Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Chapter 2
Lecture Builders
Philip de Vellis’s Vote Different ad
The opening of the YouTube video is instantly familiar—Apple’s iconic “1984” Super Bowl
commercial featuring dark Orwellian imagery created by famed director Ridley Scott streams out. But
what’s going on here? Instead of television screens filled with Big Brother spouting ideology at the
colorless marching drones, it’s Hillary Clinton’s face and voice from her presidential campaign
announcement video. At the close of the video comes the text, “On January 14th, the Democratic
primary will begin. And you’ll see why 2008 won’t be like ‘1984.’” The one-minute clip then ends with a
letter O stylized to resemble the rainbow Apple logo, above the Web address of rival Democratic
presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
The mash-up video appeared to come from Obama’s campaign, though of course it didn’t. But
it’s a fascinating look at how user-created video sites such as YouTube changed the nature of the 2008
presidential campaign. You had a zero-cost distribution network through which individual people
enthralled by the video distributed it virally through blogs and e-mails. Messages were going out that no
candidate financed or approved.
Once posted, the video became one of the hottest user-created videos on the Web. Over an 18-
day period, the clip was viewed more than 2.5 million times, and over the course of the 2008 campaign
it was viewed more than 4 million times.
There was endless speculation about who created it and, just as important, why. The user name
of the video poster was “ParkRidge47,” a subtle poke at Senator Clinton, who was born in 1947 and was
raised in the Park Ridge, Illinois, area.
1
The response to the video was fascinating. Obama, appearing on the Larry King Live show,
denied having anything to do with the video, but he spoke admiringly about it:
[W]e knew nothing about it. I just saw it for the first time. And, you know, one of the
things about the Internet is that people generate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, it’s—
it’s the democratization of the campaign process. . . . But it’s not something that we
had anything to do with or were aware of and, given what it looks like, frankly we
don’t have the technical capacity to create something like that. It’s pretty
extraordinary.
2
The accusations and rumors about the identity of the creator were all over the place. Of course,
some fingered the Obama campaign, while others accused Republican activist groups similar to Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth (who helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004). Eventually the
liberal-leaning website the Huffington Post tracked the video back to Phil de Vellis, who had been an
Internet consultant for an Ohio Democratic Senate candidate and also worked for a Democratic Internet
1
Michah L. Sifry, “Parkridge47: Not an R, and Not Bill Hillsman,” Personal Democracy Forum, March 21, 2007,
www.techpresident.com/node/173.
2
Larry King, interview with Barack Obama, CNN Larry King Live, March 19, 2007,
transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0703/19/lkl.01.html.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
consulting firm.
3
In his own post on Huffington’s blog, de Vellis acknowledged creating the video:
I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the
Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can
affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made
this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it—by people of all political
persuasions—will follow. This shows that the future of American politics rests in
the hands of ordinary citizens…This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not
be the last. The game has changed.
4
The amazing thing was how easy it was for de Vellis to produce the ad. He told Vanity Fair’s
James Wolcott, “I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a
Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs.”
5
Prior to becoming a
full-time political consultant, de Vellis was a freelance video editor and graphics designer in Los Angeles.
He has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. After de Vellis was
outed as the creator of “Vote Different,” he was terminated by his employer, Blue State Digital, but he
was soon hired to be the vice president of new media for Murphy Putnam Media.
De Vellis was correct when he said that the political advertising game had changed. During the
general election campaign, the best video supporting Obama came not from the campaign but rather
from Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. The video “Yes We Can” features speeches by Obama overlaid by
a wide range of popular performers singing and speaking. Like “Vote Different,” it was created as a
personal project by a skilled media professional with no connection to the campaign. Numerous
advertising journalists, including Ad Age’s Bob Garfield and Business Week’s David Kiley, called “Yes We
Can” the best marketing message of 2008.
6
Clay Johnson, the head of Blue State Digital, in an interview conducted before de Vellis was
revealed as the video’s creator, spoke to the challenges of user–created video. “The real trouble . . . is
that as people get more sophisticated in producing these videos, you’re going to see a very large blur in
what’s official and what’s not.”
7
In this simple statement, Johnson is putting forward Truth Two—There are no mainstream
media; Truth Three—Everything from the margin moves to the center, and, by implication, Truth Five—
New media are always scary. The “Vote Different” and “Yes We Can” videos show how new tools, such
as YouTube videos, are becoming a growing part of the political process. What makes user-produced
videos so scary to those in the business of politics is that the videos can’t be controlled. They aren’t yet
regulated—at least as of this writing—by the Federal Election Commission; they can be produced by
anyone with talent and a halfway-decent computer; and they can reach a worldwide audience almost
instantly at little cost to the producer.
Here are links to the two videos mentioned here:
3
Arianna Huffington, “Who Created ‘Hillary 1984’? Mystery Solved,” Huffington Post, March 21, 2007,
www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/who-created-hillary-1984_b_43978.html.
4
Phil de Vellis, “I Made the ‘Vote Different’ Ad,” Huffington Post, March 21, 2007, www.huffingtonpost.com/phil–
de-vellis-aka-parkridge/i-made-the-vote-differen_b_43989.html.
5
James Wolcott, “The YouTube Election,” Vanity Fair, June 2007.
