Wednesday, March 21, 2007

INSIDE POLITICS - THAT AD: HILLARY'S MAC JOB



This is the ad that has mysteriously appeared on the Internet and has taken the Democratic primary debate by storm. It's a very clever parody of a 1984 ad for Apple Macintosh computers (based on George Orwell's novel 1984) which effectively portrayed IBM as Big Brother and promised to smash the consensus.
In this ad, it is Hillary who is portrayed as the evil and controlling establishmentarian. It certainly puts those wan so-called Fine Gael attack ads from the beginning of the year (see the billboard discussions here!)into the shade, in terms of professionalism, the personalised nature and focus.

There is a clever reference to Barack Obama's website at the end but his camp have hotly denied any involvement.

In the double-cross conspiracy theories, some people believe that Hillary's people put it up so they could put about the suggestion that Barack Obama's people were getting so desperate they had to resort to attacking her.

Anyways, as far as political advertising in this country goes, let's paraphrase a very famous sentence from 1917 in Russia: I have seen the future and it sucks!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wasn't it you who started the whole attack ad campaign when you wrote about Fine Gael's poster campaign?

Unknown said...

I discussed the tame nature of the so called attack ads over on Richard Delevan's blog back in Jan when you were breaking (were you breaking it or telling it, I'm not completely au fait with the journalistic terminology) the story. The FG posters were soft enough in the general run of such things.

Harry McGee said...

Telling it. The story came out of an interview with Enda Kenny. There was no Deep Throat! Yep, they were tame enough. Tamer still when they ducked out of showing the image of McDowell, opting instead for a wan picture of a desert island. It made no sense. Also the posters were too busy. There was so much information that it took a couple of minutes to figure out that it was an anti-, and not pro-, Government campaign. H.