A new Hillary Clinton ad from EMILY’s List, a PAC for female Democrat candidates, uses a popular meme to make the former secretary of state, senator, and first lady into a smarmy millennial mascot. In a gender-bending riff on the “Most Interesting Man in the World”—a commercial for Dos Equis beer that’s been cribbed and captioned in endless internet parody—Clinton is the “Most Interesting Woman in the World.” Another smarmy millennial mascot, self-styled new media renaissance man James Franco, narrates the ad in his signature sleepy stoner voice:
We can picture the brainstorm sessions and tortured focus groups that produced this gesture of generational pandering. According to a 2013 BuzzFeed post showing how publicly traded companies market to millennials, Franco has proven a boon to branding. President of contemporary brands at apparel company VF Corporation told investors that their partnership with Franco, who directed and starred in blue jean ads, is “imperative in building brand affinity, as the millennials are voracious in their media consumption. Simply put, we need to be everywhere they are.”
Wherever they are, they still aren’t with her. Even with Clinton’s millennial support on the rise, only 33 percent of white women between the ages of 18 and 30 plan to vote for her in November, according to the latest poll numbers from the Associated Press-University of Chicago project Gen Forward. No good branding wizard can ignore the fact that Hillary’s cred with the media-obsessed, meme-fluent adult children of the Internet was never as high as Bernie Sanders’s. (Remember the primaries?)
In comes Franco, the weird, artsy dream boy beloved by girls who spend too much time on Tumblr. The premise of the ad, from Franco’s casting to Hillary’s man of mystery meme-ification, hinges on the power of persuasion Gloria Steinem gave the Bernie boyfriend. “The Most Interesting Woman in The World,” paid for and promoted by a women’s group, basically recasts Clinton as a man—one ripped and re-spun from an old beer commercial, but still. Whatever works, I guess.
