History of MoveOn.org - Bush in 30 Seconds

Bush in 30 Seconds

In January 2004, MoveOn provided an interesting example of the way that new communications technologies might be able to transform the 30-second television campaign advertisement that has become one of the standard weapons of modern election campaigning. Historically, campaign ads have operated according to the rules of top-down, one-to-many propaganda. They have been expensive to produce and have been the work of small cliques of paid political professionals who possessed the creative and technical skills and the expensive equipment needed to script, shoot and edit the ads. MoveOn's innovation was to create an online contest, inviting visitors to submit their own TV spots critiquing the performance of President Bush. Also interesting is the fact that all submissions to the contest are under the Creative Commons License. More than 1,500 people produced and submitted ads to the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, and more than 100,000 people helped vote to select the finalists. A winner was then selected by a panel of celebrities, which MoveOn promised to broadcast.

"Bush in 30 Seconds", which was created by MoveOn Cultural Director Laura Dawn, techno artist Moby, and MoveOn PAC Executive Director Eli Pariser, came under attack from Republicans who complained that two of the ads submitted (neither of which became a finalist) had compared Bush to Adolf Hitler, a comparison that conservatives described as "political hate speech." MoveOn.org attempted to place the winning ad, "Child's Pay," as an advertisement during the 2004 Super Bowl, but CBS rejected the ad, along with one from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, for being "controversial", drawing criticism for what critics alleged was censorship. The ad has since been broadcast elsewhere (most notably on CNN during Super Bowl halftime), along with several other finalists in the competition. But even before the ads appeared on television, the contest itself and "word-of-mouse" viral marketing had already given them considerable exposure.