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Bret L Bret L is offline
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Default Carly Fiorina's ad campaign

((I have on my desk here an ancient HP 200CD sine wave generator. The
price of a decent used car in its day, I bought it for $20 at a
hamfest. I've had it for probably nigh on twenty years and have never
had to even open it up, despite the fact it's packed with tubes, it
just works and works and works. It was probably built in the late 50s
judging by its color and the permanently attached power cord. Back
then HP was a serious company. Carly Fiorina did not singlehandedly
destroy it, but she was a major player in its slide to being a vendor
of consumer computer **** and having alienated large chunks of its
long-loyal scientific and business computer user base, as well as
spinning off its traditional core business of test equipment as
Agilent. Carly, despite her rock star persona (Forbes once put her on
a cover which was a slightly detoned homage to one of the biggest pop
albums of the late 70s) was in fact a singularly incompetent leader.
So the idiot GOP in Kalifornia wants to run her for the US Senate. It
figures. Bret.))


Campaign ad with sheep: The nation is flocking to it


By Mark Z. Barabak


"Reporting from San Francisco - Fred Davis -- the man who introduced vermin, Paris Hilton, bad hair and now demonic mutton into our political discourse -- is a bit taken aback by the reaction to his latest creation. "More sheep in my day than I was expecting," he said after sorting through messages from reporters across the country, all of them wanting to talk about the online video -- an instant cult classic -- he created for Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina. "You certainly never know what's going to catch on."


The spot, posted Wednesday, assails rival Tom Campbell as a profligate
wolf in fiscal-conservative-sheep's clothing. (A tortured description,
perhaps, but no stranger than the imagery, which includes sheep
gamboling and grazing, lightning bolts, a Roman column and a man
covered in sheepskin crawling on all fours and leering with a glowing
red eye.)

Much of the response has been of the "What were they thinking?"
variety, though Davis estimated the reviews have been split 50-50.
Regardless, he noted that plenty of people are talking about the ad,
which has been broadcast nationwide on cable TV and viewed more than
500,000 times on YouTube. The tag #demonsheep instantly surged near
the top of Twitter's trending topics.

"My goal is to get things noticed," Davis said. "The best you can hope
for is water cooler talk. People are blasting it as the most insane ad
ever. Others are calling it a stroke of genius. If, when the furor
dies down, they simply remember they should maybe question whether Tom
Campbell is telling them the truth, then it will have been a success."

The Campbell camp, for its part, called the ad a sign of desperation
-- a "full mutton meltdown," as spokesman Jamie Fisfis put it. The
third major GOP Senate hopeful, Irvine Assemblyman Chuck Devore,
produced his own video, tongue firmly in cheek, forswearing "silly
slogans" and the political display of satanic sheep.

Davis, a Hollywood-based consultant, operates with the instincts of a
political guerrilla (think Abbie Hoffman, not Che Guevara), often
wielding humor as his weapon of choice.

He was the man behind the flashbulb-popping 2008 ad comparing
celebrity candidate Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, which proved the
most effective John McCain spot of the campaign, as Obama aides
grudgingly conceded. More recently, he created a loopy ad for Andy
McKenna, a GOP candidate for Illinois governor, placing the luxuriant
mane of the disgraced Rod Blagojevich on men, women, children and even
the Capitol dome in Springfield. (McKenna finished third in Tuesday's
primary.)

But the closest comparison to the Fiorina spot, in its feral audacity
and the response, is the commercial Davis created in the 2002 Georgia
governor's race for a little-known, underfunded farmer named Sonny
Perdue.

The ad showed a giant rat -- with a gold crown and bling spelling
"King Roy" -- marauding Godzilla-like across the Georgia countryside
and scaling the state Capitol.

A "shameful display of bad judgment . . . sad and disappointing," said
Gov. Roy Barnes' campaign manager. Others denounced the spot as just
plain weird.

Still . . .

"Last I checked, Sonny Perdue was governor of Georgia," Davis said.

So the latest barrage of ridicule concerns him not at all. "When
you're in a state where it costs $5 million to run a 30-second ad
statewide . . . you have to think differently. You have to think
outside the box," Davis said. "It's tough to get the attention of
people in California. This has caught the attention of people across
the country."

For the record, the role of the stealth sheep was played by a nameless
crew member. "Not a professional sheep impersonator," Davis said, "or
anything like that."

In fact, the auteur in him was almost apologetic about the low-budget
production. "The rat costume cost about $20,000," Davis said, sounding
almost wistful. "This one probably cost $200."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,7555072.story
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