On Forgiving Hollywood

I don't know about you, but I've always been irrationally irritated by celebrities telling me... well, really, anything. Anything that wasn't scripted, and directed. And edited. I'm not interested in the out-takes.

I've written about the relationship between celebrity culture and politics in the past. It's certainly a powerful thing. Will.i.am's lovely and moving ode to Barack Obama, "Yes, We Can" is celebuganda (that sounded better in my head than it looks in writing) at its finest.

So I was ready to hate on the "Don't Vote" video making the rounds on social networks this week. Another 2 minutes of preachy, uniformed, judgmental, arrogant SEAN PENNs, for god's sake.

Well, for starters, it was WAY over 2 minutes. And it was... compelling. And not preachy. And sort of... sincere. And funny. And if I weren't already registered to vote, I would have done so. Because I hate keeping Leo waiting.

Art & Understanding

Our friend Glenn Sanders has created a cool blog in celebration of political art. Called "Political Poster: The Art of the Campaign," Glenn's collecting images related to the current presidential election, posters for-and-against both tickets.

I touched on the subject of political art in a prior post, but in light of the rapidly expanding body of work related to the 2008 campaign, wanted to offer some additional thoughts on the subject.

Politically-themed art is designed to provoke; to offer ideas and stimulate thinking. To agitate on behalf of a person or position. It uses a simple visual language to communicate vast notions. It reflects culture's zeitgeist. But it also, obviously, intends to shape it.

In the excellent blog "Running Yellow Lights," its author discusses the weaknesses inherent in political art:

"Art runs into problems when it stops trying to answer questions of what values we should hold and instead answers how we should get there. Art can tell us it’s a bad thing people are poor; it cannot tell us whether the government can fix it. Art can tell us to consider divinity; it cannot tell us to support churches with the state.

"Believing art can have any impact on whether we should end a specific war or support free market capitalism misses this point entirely... Art cannot reasonably answer political questions. It can sway political questions as to the values one should fight for, such as the what and the why. Through more effective means we can answer the questions of the whether, the how, and the how much... The communicative role of art is essential and important in the way we may form values, but it should never grasp pretensions of being better than empirics and logic in defining the feasibility of the means that may emerge from the values."

A gorgeous way of saying: do not rely on the simplistic idealization of issues to form your opinions. Posters just frame the question; your actual political views should not fit on a t-shirt. The road to change is not a slogan: it requires the hard work of understanding.

When Social Networking Gets Dirty

Social networking has provided a generous playground for the cyber bully. A friend who works as CMO for a great organization called CommonSenseMedia.org – an online resource for families who are looking for kid-friendly, parent-approved content – has found she's also educating parents on what happens between kids on the web: gossip and innuendo, anonymous reputation-destruction, false identities. Bullying moves from the schoolyard to MySpace.

I recently was sent a link to a blog which has been created on behalf of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Entitled "Welcome to the PalinDrome," it purports to tell Palin's story in her own voice. I appreciate satire – a lot, actually – but this seems more like anonymous bullying than deft wielding of the "weapon of wit."

Decorated with amusing images of howling wolves, Sarah's psedoblogger waxes on cosmetic preferences (including the beer rinse which keeps one's hair shiny), possible baby names ("Cialis. Bristol just made this one up. Isn't it pretty?") and her unnamed opponent's history of "helping people in the ghetto avoid paying their electricity bills."

Yup, it's funny. But mean funny. And frankly, an unreturnable volley. The idea of assuming another's identity in order to mock them is a swell idea, but imagine its use against our current Democratic presidential candidate. Apparently it's not white men, but white trash, who are the last unprotected class.

Jay Leno... David Letterman... Okay, Craig R. Smith Speaks Out

Perhaps I should start by saying I'm not a big Leno fan. Mostly because I can't stay awake that late. But there's a curious email thread working its way around the internet, which neatly reinforced the political power of a media personality – coincidently condemning the very media that created him. The subject line in the email I received: "A Perspective by Jay Leno." Jay Leno, huh? I opened it.

First of all: it's mis-attributed. Snopes.com has seen the story credited to David Letterman as well as Leno, but its author was actually Craig R. Smith, an author and political commentator of somewhat lesser renown. But who forwards an email from Craig Smith? Hell, it sounds like an alias. Although one might have had a clue that the famous rarely bite the hand that feeds them, or at least live to tell the tale.

Attaching celebrity gives the message exponential power. Think about Yahoo! Answers, and the questions posed by personalities from Bono to Stephen Hawking to Al Gore. They attracted tens of thousands into a conversation that, had the topic been posed by me, would have been as well-read as this blog.

The article by Craig Smith is long, but well worth a read, in consideration of both the cultural cachet of fame in the political arena, as well as a gentle reminder that we should be grateful every day for what we have.

