In a relentless news cycle with a million news sources competing for smaller and smaller bits of time from consumers (Read: voters), it’s priceless to have anyone from the Zucker team on your side. Since 2004, David Zucker, occasionally with the help of his brother, has been producing some of the most buzzed about ads of each cycle. The Zuckers are 2/3 of a comedy trio responsible for Airplane!, Top Secret!, and Naked Gun, just to give you an idea of the level of comic genius we’re dealing with, here. This is serious stuff.
The ads are, without fail clever, well-produced, funny, and skewer the hell out of Lefties. They get attention online, which often leads to copious attention from cable news, effectively spreading messages without spending too much on ad buys. In short, the Zucker brothers are capable of creating the buzz of an Obama girl without bimbos or bikinis. And, while some in my audience may mourn the loss of the bikinis, I think the Zuckers’ work is better for messaging precisely because their ads deliver the message instead of distracting from it.
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Their newest contribution is a short ad for the Center for Security Policy about energy, called “Nozzlerage.” As usual, it’s well-done:
My concern, however, is that conservatives turn a video like this, with such potential for Internet/TV success, into action instead of just buzz. The Nozzlerage.com website is very unclear about where it would like to take us, in terms of energy policy, and allows the user to do very little other than sign up for an e-mail list. Presumably, that list will be put to use by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, but for what? The matter is complicated by the fact that non-profits that commission such videos can’t push for outright legislative/political action from supporters or it violates their tax status.
The sentiment expressed in the video is one most Americans can get down with, and we need to be careful not to squander the momentary ire created by the ad. There should be educational resources, quizzes, merchandise, interactive demonstrations, Google maps illustrating where our oil money goes, all available for the user to explore after he sees the video. This is not to knock this effort at all, as it may incorporate such tools in the future, but simply to say that we need to be wary of such things in the future, and integrate all our Internetty tools to get things like this moving beyond the video.
It’s also to say that I hope the Zuckers will be putting out more ads during thiselection cycle. Below are a couple of their greatest hits. As you’ll see, Barack Obama is ripe for the Zucker treatment, especially when it comes to national security.
2004: This Club for Growth-commissioned “flip-flop” ad really said all that needed to be said about John Kerry.
2006: The taxman cometh, at every single stage of your life, and this was an official RNC ad.
2006/7: The Iraq Study Group and James Baker = Neville Chamberlain. Nice!
2006: Albright got cozy with dictators in this ad, and the GOP deemed the ad “too hot” for official use, but it garnered at least a million YouTube hits and plenty of attention.
