Fiorina Camp Thrilled with Sheep's Legs
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, February 5 2010
Credit: Carly for CaliforniaThe Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin finds that the Carly Fiorina campaign is taking the "all publicity is good publicity" approach to the fact that its "demon sheep" documentary short has become an Internet wonder:
A spokeswoman for Fiorina, Julie Soderlund, told The Daily Beast that they were “energized” by the ad's response, citing its YouTube traffic as “a great success” and said that [Tom] Campbell “played right into our hands” by sending out the video himself. The ad's myriad critics are an asset—helping to spread the word—rather than a hindrance, this argument goes. “It's been touted as the most genius ad ever all the way down to the worst, but no matter what, people are talking about it and it generates views,” Soderlund said. She added that the viral response to the video was intentional, “though we were surprised how far and wide it went—and very pleased.”
As it turns out, the ad was the product of Fred Davis, the Republican ad man also behind the "Celebrity" spot from the 2008 campaign that painted Barack Obama as on par with Paris Hilton and other global figures. If a big splash is what they were after, it seems to have worked: the ad has been watched more than 400,000 times in the last three days.
What makes the demon sheep ad so darn compelling? Many commentators have focused on the moment when, near the two-and-a-half minute mark, the faux-sheep's eyes began to turn a fiery, glowing red. Fair enough. But there's really so much more to the spot than that one moment, no matter how attention-grabbing and frightening it might be. For examples, here are five other parts of the Demon Sheep experience that just have to make you scratch your head:
- As the ad opens, the phrases splashed across the screen are "purity," "piety," "honorable," and even "true believer." Cut to a field of sheep -- because those are qualities that the ovine species is known for?
- The female voices over celebrates true fiscally conservative leaders as "men we admire [and] aspire to be," despite the fact that the ad is for Carly Fiorina, an entirely female candidate who is positioning herself as a fiscal conservative.
- When the ad discusses the evils of budget pork, a picture of a peaceful sheep is flashed on the screen. This in a narrative structure where the sheep are playing the role of the the good guys.
- The narrator speeds up very quickly to say FiscalConservativeInNameOnly so it doesn't seem to be such an awkward and endless mouthful. Of course, having to race through saying it only proves how ungainly a phrase it is.
- At one point in the ad, the Campbell/evil wolf character is raised up on a pedestal, only to be struck by lightening, causing him to topple in slo-mo to the ground as the voiceover intones, voice-of-God style, "leaving...but one...way...to fall." And that, my friends, is just pretty weird.
Fellow Republican candidate Chuck DeVore, so as not to be left out of the party, is making use of YouTube's overlay feature to update an web spot from September in which DeVore pledged that his campaign wouldn't be run on silly slogans. The new, timely, annotation on the video clip? "We also promise to never use Demon Sheep in our ads."