Oh – and the article's actual title?: "Made in the USA: Spoiled Brats."

Politics and the Olympics

Back to the funny papers again...

An ad agency network recently experienced a rather awkward public clash of conflicting sentiment toward China.  Two offices serve very large global clients with Olympic sponsorships.  A third has a long-standing relationship with Amnesty International.  Each produced work on behalf of their respective client – and understandably, demonstrated very different points of view on the nature of humanity.

The Olympics, despite protestations that it is an apolitical celebration of athleticism, transcending boundaries and skirmishes, petty and otherwise, is about flags.  Anthems.   Nationalism.  And beating ("smashing!" say the French swimmers) other countries.  Sounds almost... warlike... when you think about it.  Politics continues to overshadow these games, as it has many before, from Moscow to Berlin to Mexico City.

Prickly City (not to be confused with Mexico City) is a politically-conservative comic strip that runs in the LA Times.  It's theme over the past week or so has been China and the Olympics – and notably, China's relationship with Tibet.  After kicking off the series with the strip shown above, each subsequent day has featured an end panel in which one of the characters is viewed through prison bars.  

Human rights makes strange bedfellows.  Tibet: it's not just for liberals anymore.  And it's not going away because we're pretending the Olympics isn't political.

Wag the Dog

What if John Edwards secretly arranged for Russia to send troops into Georgia in order to distract from media coverage of his illicit affair?  

And damn that Fox News, for refusing to take the bait.  

Watch this great clip, in which Gregg Jarrett interviews Bonnie Erbe of PBS.  His dogged commitment to delivering a titillating piece on Edwards is impressive, as he repeatedly rebuffs Erbe's attempt to insert substance into the discussion.

The SmackTalk Express

John McCain has become well known for his stream-of-consciousness campaign-bus gabfest, the "Straight Talk Express."  His ability to engage – nay, enchant – the media in this oddly informal group format has been one of the strongest aspects of a generally weak campaign.  Vanity Fair recently noted this phenomenon in an article by James Wolcott called "Mad About the Guy," describing the almost irrational attraction grown men (in particular) feel for McCain when they meet him in person – in contrast to the Beatles-like mass hysteria induced by Obama.

Although clearly, the bromance doesn't extend to the relationship between the two candidates themselves.  Beyond the obligatory cordial mutual-respect thing, and the predictable sniping of "celebrity" versus "old guy," the Obama organization has created a unique criticism-debunking tool: The Low Road Express, a virtual Snopes.com of Obama rumor and innuendo.  It's motto, "Seen a low blow?  Let us know!," suggests a comrade-lite approach to keeping an eye on your neighbor's propaganda.

Paris for President

OMG (as they say) – this is the best freakin' thing I've seen in this campaign.  Actually, in any campaign, ever.

McCain's "celebrity" ads have been garnering a lot of attention, comparing Obama to shallow mononomial paparazzi-magnets like Paris and Britney.  The Yes, he's The One, but is he Ready to Lead? message. It's oddly compelling, if not exactly platform-differentiating.  I'd been hoping for something of substance soon.

Well today, Paris was the one that stepped up.

Her response video is brilliant.  And OMG again: Paris has the most sound energy policy that's been put forth by any candidate this election.  She's like, totally got my vote.

I Look Like Facebook

Just read an article on Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, who left the company in early 2007 to work on the Obama campaign.  He's been harnessing the power of the online masses in a way that Howard Dean's campaign only dreamed of, turning MyBarackObama.com into a hub of organizing, networking, fundraising and rumor-debunking.  (More on the rumor-debunking part later – his organization is running a veritable Snopes.com of negative press on the candidate, which is nothing short of revolutionary campaign management.)

There was an interesting reference in the article regarding a comment made by Clinton's campaign advisors, when she was still in the race.  They minimized the impact of the Obama supporter  base and its Internet roots; Mark Penn was attributed with the quote "They look like Facebook."  He expanded: "Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state."

What I Meant to Say Was...

My pal and colleague Robbie recently sent the following to me:

"If you're as fascinated as me about the role of the web in this year's big election, check this out:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/mccain-campaign.html."

One of the most effective tactics a politician can use against an opponent is to show them contradicting themselves.  To that end, an automated "change-tracking" service called Versionista has been employed by the McCain campaign to compare Barack Obama's tweaks to his policy statements regarding the Iraq War.  Versionista is based on the same concept as Wikipedia – that encyclopedia of democracy – where updates people make to entries are followed over time so you can watch the world argue with itself over what constitutes the "truth."

Back in November, the DNC launched "Flipper TV," the video equivalent of Versionista, which pools and compares campaign footage filmed by citizen journalists with digital cameras.  The idea behind both concepts is to capture contradictions that candidates make during campaigns.

