration and how often they interacted with him, then ask for a show of hands who among them will be voting for Trump.
Ask them why not.
THEME 2: ECONOMICS
Start with a dreary time-series of videos of Trump announcing yet another imminent infrastructure week, week after week, as the video in the background fades to darkness while showing a factory parking lot getting more and more barren until the last car leaves and someone comes along to turn off the lights and padlock the gates.
Trump leaves office with fewer people working than when he came in, first time since the Great Depression. (Fleeting Great Depression images.)
Trump places flaming bag on White House steps.
Rolodex-like picture of Trump flipping over to Biden, and
BANG! Sudden intense bright lighting. (Lights! Action!)
Inflation Reduction Act!
CHIPS Act!
Factory lights come on, video speeds up, parking lot fills with cars, construction begins on second factory next to it.
Cash registers chime.
Videos of Republicans praising the effects of the bills they voted against.
Videos of people coming home exited to tell their families they got the job!
Voice-over: Trump failed. Miserably. It took Biden to get this done.
Millions of people now have new jobs that never existed under Trump. Are you one of them? Are some of them customers who can buy your products now?
THEME 3: COVID
Clips from 2010 to 2018 of scientists and politicians (including Biden) warning that pandemics can happen and we need to be prepared for them.
2017: Obama's outgoing team describes the danger to Trump's incoming team, gives them a presentation and a step-by-step playbook to stop pandemics.
Video of Trump's team tossing the playbooks in the trash on their way out.
2018: Trump fires all of our overseas pandemic observers. (Show observer leaving the Wuhan lab where they had been stationed to keep an eye on them.)
Visual of pandemic response team at center of web of information flowing in from around the world.
Trump disbands the reponse team, leaving us blind. (Show links in the graph fluttering out, and then central node going dark.)
Voice-over that Trump has now left us blind and flat-footed.
2019: Pandemic hits.
2019: Trump ignores it.
2020: Trump ignores it.
For two full months, the most crucial period for any pandemic response. (By contrast, Obama had begun to crush two similar pandemics in their first two months.)
Late February: Trump finally plans to distribute PPEs to hospitals.
March 2, 11 AM: Trump learns COVID is hitting blacks in cities the hardest.
March 2, 2 PM: PPE shipments are stopped and turned back, mid-transit.
March/April: March Governors panic and try to order PPEs for their hospitals.
Trump confiscates their medical supplies at customs — voiceovers for videos of nurses and doctors dying because Trump seized the PPEs they needed.
Bodies piling up in refrigerated trucks.
Video of Trump saying the pandemic will "magically go away".
Video of Trump saying the pandemic will “magically go away”. [Voice-over: That’s how conmen speak.]
Video of Trump suggesting we inject bleach to cure COVID. [Voice-over: That’s how morons think.]
Video of Trump suggesting people gather in large crowds as the pandemic was starting. [Voice-over: That’s how psychopaths think.]
Statistics pointing out that because of Trump's malignanant incompetence, the U.S. death rate was four times the world average. People in counties that followed Trump died at twice the rate of those who went for Biden.
More people dead from Trump's COVID policies than all Americans killed in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Vietnam, and the Korean War, and WW2, and WW1, and the Spanish-American War, and the War of 1812, and the Revolutionary War, COMBINED.
More Americans needlessly killed than died in the Civil War.
Image of Trump planting yet another flaming bag on White House steps.
Voice-over: All those deaths because of Trump -- the worst mass murderer of Americans in history.
THEME 4: FOREIGN POLICY
Remind the viewers that although there is an armistace, we are technically still at war with North Korea and they are an official enemy of the United States.
Video of Trump saluting a North Korean general, then praising Kim Jung Il.
Text and voice over describing what would happen to any American soldier who did that while in uniform.
Picture of Doha agreement.
Narration reading off the points where we release all the Taliban prisoners and transfer control to the Taliban.
Scan up to date and highlight it: February 29, 2020. Scan down and highlight Trump's signature.
Voice over -- the first and only formal surrender to an enemy power ever signed by an American President.
Video (or AI imagery) of Afghan prisons being emptied in August of 2020 on Trump’s watch. Point to mass murders, terrorists, etc.
Text or voice over of Trump reducing our troops down to 2,000 during his last few days of office, barely enough to defend one airbase.
Another flaming bag left of Biden’s doorstep.
AI Image of crowds trying to flee at overwhelmed Afghan airport, highlighting terrorist from before now wearing suicide bomb. Fade to white. Voice-over: “Trump’s legacy”
THEME 5: AMERICAN FREEDOMS
Videos of Trump praising dictators.
Video of Trump saying he will be a dictator.
Trump appointing Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett, talking about how they will end Roe v. Wade.
Video of Trump crowing that he was responsible for ending Roe v. Wade.
Video of Trump praising the work of the 2025 group as they began preparing it.
Highlights of awful provisions in it, ending contraceptives. Remind voters that the Comstock law is still on the books, because Republicans refused to repeal it, so he can actually do this with a stroke of a pen. This is as real as a heart attack. Or an unwanted pregnancy.
Trump sneaking back towards White House with a dump-truck of flaming bags and a few hangman scaffolds bouncing around. Thousands of brownshirts with Trump armbands marching after him with Tiki torches. Ominous fade-out as calendar with pages labelled "America" flips over from 1776 to 2024, then goes blank and dark images of Nazi Germany through fade out.
Maybe?
Voice-over describing the international treaty on asylum, signed by the U.S. into our supreme law of the land.
Video of screaming children being torn from the arms of parents who were seeking asylum.
Voice-over that no attempt was made to ensure those children could ever be re-united with their parents, and that many of those families will never be re-united because of that deliberate casual cruelty.
Text and voice over: This was the central, stated, deliberate and calculated intention of Trump's border policy: to inflict terror, even against innocent chidlren. Terror inflicted in your name, to protect you from three year olds.
Obviously, none of these are polished scripts (Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an ad man). Things like timing are probably all screwed up for typical ad lengths. But they are brain-storming ideas that maybe just might spark ideas in more professional efforts...
No need to nit-pick them — that’s not the point of a brain-storming session. Rather, see if they lead to anything better.