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Deep inside the Campaign of '08, the senior Tory campaign strategist puts it bluntly: “You've only got 37 days to make the sale.”

He's not selling soap, he's not selling cars. He's selling the Stephen Harper brand and, he says, he's got to move fast.

“The average person doesn't want to be a political junkie for 37 straight days,” he says, so the opening hours of the campaign are crucial in swaying public opinion.

What the Tories want to convey: clarity.

What they want to avoid: subtlety. “Subtlety,” he says, “is “very dangerous.”

By that measure, Rounds 1 and 2 of the Tory campaign rollout are very much on plan. Three commercials released Monday, using craps , slots and a “scratch ‘n' lose” card portraying Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion as a gambling man, are attack ads of the first order. The ads, which do not carry the Conservative Party logo and make no mention of Stephen Harper, juxtapose the earlier release of the sweater-vested Conservative Leader as a soft-spoken crime fighter and doting father.

The timing of the go-negative strategy was, in the view of Jack Bensimon, “flawless.” Having launched their campaign on the wings of a “kinder/gentler” narrative, the Tories were able to saturate the setup coverage in all media, before switching gears 24 hours later.

“Very strong tactical planning,” says Mr. Bensimon, president of Bensimon Byrne, the lead English-language ad agency for the federal Liberal Party in both the 2004 and 2006 battles. (The firm is not formally involved in the current campaign.)

By contrast, Mr. Bensimon casts the Liberal Party's Sunday release of a lone Green Shift English-language commercial as a “mistake.” “Campaign advertising must be appropriate to the evolving context and dynamic of the election,” he says, adding that the Liberals needed to counter the Tories' assertion of strength-on-all-fronts as opposed to focusing on a single ballot question.

“Elections are about punch and counterpunch. … It's incumbent upon the Liberals to come back with something that is different than what they scripted a week ago.”

Brian Howlett, chief creative officer at ad shop Agency 59, sees positives in the Liberal strategy. “His is very much about policy,” he says of Mr. Dion's insistent Green Shift focus. “He's bringing the economy into the story and hoping that he convinces people that the Green Shift isn't going to be a huge spending gaffe.”

Even viewed through the rosiest lens, the Liberals appear less than fleet of foot. The Conservatives learned this same lesson the hard way in the 2004 campaign when, says the strategist, the party produced relatively few and overly elaborate pieces of creative that were meant to have staying power throughout the campaign. Very old school. “The Liberals were far more agile,” he says. “They had a campaign that was simpler, but that could be more easily deployed.”

The Tories retain still-painful memories of searingly effective Liberal attack ads. “We were going to ban abortion, send Canadian troops to Iraq, impose U.S.-style health care on Canadians,” recalls the strategist of the way his party policies were cast by the Liberals. “Our response was an ad … that had a nice shirt and Liberal-style cufflinks reaching in and taking cookies from a cookie jar. …We were trying to use a metaphor [for fleecing Canadian taxpayers.] The shit was getting kicked out of us day in and day out on TV, and our response was a cookie jar.”

Stephen Harper vowed then that such “subtle” advertising would gain no future traction with the Conservatives, and that the party would never again lose the ad wars.

How will the Liberals respond this round? “The Liberals have to go negative right now with an evidence-based, truthful campaign about Stephen Harper,” says David Rosenberg, senior creative director at Bensimon Byrne. “If they don't do that,” adds Jack Bensimon, “there is a real chance for a momentum trap to swallow them.”

The waters have been tested. In crisply produced, French-language ads released Sunday, the Liberals do attack Mr. Harper for “tearing apart our culture,” a reference to recent cutbacks to arts funding. MP Michael Ignatieff equates the liberty of arts and culture to our liberty as a nation and forewarns of a dark era to come. He's very convincing.

If that creative is going to roll out to English Canada, it had better happen quickly. “In political advertising,” says the Tory strategist, “speed really, really matters.”