Check out the article; it's an interesting side-by-side comparison of how a candidate's views reflect the audience they're addressing and the changes in popular opinion that influence their rhetoric... This is what mash-ups were meant for: using technology to help you evaluate your options. 

Welcome Back, Gary Trudeau

Is there any form of political discourse more enchanting that the cartoon?  What a righteous tradition of satire and commentary, celebration and commemoration. 

As I'm probably the only person who still reads the LA Times in paper format, I always feel compelled to share with others what cartoonists are talking about.  My husband finds this totally unfunny.  Interestingly, the Times is almost pathologically "fair" in its balance of liberal and conservative political viewpoints in the funny pages.  For that matter, it equally represents nearly every ethnicity, race, gender, age and sexual orientation, including talking animals of both the mammalian and reptilian persuasion.  Never have I seen such democracy in action as in the LA Times comics.

But to the point: Gary Trudeau went on a sabbatical for a while.  And I felt like I'd lost my perspective on things.  

If you've followed him over the decades, you've watched him, for lack of a better word, mellow.  His observations, while still delivered on the tip of a razor-sharp scalpel, are more considered.  For example, while his disdain for the Bush administration is as pointed as ever, his commentary on the war in Iraq – and more accurately, the soldiers in Iraq – is heartbreakingly beautiful.  I poked around on his site to find out how long he'd be incommunicado, and I found a really surprising thing: a section on doonesbury.com called The Sandbox.  It's a blog made available to servicepeople in Iraq and Afganistan, allowing them to document their experiences and thoughts for readers around the world.  It's a treasure.

Welcome back, Gary.  All is right in the world again.

Softball

I'm feeling ranty today, regarding the frustrating state of political debate.  As the blogosphere twitters on about yet another piece of campaign propaganda, I wonder why people who profess to have a genuine interest in how technology and the political process have intertwined can so easily become cheerleaders for its lowest-common-denominator use.

If you think of Yahoo!'s candidate mash-up from earlier this year, you saw a brilliant use of technology to help people form educated opinions.  While it's certainly the nature of culture – and especially digital culture – to create memes, it's just so... intellectually lazy.

Today's poster child is the video "I'm Voting Republican."  It's a kind of sophomoric attempt to frame the right as the source of all evil, not to mention quite mindless in their pursuit thereof.  As of this morning, it's been viewed by over 3 million people.  Understandably, it's been commented on by nearly 30,000.  The discourse is not exactly give-and-take, nor especially eloquent (my personal favorite rebuttal: "I'm voting Democrat because I want free stuff.  Abortion is murder."), it's a fairly predictable response to polarizing campaign rhetoric.

If your attempt to position yourself by framing your opposition, expect the counter-attack.  It's Marketing 101.  If you claim to stand for something great by claiming your opponent stands for something worse, you don't change minds.  And so we death-spiral into five months of unenlightening generalization-lobbing.  I feel sorry for those folks who really do want the kind of meaningful information that can help them decide, if this is what cheerfully passes for "campaigning."

The Best Technorati Rumor All Day

Okay, this has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with culture....  I just read on Technorati that Leonardo DiCaprio has been tapped to play the role of my friend and fellow NeoEdge board member, Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, in a new biopic.

Technorati Profile

User-Generated Politics

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Yahoo!-sponsored panel discussion at the American Association of Political Consultants' annual meeting in Santa Monica, CA, on the subject of Politics & Online Advertising.  You can tell by the title of the session that the thinking on the subject was already pretty narrow.

I conducted a highly informal poll (of employees in our NY and LA offices, to be exact, naturally limiting my respondents to kids under 30 who both read and respond to "Public" emails), and asked them a couple of questions.  Where were they currently getting their information on candidates and issues?  What sources did they find most credible?  What did they feel was missing from the the media that would help them to be a better-educated voter?

Not unexpectedly, very few respondents got their information from traditional mainstream media channels.  If they did, it was through the .com versions of a CNN or MSN.  Where the real education process was occurring was through user-generated content.  Sometimes it was facilitated through a moderated channel (Yahoo!'s Democratic Candidate Mash-Up, or YouTube's Virtual Republican Debate) and then shared with others, but frequently the message was consumed in the form of actual content created by friends, or "friends" – those trustworthy individuals you've never actually met – and passed along through their networks.

I showed the audience a short video of what the next generation of voters was using to make decisions.

The consultants attending the AAPC panel were sort of stunned that they had effectively lost control of so much of their candidate's message.  Most were neither monitoring, responding to, or more importantly, creating any of the dialog that was happening in the world regarding their cherished and carefully-crafted brands.  They were quite proud that they'd translated fundraising activities to online channels, but few were thinking about what else was circulating along with their highly-optimized pleas for support.

I love democracy in action; in the world of UGC, there is not universal truth, only my truth.  And depending on how provocative or entertaining the "truth" is, I can influence more voters than a 30-second ad run on national television, costing millions of dollars.  I can create a national dialog around a subject that the party may not have registered as worthy of discussion.  Hell, I can create a national dialog around an outright lie.

