Gard fails truth in advertising test

John Gard's campaign for Congress did a television shoot last week at Pierce Manufacturing in Appleton, where they manufacture fire trucks.

In that first sentence, I've already told you more than the Gard campaign told some of the people who were asked to be in the commercials.

This is from an email from one Pierce employee. I have deleted the names:

A film crew showed up, and several of my co-workers were asked if they'd like to be in a film project. Thinking it would be for a documentary or commercial about Pierce, they readily agreed.

They were given lines to read, and after having make-up applied, they were filmed delivering their lines. One woman was told to deliver the lines, "John will help us with our retirement, and he will help us keep our jobs".

She assumed "John" was John Randjelovic, our company president. [Others] were asked to deliver similar lines. Only after all the filming was completed were they told that "John" was John Gard. When one of the film crew asked [one of the workers] if he was going to vote for John Gard, he replied, "I don't even know who he is!"

None of the people I talked to who were involved even knew what John Gard looks like! [They] told me about all of this later. Both were more than a bit upset, feeling used.

I am writing because I think this is an outrageously dishonest action Gard's people did. I think everyone should know how dishonest Mr Gard's commercial is.

The person who complained was not directly involved in the commercial, so it is all second-hand. But he signed his name and used the names of other co-workers, so there's no reason to think he's making it up.

If that's accurate, it certainly is a highly unusual -- and unethical -- way to operate.

As someone who's shot a lot of political commercials on similar locations, it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would withhold information about the purpose of the filming. Standard procedure is to tell people in advance that it's a political commercial, ask them if they are willing to participate, and have them sign a waiver agreeing to allow the footage to be used.

If you fail to do that, you run the risk that when a commercial appears someone will complain to the media that they don't support the candidate and don't want to be in the commercial. That's been known to happen, and it's just not worth the risk. (Maybe they were told what it was after the shooting was done, when it would be hard to say no, and that's when they found out it was a Gard commercial.)

In this case, it's unlikely any Pierce workers will complain because their boss obviously supports Gard and invited him to do the shoot there. But you can bet there will be a lot of word-of-mouth about it in the district. It's already started.

UPDATE: The program director from a Fox Valley talk radio station says:

We investigated this, including contacting Gard's office. At our request, they showed us the signed releases from every person mentioned in the email. This is why we, and other media outlets contacted, ignored this story.

The Gard campaign has not complained to me.