The Cardboard President
In the spirit of a premature Throwback Thursday, here’s the story how I created an inanimate president. I’m not referring to Trump or Biden, but Niinistö. The current oval resident of Finland.
Halfway into the Finnish presidential race of 2006, the Niinistö campaign had a problem: they were not reaching younger demographics and their agency was fresh out of ideas. I had already done several unconventional and controversial campaigns for the party, so they asked if I could come up with some concepts. They knew me as someone who can bring in a lot of earned media and reach young voters.
This was my pitch: “Let’s do a shitload of life-size cardboard cutouts of the candidate and put them on tour across the country. People can pose with the future president in college watering holes, etc., and we’ll share the pictures online”.
The campaign staff was not impressed. They thought cutouts were cliché. It was beyond cliché, I argued. No one had really seen cardboard cutouts since the 80’s, and back then they were done seriously. Another concern was nicknaming the cutout “Pahvi-Sauli”, Cardboard-Sauli in English, since in the Finnish language the word “pahvi” also means dumb. What if people will call him “pahvi” like he’s dumb, they asked—I said that would be awesome.
The campaign took off like a fire on a bone-dry field. Newspapers, talkshows, editorials. They were everywhere. It was all earned, pre-smartphones, pre-social media. Of course, the press loved the term “Pahvi-Sauli”. Exactly what some of the campaign staff were afraid of and exactly what I had hoped for. Cardboard-Sauli became like a separate entity. It had its own campaign trail and everyone wanted to strike a pose with the cutouts. People requested their towns to be included on the cardboard trail. Some cutouts got stolen, which was also great press.
Unfortunately, with a historically tight margin, Sauli Niinistö lost the election against the incumbent president Tarja Halonen. I blame Conan O’Brien. However, Pahvi-Sauli lived on. Surviving cutouts became collectors’ items and got auctioned on eBay. Periodically, they kept popping up all the way to the next election in which Sauli Niinistö ran again, with cardboard running mates I was happy to hear. That time around they got elected, and in 2018 President Niinistö scored himself a second term—Pahvi-Sauli right there by his side.
The term Pahvi-Sauli became part of popular vocabulary in Finland and resonates to this day. Just two weeks ago I bumped into it again. The cutout revival idea itself has been copied by many politicians ever since, even in neighboring countries. The only problem is, there are a lot of cardboard politicians in Finland now.