The managers of "brands," whether consumer goods or political candidates, are navigating a new landscape, and their participation in social media is not optional.  Be the creators of the content, be worthy of engagement on a subject you want to talk about – but at the very least, know what's going on out there and be prepared to respond to it.

Oh: and the kids' answer to my question "What's missing from the mainstream media?"

"The truth."

Shepard Fairey and the Art of Politics

In political discourse, which is more powerful, the idea or the image?

While art has always reflected (or rejected) the state of politics surrounding it, graphic art – technically, "commercial" art (remember that term, my fellow aging art directors?), that particular brand of art and commerce – actually intends to shape politics. Communist governments have long understood the power of iconography, and the nature of the singular, undebated, undiscussed, non-negotiable thought.

The Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster (note the candidate at right, looking wistfully left) is a really gorgeous piece of propaganda. But, truthfully, every time I come across one, it always leaves me vaguely... disturbed. I have enormous respect for the icon. Love those little humanoid figures in the skirts that tell me which restroom to use. Dig the peace sign. But can you capture something as complex as a political platform in a single word and a searching look into the middle distance? Are we also starving for icons that simplify our positions, allowing us to demonstrate the enormity of our thinking to each other in shorthand?

Or is the icon intellectually lazy? Does it subvert questions, rather than provoke them? Should our deepest beliefs fit on a t-shirt?

Maybe what bothers me is Jack Welch famously saying, "Hope is not a strategy." But here it is, saying everything, saying nothing. But man, it's beautiful.

Politics and Social Media

Been thinking a lot about the intersection of politics and culture these days.  I had the opportunity to go to Russia last fall, and as we watch the regressive Putin political agenda come into play this Spring, it's interesting to contemplate the role of culture in disseminating – or debunking – political propaganda.

Under Stalin's Soviet era, there was a single approved art form, Socialist Realism, which was mandated as the "national style."  All other forms of art, including Russia's rich history of abstraction and constructivism, were banned as "irrelevant" to the Communist ideal.  When Stalin died in 1953, the official aesthetic continued, although by the 1970s, dissident artists used the style ironically to criticize the communist system.

While I was in Moscow, I spent time with a woman from our local office, whose uncle was one of a well-known collective of protest artists in the mid-70s.  His work now hung in Moscow's Museum of Modern Art (a wildly decrepit post-modern wonder), and the last weekend I was there, the museum featured an exhibit of one of his fellow painter's work.  It was amazing to walk with her through the exhibit as she translated the text in the paintings – they were huge canvases in the Socialist Realist style, overlaid with bold red graphics, often common phrases from Russian life.  We stared at a painting of the Kremlin together, over which enormous red text was painted.  "I don't get it," she said.  "It's a sticker that's on all the windows on trains.  It says, 'Do not lean.'"  

I explained the double meaning to her.

Culture, in the form of art, has always had a role in social and political commentary.  Marat Guelman, Russia's first post-Soviet-era gallery owner, is also a political consultant.  Most of the art he supports is anti-Putin – although interestingly, Guelman once consulted with the president, before resigning.

"Putin is trying to create absolute, vertical power," Guelman says.  "Under such a structure there is no need for creative people.  And so there are three options.  You can obey him; an entire political class has decided to obey Putin.  There is no opposition.  Or you emigrate.  Or you can construct your own parallel social media, and exist in it."

Now that's "social media."

Politics and Culture My Ass

Thoughts from the Advertising 2.0 conference: Politics and Culture panel discussion

Y'know, panel discussions are hard enough (christ, you can't get a freaking' word in edgewise), without panelists having something to sell.  I'm good with an ax to grind, or a POV (educated or otherwise) to expound, but ignoring the topic in order to convince an audience that your 100-year-old media brand is suddenly relevant because you can serve it up on a mobile device is just irritating.

The saving grace was getting to sit next to Kurt Anderson, founder of Spy magazine, and kind of a personal hero to me, journalistically speaking.  He offered an interesting counterpoint to the assertion by one of the mainstream media channels that they were experiencing "explosive" growth in news consumption among a younger demographic.  Kurt pointed out that it might be the "Obama Factor" – people, and especially younger people – are consuming Obama news, not... news.

Obama is the first legitimate digital political brand.  (My apologies to Ron Paul.)  He's simultaneously being created online by his own brilliant strategists, and thousands of anonymous and famous denizens of the web.  Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" video is the most powerful piece of propaganda since Leni Riefenstahl.  And don't read anything into that.  Barack Obama is a magnificent orator on his own.  Combine him with music, celebrity and message, and that's some powerful shit.

But the question plagues me: can a digital political brand be built without substance behind it?  I bet it could....