Christy Crunch (2011)
Using humour to force a serious contrast
The lay of the land
In early 2011, the political terrain in British Columbia was unsettled.
The country was still economically fragile following the 2008 global financial crisis. For the BC NDP, the loss of the 2009 election was still fresh. The BC Liberals, meanwhile, had a new and relatively unknown leader in Christy Clark — unburdened by the HST backlash that had forced Gordon Campbell’s resignation.
The NDP was focused inward, running its own leadership race, with a federal election looming that would soon dominate the airwaves.
The real problem
The real problem was money.
With campaign finance reform still a distant dream in B.C., the BC Liberal leadership candidates had raised millions of dollars in the wild west of political fundraising. The NDP, by contrast, was still paying down loans from the previous election.
We knew political leaders only get one chance to make a first impression — and we were determined to give Premier Clark a warm introduction to B.C. voters.
We just didn’t have the million dollars it would normally take to do that.
The insight
If we were going to do something, it had to punch through creatively.
We needed an ad that was truthful and memorable — something that would stick even if people only saw it once. A mentor of mine used to say that the best political attack ads are rooted in a seed of truth. The task wasn’t to invent a caricature, but to build on something real and believable about the new premier — and to do it in a way that was clever and funny.
Humour wasn’t a risk; irrelevance was.
The creative choice
Our agency partners helped us take a familiar advertising cliché — the breakfast cereal commercial in the kitchen — and turn it into something unexpected and playful.
We weren’t trying to inundate viewers with facts about Premier Clark. Instead, we used deadpan humour — the kind popularized at the time by shows like The Office — to casually tie her to scandals and disappointments people already remembered.
Timing mattered. We had a narrow window between the BC Liberal leadership race and the NDP’s own leadership contest, with a federal election increasingly likely to crowd everything else out.
We had to move fast.
Launch and reaction
We were nervous.
We had scraped together barely $100,000 for creative, production and the media buy. That bought us roughly a week of television airtime during newscasts — hardly the stuff of traditional political takedowns.
We launched the ad a few days before its first paid air date, hoping to generate as much earned media as possible. We didn’t have money for polling, so there would be no neat charts to tell us whether it worked.
When your target audience starts repeating your message back to you, you’ve done your job.
The moment I knew we’d captured public attention came on the second night after launch.
I’d left the office late and stopped at a grocery store on my walk home from the SkyTrain. The couple ahead of me in line was talking about an ad they’d seen — Christy Crunch. The woman thought it was hilarious. The store clerk chimed in, saying how much she liked it, and how mean she thought Christy Clark was as premier.
After two long years of defeat and internal infighting, the NDP finally had traction.
What mattered
Christy Crunch didn’t decide an election.
Winning in 2013 would have required sustained contrast that didn’t stop the day the writ dropped. But what the ad did do — for audiences inside the party and for B.C. voters — was diminish the BC Liberals’ overwhelming financial advantage by softening the shine on their new leader.
It sent a message that the NDP wasn’t out of the game.
It also showed that it was possible to campaign on serious issues and still have fun — and that humour, when grounded in truth, can be a powerful vehicle for political contrast.
For a young communications staffer, it was a formative lesson in the power of creative risk and paid advertising in political campaigning.