A few weeks ago
drewthaler wrote a wonderful diary (
Democrats, Mac OS X, Dean, and the iPod) comparing Apple computers and its CEO Steve Jobs to the Democratic Party and Howard Dean. I don't have anything quite so eloquent but I am going to quickly connect Apple to the Democratic party again via the iPod,
Moveon.org, and a man named George Masters.
Who is George Masters? He's a "36-year-old high school teacher from Orange County, California" who spent a couple of hours a day, over roughly the last five months working on his pet project:
a homemade ad for Apple's iPod (
300k video).
He created the spot in his spare time. Working a couple of hours at a time, the ad took five months to make.
How does this relate to anything? Well it seems to me to relate directly to Moveon's "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign last year. Individuals making their own ads, from their own perspectives, and their own sense of marketing. Only this relates to a product, not a campaign.
Experts are saying things like "Homemade ads will play a big part in marketing, just like blogging is shaking up the news", and indeed look at the Spread Firefox campaign as a prime example. This may be the case, however, I'm more interested in how this will relates to political campaigns in the future. Last election we saw lots of professional campaign/PAC ads all over the internet, and we saw tons of criticism on blogs about how weak many of these ads were and what we would have done instead, along with even some storyboarding. Perhaps by the next Presidential campaign we will be able to harness enough of the creative ability in the blogosphere to spread our own viral ad campaigns, and share the grassroots mesage from the grassroots itself?