This isn't breaking news, as it's been in the headlines since the weekend (As of this writing, Google News recognizes 78 articles on it), but I've been too busy to write about it until now.
Long story short, somebody took Apple's famous 1984 ad and mashed it up to make it an ad for Obama's Presidential campaign. Hillary stars as the big brother figure, and the lady who smashes the screen is wearing a shirt with Obama's logo. Anyway, enough with the description, just watch it HERE. That's the original YouTube post, and it already has more than 1 million views, plus a few more hundred thousand views of the same video under other usernames.
The creator is still unknown (except by YouTube username ParkRidge47), and Obama's staff maintains that they certainly had nothing to do with it. Obama himself said that his staff doesn't have the technical ability to make such an impressive ad even if they wanted to.
Well, this is a big deal. This video has had a bigger footprint than than any conventional political ad so far this year, and it wasn't even created by one of the candidates. It opens the door to anyone publishing political ads that are far more aggressive than anything a candidate could get away with airing -- AND make a real impact. As a result, some headlines refer to 2008 as "the first YouTube election." It'll be interesting to see what role viral videos play in the rest of the election. If this were to become commonplace, would campaigns bother to spend as much money on television advertising as they do? Could they save money by "outsourcing" unendorsed advertising to YouTube creators? This sounds similar to how Pomona created a "MyPomona" video contest to get films they could use for promotions...
MySpace has announced MySpace Impact, and this PC World article talks a bit about it. While YouTube is unintentially affecting the election, MySpace seems to intend to do so.
According to the article, "MySpace hopes to play a "powerful role" in the 2008 elections, CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a statement. The site plans to give users easy-to-use information in a format they can relate to, he said." Now that MySpace is owned by Fox, this might strike fear into those who feel that Fox is partisan hackery, but I'm not really worried -- I'm sure MySpace realizes that to play politics with this one would turn off their many liberal users. In fact, I would expect this would help the Democrats because I would guess that MySpace users are generally younger, likely students, and therefore generally more liberal than the average voter.
Another quote from the same article, "As of Monday afternoon, "friends" were already on board various candidate sites. For instance, Romney, McCain and Clinton each had more than 1,000 MySpace friends, while Obama had more than 68,000. Paul, also running for president, had about 350 friends. Giuliani's profile was set to "private" and so it could not be publicly seen." Seriously? Is 2008 going to become a student body election? Whoever, like, totally has the most, like, MySpace friends wins!
Ugh.
A couple of interesting things I thought about when I saw the Obama 1984 ad:
• Who made this?? This is such a great example of how the public can contribute to thought-provoking and really intriguing media production. I immediately thought about how this ad plays with a sort of Post Modern intertextuality . . . I love this! How sad it would be if net neutrality prevented media clips like this from circulating the web.
• What are the copyright infringements?? Clearly, the maker of this ad used previously-existing (and undoubtedly, protected) media. What are the potential problems the producer(s) of this spoof are in danger of encountering? Do you guys have issues with how copyright was violated here? Or is it ok, because it makes an entirely new, witty, and political statement?
• How will this be read by different generations/sectors of society? We've talked a bit about Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding, but how might these principles be enacted here to create a multiplicity of readings?
Your copyright point is a good one. Without a doubt, this is copyright infringement, not only breaching Apple's (and/or the famous ad firm that produced the original ad) intellectual property rights, but maybe also those of Obama's campaign by using their logo without permission. I don't know enough about the law to know that last bit. Personally, I don't mind because the person creating the ad is not benefitting from the copyright infringement. If Obama's campaign produced the ad, I would have a huge problem with the violation because they would be the beneficiaries.
Some people surely have a problem with it anyway...I tend to interpret protection of intellectual property loosely.
Does it make clear that I'm really old -- or just really a geek -- that one of the first things I noticed was that it wasn't the 1984 ad they'd mashed-up, but the iPod remix of the 1984 ad?
The 1984 version was probably only available on VHS that sadly went out of production a month or so ago.
To answer our questions, the creator of this ad has been identified. He lost his job because of it. To the possible dismay of Pomona students and conspiracy fanatics, the "47" in the creator's username is suspected to simply refer to Clinton's year of birth.