A Compelling Political "Mashup" Ad--"Hillary 1984"

A chillingly creative ad has opened a Pandora's box of new ways outsiders can anonymously attack their opponents to influence political campaigns. This compelling ad called a "mashup" where old and new elements are combined to create a new message, uses footage from the "1984" Super Bowl ad, produced by director Ridley Scott, that introduced Apple's MacIntosh Computer, and then splices in footage from Sen. Clinton speaking on the presidential campaign trail. It wasn't broadcast: it's posted on the Internet on YouTube.


In the updated ad: "Hillary 1984," Clinton's face is seen on an IMAX sized screen as she talks about holding conversations with the public, while a mass of zombie like people (mainly men) watch mindlessly until a young blond female athlete carrying a sledgehammer, chased by a band police officers, races into the room and smashes the screen; a blinding light appears, a new tagline rises up: "On January 14th, the Democratic primary will begin. And you will see why 2008 won't be like '1984;" the screen then fades to an updated Apple logo showing a rainbow colored O and the Web address BarackObama.com at the bottom.

The outside activists who created this video remain a mystery...for now. Someone else (a Clinton supporter?) retaliated and used the same Super Bowl anti-Hillary ad concept calling it "Barack 1984." Now Obama is in the mix: The setup is he seemingly is giving his announcement to run for the presidency; the ad shifts to his announcing "the (Chicago) Bears to go all the way baby" and win the Super Bowl; a caption then appears, "The Bears Lost, So Will Obama." Both the Obama and Clinton Campaigns absolutely deny any connection with these ads.

Observing the impact this video will have in political campaigns, Carla Marinucci writes in the San Francisco Chronicle,

[I]n the weeks since its early March debut, the expertly created video remix -- called a mashup in blogosphere circles -- has "changed the zone" between political campaigns, their followers and the Internet, said Simon Rosenberg, president of the Washington-based New Democrat Network, an influential party advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

With presidential campaigns now poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that will blanket television before November 2008, this seemingly home-produced video -- created with software and a laptop, and likely without the benefit of a team of expensive political consultants -- opens a new window, Rosenberg said. It has dramatized a brave new world in which passionate activists outside the structure of traditional campaigns have the power to shape the message -- even for a presidential candidate.

The ad is proof that "anybody can do powerful emotional ads ... and the campaigns are no longer in control," Rosenberg said. "It will no longer be a top-down candidate message; that's a 20th century broadcast model."

It also dramatizes that today, political activists with the Internet as their ammunition have gone from being "just donors to the cause," he said, "to being partners in the fight. And they don't have to wait for permission."

While the original provocative Apple ad borrows themes from George Orwell's book, 1984, in which Big Brother coerces conformity among the masses to control the future, I am reminded of a recent subversive film, V for Vendetta--the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix Trilogy) adaptation of the graphic novel V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, and Stephen Rea. Next we might see movie trailer political mashups.