Cool ad! You’re fired…

More than three million people watched “Vote Different,” an amateur ad for presidential candidate Barack Obama last week, a video remix of a classic 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial that replaced the images and voice of the “Big Brother” figure with those of Hillary Clinton. In “Vote Different,” the hero — a woman who outruns grim security officers to burst into a large room and throw a hammer at a giant video screen — is wearing an Obama T-shirt.

Technically, the piece is very well done. The video clips on the monitors, taken directly from the Hillary Clinton’s campaign web site, are desaturated to give them a bleak, ominous look. Her voice is echoed to make it sound broadcast from loudspeakers. Phrases from her speech are overlaid on the screen like lines of propaganda — “we are having a conversion” suddenly seems like an ominous piece of Orwellian doublespeak. The Obama logo on the woman’s shirt curves and folds naturally with the fabric as she runs.

Thematically, it has a simple message — Obama is to Hillary what the Mac was to the PC in the ’80s: different, innovative, and liberating. Obama, the ad suggests, stands for big changes, while Hillary stands for more of the same.

So it came a bit of a surprise to me to hear that the creator of the ad, Phil de Vellis, previously anonymous, was fired from his job at Blue State Digital last week.

de Vellis, who did the ad privately, on his own time, had a clear conflict of interest, since his company was also responsible for building Obama’s campaign web site. Still, the reaction of all seemed a bit out-of-proportion to the impact of the ad. Blue State digital publicly disavowed itself from the ad and de Vellis, as did Obama’s campaign.

After being fired from Blue State Digital, de Vellis defended his work on the Huffington Post, arguing he was proud of the ad and its message that “Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton’s “conversation” is disingenuous…. The underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power.”

I’m familiar with the tricky spot de Vellis faced. My day job in Washington D.C. is political. I design for a high-profile nonprofit organization that takes a variety of political positions, but does not expressly advocate for any particular candidates. Every employee is given training and instruction on how to keep our work within the boundaries of election and tax laws. Almost everyone I know in D.C. that works in the political realm has to to be aware of the thin line between what’s allowed and what isn’t. Even if he did this ad on his own time, without the knowledge of his co-workers, surely he had to have some inkling that it might spark a bit of controversy, given his day job.

“Vote Different” is many things — clever, polished, irreverent — but it’s not an “attack ad.” But three things still trouble me about de Vellis losing his job over doing a great ad in his own time.

First, even for those of us who work in Washington D.C. and have political jobs, outside of our careers, we’re still citizens. We still have the right of free speech. We still have the right to express ourselves politically. de Vellis created a clever, memorable video that conveyed his sense about the state of the Democratic Party’s nomination race, and for doing a great job and creating something that got millions of people’s attention, he wound up without a job.

Secondly, the “Vote Different” mock ad wasn’t a vicious smear like the Swiftboat Veterans ads. “Vote Different” is many things — clever, polished, irreverent — but it’s not an “attack ad.” It associates Obama with the novelty and “coolness” of the Mac brand, and the notion of change, while tying Hillary to the cold, gray politics of the past and present. It certainly does not show Hillary in a flattering light, but neither does it demonize her in the manner of typical political ads. In too much of the media and buzz surrounding this video, like this article on NPR, the ad is described as if it was a hatchet job on Hillary. Every two years, airwaves are filled with crass, misleading, distorted political attack ads — this wasn’t one of them and shouldn’t be discussed as if it were.

Finally, there was just something disappointing about how quickly the establishment ran from this ad as fast as it could. Within a day of the ad’s creator being exposed, Blue State Digital fired the creator and Obama’s campaign disavowed it.

I suppose they had to, for a variety of reasons, but it would have been refreshing — “different” maybe — if Obama or Blue State would have just said, “we didn’t know about this ad, but now that we do, we think it’s cool as hell and we love it.”