Success Stories
Election 2006
The Challenge
Conceding the policy field to the Conservatives in the opening weeks of the campaign, the Liberals responded in January 2006 with twelve negative television commercials that were widely acknowledged as built on fabrications and scare tactics. The savage tone of the commercials had never been seen before in Canadian electioneering. But their garishness proved to be their undoing.
The Solution
In earlier campaigns and daily political work I stood out for cutting-edge use of web multimedia to communicate effectively outside of the mainstream media. I created a series of satirical digital videos mocking the new Liberal ads and the Martin campaign as a whole. The objective was simple: expose the Liberal message as duplicitous and debasing the tone of political debate by lampooning their very own tactics. It is impossible to respect or even fear what one can laugh at, and the Liberals' flank was exposed.
The Results
I was invited to join the blogging team at The Shotgun, the blog of the Calgary-based political magazine The Western Standard. From my articles on The Shotgun came nearly ten thousand downloads of videos in one week, including peak traffic of nearly three thousand on the eve of the election.
Beyond that is the multiplier effect of users passing them on to colleagues: viral marketing. One visitor to The Shotgun said of the Battlestar Galactica parody, "I laughed so hard that I cried!"
And all of this work was done from a notebook computer in rural Newfoundland!
Judge for yourself (Flash Video Format):
- A New Hope for Canada
- Trudeaupia, 'Tis for Thee
- Battlescarred Gritica
- A New Hope for Canada (The Gustav Holst Remix)
- "Hurt" by Paul Martin and the Earnscliffe Boys
- Anarchy in the Grits, Eh!
- "Just a Librano" by Paul Martin and the Scott Feschuk Dek-Tette
