Attytood reports:
Have any other Philadelphians seen a brand new anti-Obama attack ad that seems to have been literally dropped on Pennsylvania in the very final hours of the campaign? I saw it late last night on ESPN as I was falling asleep (like any true 49-year-old guy!) and it just aired again on the 10 a.m. rerun of "The Daily Show."
It's man-on-the-street type interviews with young voters in an urban, Philly-looking, setting. "Can you tell us your favorite Obama policy?," an off-screen narrator asks a couple of befuddled young voters, while a third young adult babbles something about "hope and vision." Then words are stamped on the screen: "You don't know Bama"...at least that what it looked like, I didn't see an "O" -- weird.
It says the ad is paid for by Morgan Warstler.
This 2000 article from Los Angeles magazine identifies him as a young "junk mail mogul":
This high-school-with-money model became the norm at Web shops like LOADtv, cofounded by a 29-year-old junk-mail mogul named Morgan Warstler. Flush with venture capital, Warstler rented an old bank building on the Sunset Strip and filled it with staff from his native Canton, Ohio. Former and current employees say they logged 75-hour workweeks producing Web programming targeted at what current CEO Jack Kennedy calls "low-hanging fruit" -- Gen Y computer nerds and skate punks.
I can't find any news about this ad, and oddly I couldn't find it on YouTube. Can anyone help with this one?
UPDATE: A March 2007 Vanity Fair article identified Warstler as "a thirtysomething entrepreneur who dabbles as a conservative operative" and says he's a close friend of Andrew Breitbart, longtime contributor to the Drudge Report.
UPDATE II: Hey, crowdsourcing works -- an alert reader helped track the ad down to its source.
You can watch it here.
It's a product of something that the above-mentioned Warstler is involved in called Saysme.tv, and here is a description of the venture:
Beginning with the highly polarized 2008 elections, SaysMe.tv allows you to participate in politics in a brand new way. For the first time ever, you will be able to use your campaign dollars to broadcast the messages you care about on TV. This begins in the form of sponsoring ads with your name at the end and will quickly grow into ways for you to create increasingly personalized messages by adding your own text, graphics and voice to commercials.
So....it seems to be something of a profit deal, when you go to the Web site you can see there are pro-Obama ads as well, and ads on other issues and candidates. As a business scheme, it may be a clever way for enthusiatic partisans to bypass the whole federal campaign finance system, by simply buying political commercials and airing them on local cable channels without coordinating with campaigns or affecting the spending limit.
It's just coincidence that the only two times I've seen their work are anti-Obama ads airing on Primary Day, right?
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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