YouTube/Mike Diva Media The Homemade Ads Changing American Politics Citizen-created political ads are upending the norms of campaign advertising that have governed politics for the last 60 years.

Laura Reston is the managing editor of The New Republic, where she write a weekly column about the 2016 presidential election. She lives in New York.

When YouTube wizard Mike Diva posted his Donald Trump ad in June, he never expected it to take off. With its kinetic, Japanese aesthetic, the video looks a lot like the other spots on his YouTube channel, an eclectic mix of revamped movie trailers, puppy memes and horror shorts. It opens in a startling, dreamlike universe drenched in vivid blues and pale pinks, filled with overstuffed toys, rocket ships, bobbing alpacas and cherry blossoms. Trump is everywhere you turn. He dances then morphs into a sleek mechanical beast that looks like it belongs in a futuristic gladiator match before flying into orbit and smashing Earth to smithereens with an arm-mounted laser cannon.

Within a day of the video’s online debut, it had racked up 300,000 views on YouTube and more than 8 million on Facebook. Diva was getting calls from major news networks asking him to appear on their morning shows


Today, homespun political videos from artists like Diva can be more successful at engaging viewers than traditional ads. Since two former PayPal employees launched YouTube in 2006, the site has allowed videographers to unleash their most outlandish, creative political spots online, reaching potential millions at the click of a button. With a decent camera, some basic video skills, and editing software, almost anyone make and distribute an ad that looks as professional as one from Madison Avenue.

It’s a development that upended the laws of campaign advertising that have governed American politics for the past 60 years. Since 1952, when the Eisenhower campaign released its first TV ad, the solemn “Eisenhower Answers America,” candidates with media bugets large enough to hire advertising execs, shoot glossy commericals and run those spots in prime time usually bested their rivals.

The Internet leveled the playing field, aided by the fact that conventional political ads cranked out in Washington media shops are simply not as effective as they once were. In the run-up to the 2016 primaries, Jeb Bush and his allies spent more than $84 million on sunny biographical spots and savage attack ads that plopped down on TV screens with all the subtlety of a monster truck show. But for the most part, voters in Iowa and New Hampshire simply tuned out the ads. That $84 million failed to move Bush’s support more than a couple of percentage points.

“We live in a world today where the very form of an ad turns off a significant number of people,” says documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald. Now, dark horse candidates like Bernie Sanders can make more of a splash than ever before, with legions of avid supporters ready to unleash their most irreverent ads online. Here, a look at five of the most memorable, successful and just plain creative political ads created by average voters and activists, not paid consultants.

“John McCain vs. John McCain”



Posted: January 2007

Creator: Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald

When Robert Greenwald discovered YouTube in 2006, most of the clips on the site were cats playing the piano or attractive women taking showers. That anyone would use the site to watch substantive political videos was “mindboggling,” he says.

Born and raised in New York, Greenwald had embarked on a career in theater and commercial television in the 1970s, producing more than f50 TV movies and miniseries with names like Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal and Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold. After the 9/11 attacks, he decided to leave commercial television to found Brave New Films, a feisty, liberal, Los Angeles-based nonprofit that would go on to create documentary films about public figures like Fox News magnate Rupert Murdoch and billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

One morning in early 2007, while reading the New York and Los Angeles Times at home in L.A., Greenwald spotted a story in which John McCain backtracked on a statement he made a few weeks earlier. The incident gave Greenwald an idea: a short YouTube video in which John McCain debated himself. Over the next few days, he worked with one editor and one researcher to find video clips of McCain rebutting his own statements, sometimes within a few minutes, on issues from the Iraq War to South Carolina’s official use of the Confederate flag to Christian conservatives and gay marriage.

Greenwald released “John McCain vs. John McCain” on YouTube in January of that year, only a month before the Arizona senator would announce he was running for president on the Late Show with David Letterman. The tinny soundtrack and WordArt effects caught on, amassing well over a million views and becoming one of the first YouTube videos of the 2008 election to go viral.

Greenwald has remained political over the years, most recently releasing a feature-length documentary, Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. But he says he would never go into commercial advertising because it would dilute the quality of what he produces. “If you work in a large organization, a campaign or a very large nonprofit,” he says, “the more people you have looking and approving a particular narrative, ad or video. And the more you can wind up with junk.”

“Vote Different”



Posted: March 2007

Creator: Democratic strategist Philip de Vellis

On a Sunday afternoon in March 2007, a YouTube user named ParkRidge47 posted a short video on his channel. It was a remake of the iconic Orwell-inspired “1984” Apple ad that ran during Super Bowl XVIII, introducing the country to the Macintosh personal computer. In the updated version created by ParkRidge47, a lithe blonde athlete wearing an Obama tank top hurls a sledgehammer at a flickering screen broadcasting footage of Hillary Clinton (Big Sister, in place of Big Brother) to legions of mindless drones. Showers of sparks rain down on the audience, and the drones are jolted out of their collective stupor.

After weeks of liberal blogs speculating about the origins of the ad, Philip de Vellis—a Los Angeles native who had volunteered for Howard Dean in 2003 and was at the time working at the digital strategy firm Blue State Digital—wrote a Huffington Post article confessing to making the spot in his apartment over the course of a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. He had cobbled the ad together on his Mac and circulated it in the liberal blogosphere but never expected it to catch on outside the insular world inside the Beltway. That changed when he got a cellphone call at work from Arianna Huffington, publisher of the Huffington Post, threatening to run a story outing him as the mystery YouTuber behind “Vote Different.”

