Did you watch any of the Olympics over the weekend? If you did, than you probably caught at least one, if not both campaign commercials.
The ads were a brutal battlefield of contrasting images carefully crafted to distinguish the candidates from one another. McCain’s negative and baseless attack ad and Obama’s optimistic, yet substanceless fluff piece contrasted sharply, especially when they defined the candidates’ energy policies. Since energy is such an important issue right now, voters need only look at the below images to decide who to vote for.
Ok, ok, so despite picking the same images for renewable energy (wind turbines is an obvious and effective choice), the ads were pretty different. But I laughed when I saw that the two campaigns chose the exact same video.
The turnaround time is so tight on campaign commercials that they pretty much have to be 100% stock. This particular shot comes from the ubiquitous Getty Images. Perhaps Getty should commission a few dozen more shots of wind turbines. They have over 200 clips already, but apparently only this shot over Evanston, Wyoming is presidential material.
Full commercials after the jump.
LOL.
Posted by Ames | August 11, 2008, 12:15 pmActually I just remembered – one of the commenters pointed this out, but it was a while back, so I don’t think you saw it :-). He’ll be glad of the mainpage elevation though.
Posted by Ames | August 11, 2008, 12:30 pmNot that this has anything particularly substantive to add to the discussion, but…
Yeah! Wyoming!
Posted by Anzezzle | August 11, 2008, 12:34 pmGood thing they didn’t use this clip!
Posted by James F | August 11, 2008, 11:31 pmHa, I’d say that’s definitely worthy of being proud of, Anzezzle ;)
Was anyone else reminded of Futurama? In particular, the scene where two clones were having a presidential debate. “His 3% tax increase almost goes too far!” “His 3% tax increase doesn’t go not far enough!” Or something to that effect.
Posted by MattF | August 12, 2008, 6:06 pmInterestingly, when you license from Getty you can (usually? always?) pay extra for an exclusive license. Apparently neither party thought of this… I’d think it would be a nifty tactic to exclusively license all the best footage in a few key categories.
Or am I nuts?
Posted by John | August 13, 2008, 12:54 amYou’re right. If a campaign did start gobbling up stock footage, I’d be quite interested to see what they buy. It’d be kind of like those lists of domain name buys every campaign makes. First you buy a bunch of positive domains (votehope, changeisgood, etc etc). Then you try to head off your opponent’s attacks (flipflopobama, etc etc). Then your opponent buys a bunch of attack domains he never uses (the GOP bought fauxbama.com, hopelesshillary.com, and many others.)
It would be cool to see what images a campaign literally tries to “own.”
Posted by MattF | August 13, 2008, 10:24 am