stevenberlinjohnson.com: Mob Spots

Ever since the fall of Trent Lott, I've been fascinated by the thought of the web contributing ideas and strategy to political campaigns, and not just money and meetups. (Both of which are crucial, of course.) I have a feeling that as the 2004 campaign heats up, the blogosphere will become an increasingly rich source of "message" brainstorming, given how easy it is to put together a relatively polished attack ad these days.

In that spirit, I've spent about two hours tonight putting together a little imagined TV spot that a Clark campaign could run against Bush. I genuinely don't know yet which candidate I'm supporting in 2004, so think of this as a proof of concept, not an endorsement. But the concept is threefold:

1. It's really, really easy for people who are not high-powered political consultants to build these things now -- I whipped this baby up using the Web, and Apple's iPhoto and Keynote software.

2. There's a useful way to connect the fantasy world of the Bush deficit with the fantasy world of the Iraq plan. And it revolves around showing Bush in that flight suit again and again, until it's Dukakis in the tank times a hundred.

3. This could just as easily be a Kerry ad.

You can see the mockup here if your browser can view QuickTime movies.

Feel free to circulate, rip, remix, burn, sample, etc.

Updated Sunday, Sept. 28, 1:15 PM: A few additional thoughts. The great thing about this kind of grassroots advertising is that it combines two of my favorite web developments of the past few years: the political force of blogging, and the distributed collaborations of the Lazy Web. I suspect the general pattern of development for these ads will be something like this: an individual somewhere comes up with an idea, and does a quick mockup, as I did with this Clark/Bush ad. Then sometime else pulls together a soundtrack, or tracks down a video clip (Cheney on Meet The Press would be nice), or records a voiceover. Before long you've got a spot that could air on television without anyone being able to tell that it was produced for literally zero dollars.

It would be nice to have a name for this kind of grassroots advertising. I was thinking about "mob spot" (as in Howard's smart mobs.) Used in a sentence as follows: "Check out this little mob spot I did for the Dean campaign last night after three beers."

Updated Sunday, Sept. 28, 10:15 P.M.: Now it gets interesting. We now have a version with music and one with music and voiceover. (Thanks Sean!) I'll try to upload tomorrow some of the original files so people can tinker with the arrangement even more. It'd be nice to have a single image billboard-style presentation of the final three slides: Bush in the flight suit, Clark in uniform, and the final tagline all on one page. Also, some have suggested that using the UN bombing is too harsh, and might potentially seem exploitative. Any suggestions for a better slide?

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I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

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My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

The real hero in the white house is a great slogan, nice one. Wonder if the Clark team is confident enough to let those things filter up?

Posted by: Abe | September 27, 2003 at 03:40 AM

Clark looks more like a self-serving weasel than a hero.

Posted by: NY10012 | September 27, 2003 at 06:00 AM

I slapped in some royalty free politicoMusic to your prototype. It's available at prototype ad.

I'm not sure whom I'm supporting either but agree fully with the notion of how easy it is to put these things together.

Posted by: Sean | September 28, 2003 at 03:10 AM

Here's a version with music and voiceover, quite rough but fun. :-)

Posted by: Sean | September 28, 2003 at 05:29 AM

What better place to run that ad (without sound for now) than on blogs? You could buy a full month's exposure (1 million page impressions) on some of the country's best political blogs for $500; the same load of impressions would cost $20,000 on TNR.com.

Posted by: henrycopeland | September 29, 2003 at 01:59 AM

This is great. I'm going to blog it now. You should have a creative commons license on this... ;-)

Posted by: Joi Ito | September 29, 2003 at 05:14 AM

Is that last slide meant to be Clark, or Steve Martin, the goofy comedian?

Posted by: Eric Scheid | September 29, 2003 at 08:08 AM

When Al Franken was on the Daily Show, he had a similar idea for a campaign ad (I think he said it could be for Kerry or possibly for Clark, who was not yet in the race). The opening shot would be Bush in the flight suit, and the voiceover would begin, "Playing dress-up is fun," and then continue along the "Real Hero" line.

Posted by: Alex | October 06, 2003 at 09:28 AM

I would be much more interested in seeing the fact v. reality between Clark and his former Joint Chiefs boss, you know the one that said he couldn't vote for the boob due to integrity issues.

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