On 5 March this year, an ad appeared on the spectacularly popular video-sharing website, YouTube. The person who posted it identified him or herself as 'ParkRidge47' - the place where Hillary Clinton grew up and her year of birth - but the video did not appear to have originated anywhere near that presidential candidate's camp. An updated version of Ridley Scott's famous Apple Macintosh ad from 1984, it took the Orwell-inspired original, in which armies of grey-faced workers are lectured to from a vast television screen by a fearsomely Nazi-like dictator, and replaced the face and voice of Big Brother with those of Hillary Clinton. 'One month ago I began a conversation with all of you,' she says from the screen, addressing the masses she refers to as 'hard-working'. A digital subtitle appears across her face: 'This is our conversation', before a colourfully clad sprinter races up to the screen and smashes it with a mallet.The ad sought to show how little like an actual conversation Hillary's one-way mode of address is, and its brilliance was that the form and the content were beautifully entwined: the anonymous posting was itself the equivalent of the girl with the mallet - a way of smashing the old order of demagoguery and spin by surreptitiously democratic digital means. The ad, entitled 'Vote Different', ended by transforming the Apple logo into an 'O', underneath which was written: barackobama.com.
Negative advertising is a popular sport in American politics (in 2000, George Bush did it subliminally, by flashing the word 'Rats' over Al Gore's promises). Yet the new '1984' ad, while conceptually ingenious and technically accomplished, hardly seemed in keeping with Barack Obama's gentlemanly modus operandi. Where had it come from? No one seemed to know. The Obama campaign denied any involvement, and Clinton's claimed to be equally clueless.
Within days, the 'Vote Different' ad had, as the digitally savvy world likes to say, 'gone viral'. It was picked up by progressive blogs, by conservative blogs, by advertising blogs - and then by the mainstream media. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as 'a watershed moment in 21st-century media and political advertising', and every time the ad received any kind of coverage from then on, it would send viewers to YouTube to look at it. As of last week, 'Vote Different' had been seen by more than 3 million people and discussed ad infinitum, making an ad that was disseminated for free and apparently independently of a political campaign far more effective than any official ad made by the presidential candidates in the 2008 race so far. 'ParkRidge47', who remained anonymous, became an instant YouTube celebrity, a poster child for the idea that anyone can have a widely heard voice. Interviewed on TechPresident.com, a new website designed to track the 2008 candidates' use of the internet, ParkRidge47 proudly said that 'considering Hillary Clinton's biggest video has only received 12,000 views on YouTube, I'd say the grassroots has won the first round'.
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