shouting loudly

You’ve probably seen or heard something about Carly Fiorina’s “demonsheep” commercial.  Here it is, in case you haven’t:

The payoff from this 3:21 second campaign “commercial” comes at the end, when a person in a homemade sheep outfit with laser-demon-eyes appears behind a tree, supposedly indicating a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It’s hilariously amateurish, and has become an immediate hit among political campaign professionals on twitter.

In the course of receiving ridicule on the cable talk shows (or at least Olbermann and Maddow, which I’m currently recording for a new data collection project), Fiorina’s ad has also gotten heavy play.  Therein lies its brilliance.  This campaign commercial was obviously never meant for the mass media airwaves.  It’s 3:21 long!  What the Fiorina campaign has done is craft something goofy enough to go viral — based not on its message, but on its amateurish nature.  In so doing, clips from the video get bootstrapped into the mainstream media and the major political blogs.

Now this approach has its downside.  The news frame is around how ridiculous Fiorina’s campaign is, rather than around her opponent’s fiscal record.  Stories about campaign mismanagement are not generally viewed as a positive.  Likewise, I personally can’t recall the name of the opponent in this attack ad, and I’ve watched it several times already.  For attack ads to stick, your audience probably has to know who is being attacked (particularly in a big open primary where we can’t just default to “the other guy”).

Nonetheless, I’d be interested to see just how much this “campaign ad” cost to produce.  If I had to guess, I’d say “peanuts.”  And at a cost of peanuts, I’d say the payoff is pretty impressive.  Fiorina’s opponent as “FCINO – Fiscal Conservative in Name Only” is approaching meme status, and getting heavy play in youtube remixes.  Compare that to the costs and payoffs from an everyday attack ad, produced to be actually aired, a few weeks before the election.  They almost belong as separate budgetary line-items.  There are “real” ads, which seek to move the dial through resource-intensive mainstream media political persuasion, and there are “youtube” ads, which seek to go viral and thus attract a lot of earned media (campaign-speak for free coverage on the news shows) at practically no cost.

To the extent that youtube ads are a new genre in and of themselves, “demonsheep” is a hit.  It’s a hit specifically because of its lo-fi feel, inviting ridicule of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 variety.  In this new arena of campaign communications, the goal is to be remixed, mocked, or copied.  As with so much of youtube’s content, it seems that “be original, be humorous” is the categorical imperative.