A few days later, he informed his bosses at Blue State Digital. They fired him. The story hit the Washington Post with a story called “Watching Big Sister” in which Obama campaign officials hastened to assure the paper they had nothing to do with it. Finally, ready to confess, de Vellis promised Huffington he would write a blog post for the site. When the Huffington Post prematurely released his name online, his cellphone started ringing. Andrea Mitchell, the Today show, and a litany of other programs were all clamoring to get him on air. It was, he says, the start of a newfound willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, who at that point, looked like she was on a glide path to the 2008 Democratic nomination.

“The future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens,” he wrote in the Huffington Post in 2008. “This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.”

Less than a month later, de Vellis landed a job at Murphy Putnam, a prestigious Democratic ad shop in Washington. He started his own firm, Beacon Media, in 2015, handling digital strategy for congressional campaigns and others.

“Puppet Pat McCrory”



Posted: July 2012

Creator: Freelance videographer Frank Eaton

Filmmaker Frank Eaton was working at a legal services film in North Carolina making sad documentaries designed to settle wrongful death suits when he started dabbling in local politics in 2007. Five years later, Pat McCrory, the Republican mayor of Charlotte, was running against Democrat Walter Dalton in North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, and Eaton decided to create an ad lampooning the telegenic, if somewhat wooden McCrory for acting like a puppet for the Republican establishment. “Puppet Pat McCrory” harnessed every stereotype about Republicans in the playbook: wealthy and influential lobbyists, good ol’ boys sipping martinis in the afternoon, secret plans to replace schoolteachers with smartphones, and sycophantic young white aides with mussed hair and pastel sweater vests pussyfooting around their candidate.

When a local paper wrote an article about Puppet Pat the next year, a McCrory spokesman responded with a snippy statement: “This is yet another disrespectful, childish and biased political stunt from a left-wing paid media consultant.” It wasn’t the last time a public official objected to his ads. Eaton has been sued twice, once for an unreported campaign contribution in 2010, and once for libel in 2013 after he made a brutal video criticizing a state party chair.

In recent years, tired of fending off lawsuits and backing candidates who never seemed to win, Eaton moved to Red Hook and started freelancing for big Democratic ads firms like Beacon Media, Putnam Partners and 76 Words. But the moniker Eaton coined for Pat McCrory still haunts the now-governor four years later.

“He is not a puppet master,” a Charlotte City Councilwoman told the New York Times of McCrory in May. “He’s a puppet, and I hate that.”

“Vote Together”



Posted: January 2016

Creator: Jonathan Olinger, founder of the New York media company HUMAN

“Our job is not to divide,” Bernie Sanders says in a YouTube video that premered at an Iowa rally in late January 2016. “Our job is to bring people together.” A whirring sound emerges in the background, like an old video reel clicking, and faces start flipping past on the screen, all torn apart before being sewn back together. “When we stand together and demand that this country works for all of us rather than the few, we will transform America,” Sanders intones via voiceover.

The video went from 1 million to 3 million views on February 10, after Sanders’ staff tweeted it out and media outlets started taking notice. Playing it on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the next day, Joe Scarborough declared that the Sanders team had “put out two of the best ads of this campaign.”

What Scarborough and other commentators missed was the fact that the Sanders campaign did not put out, commission or weigh in on the video at all. Jonathan Olinger—a globetrotting filmmaker and Colorado native who has traveled to over 60 countries documenting the plight of child soldiers in Africa, earthquake victims in Haiti and street children in Indonesia—made the spot and released it in his free time.

Olinger spent hours late at night in his Lower East Side apartment listening to audio and reading transcripts of speeches Sanders had given on the campaign trail to find workable snippets from four speeches that could be spliced together, creating a soaring message about “togetherness.” He and a few friends from the New York media company HUMAN, which Olinger founded, then shot the stills in Union Square, enlisting the people lounging on the pavement to participate in the video. One man was wearing a Rick Santorum sweater in his photograph. “It was equalizing,” Olinger said. “People from all walks of life could lend their faces.”

After the ad went viral, the Sanders campaign quietly acquired the rights and began airing it on TV as an official campaign ad a mere 10 days later.

Now, Olinger says he would be reluctant to wade back into political ad making. Apathetic about most issues in American politics, he is focusing on his next major project: a video featuring Alicia Keys that sheds light on the immigration crisis in Latin America.

“Japanese Donald Trump Commercialトランプ2016”



Posted: June 2016

Creator: YouTube star Mike Dahlquist, known online as Mike Diva

Mike Dahlquist may have even less interest in American politics than Olinger. An aspiring film director, he works part time for a Los Angeles production studio called Super Deluxe, cutting short videos for its clients. The rest of his time is spent shooting zany videos that he posts to YouTube under his online pseudonym, Mike Diva. “I have absolutely zero interest in politics,” he says. “I created the Donald Trump video to entertain and confuse people.”

He and some friends spent $1,000 to buy props, print out Trump signs and paint his girlfriend’s North Hollywood bedroom a sallow pink. They shot the first half of the video there, and the second half nearby, using a green screen treadmill they found in a junk pile on a street corner in LA. In his bedroom in North Hollywood, aglow with what Dahlquist calls “strip club lighting,” he edited the footage for almost a month and a half, often with Netflix playing on a monitor above him.

He had some help. Dahlquist has cultivated a sprawling network of fans, other YouTube stars and people he had encouraged to learn about visual effects. Many chipped in on the Trump ad. One friend in Germany created the robot sequence that Dahlquist had sketched out on storyboards. A contact from New York offered to make the buildings. A videographer who had finished making a music video featuring dozens of alpacas offered Dahlquist some leftover footage, which Dahlquist then altered to look like Donald Trump’s face growing from a llama-esque body.

Dahlquist’s real passion, though, is horror films, and he has a short horror film in the works with Skybound, the entertainment company behind AMC’s zombie series, The Walking Dead.