6
Bob Garfield, “Ads Garfield Loved,” Advertising Age, December 15, 2008, adage.com/article?article_id=133200;
David Kiley; “Best Message Creation of 2008: The Winner Is Will I.Am,” Business Week, December 31, 2008,
www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2008/12/best_message_cr.html.
7
Sarah Lai Stirland, “Fears of a YouTube Swiftboat,” Wired News, March 23, 2007,
www.wired.com/news/politics/0,73069-0.html?tw=rss.politics.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
• http://ralphehanson.com/blog/archive_07_03.html#032207_1984
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
Material on political influence
Our understanding of the media and the campaign process has evolved over the past hundred
years. In the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars and critics worried that voters might be
manipulated and controlled by campaign messages sent through the media, especially those that might
be sent subliminally. This understanding changed in the 1940s and 1950s as scholars came to suspect
that media effects might in fact be selective and indirect. Currently, it is believed that an interactional
relationship exists among politicians, the press, and the public in which each influences the others.
How Do Political Campaigns Affect Voters?
If, as The People’s Choice study indicates, campaigns do not have strong direct effects on voters,
what are candidates trying to accomplish with their campaigns? They may be trying to directly persuade
voters with the content of the messages, but more likely they are trying to shape the campaign in
subtler ways. These are interactional models that say that the interaction among voters, the media, and
the campaigns that are triggered by the ads are more important than any direct persuasion of voters.
Here are two examples:
The resonance model says that the candidate’s success depends in part on how well his or her
basic message resonates with voters’ preexisting political feelings. Thus, the candidate who does the
best job of sending out messages that connect with target voters is the one most likely to win. The
communication goal for the campaign is not so much to get people to change their minds as it is to get
voters to believe that they share viewpoints with the candidate.
8
The resonance model was clearly used
in the 2008 campaign in ads by both Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate
John McCain. Obama got strong resonance out of a commercial that claimed McCain was out of touch
with ordinary people because he didn’t know how many houses he owned. McCain got a similar
resonance by charging Obama with being more of a celebrity than a serious politician.
The competitive model looks at the campaign not in isolation, but as a competition between
two or more candidates for the hearts and minds of voters. Hence the success of a campaign message,
such as a speech that criticizes the candidate’s opponent, depends as much on the opponent’s reaction
as it does on the message itself. Voter response can also depend on how the media react to the
message. If the message attracts media attention, it may be played repeatedly on news broadcasts, as
well as on political talk shows.
9
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, candidate Hillary
8
Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut, “Obama Joins Race with Goals Set High,” Washington Post, February 11, 2007.
9
Stephen Ansolabehere, Shanto Iyengar, and Adam Simon, “Shifting Perspectives on the Effects of Campaign
Communication,” in Do the Media Govern? Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America, ed. Shanto Iyengar
and Richard Reeves (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997).
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Clinton leveled charges against Obama that he had lifted political rhetoric from Massachusetts governor
Deval Patrick. Similar charges that Sen. Joe Biden had lifted a speech from the British Labor Party leader
helped sink his campaign for the presidency back in 1988.
10
But Obama did not suffer the same sort of damage that Biden did. Why not? First, Obama and
Governor Patrick are friends, they share the same political adviser, and they have long shared a similar
message. Second, Patrick did not object to the use of his words. Finally, Obama did not react particularly
defensively to the charges of plagiarism. So, according to the competitive model, the public’s direct
reaction to the charges didn’t matter as much as how the public reacted to Obama’s reaction to the
charges.
MEDIA THEORY NOTES: McLUHAN: Marshall McLuhan was famous for his quote “The medium
is the message.” Now it is absurd to argue that there is no importance in the actual message. Rhetorical
theorist Kenneth Burke says to imagine you are given a warning that you have an enemy coming to kill
you. You will want to know who the enemy is and why he hates you. You want to know more than just
what channel was used to transmit the message. But McLuhan was not really trying to say that the
message itself was unimportant. Instead he meant that media have effects beyond the messages they
transmit.
McLuhan argues that the changing nature of our communication technology changes how we
use our senses to perceive the world. When we lived in an era where all of our media were printed, we
used rational, linear arguments because we were accustomed to the linear nature of print. Now that we
live in a video age, we pay more attention to our feelings and to what McLuhan considered to be more
expressive communication.
McLuhan died in 1980, not long before MTV first went on the air, but he would have loved the
implications of the music video channel. For music videos are media with very little content. There is a
stream of music and images that individually might make sense, but more often have little to do with
one another. MTV, McLuhan might have argued, is almost pure medium―a series of beautiful,
interesting, or shocking images and sounds that push to the limits the technological capabilities of cable
television. The message of MTV might be that life is a series of brief images that capture our imagination
because they are flashy, interesting, sexy, or violent.
MEDIA THEORY NOTES: MACARTHUR DAY PARADE: One of the most visionary of the early TV
studies was conducted by Kurt and Gladys Lang in the late 1950s. They wanted to know how people
perceived an event differently when they viewed it on television rather than when they experienced it in
person. To find out, they positioned 31 observers around Chicago to study how people responded to the
parade honoring General Douglas MacArthur and then compared their feelings to those who viewed the
parade on television.
10
Howard Kurtz, “Media Notes: Big Day or Non–Event?” Washington Post, February 19, 2008, www.washington
post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/19 /AR2008021900844.html?referrer= emailarticle.
