“Rick Perry’s Unpopular Opinions”: Memes as Political Ads in the 2012 Campaign
This week, seeking to gain support in traditionally evangelical rural Iowa, Republican presidential candidate and Governor of Texas Rick Perry made a campaign ad to stake out his position as the candidate that is, essentially, the most Christian.
In the ad, Governor Perry claims that President Obama’s policies amount to a ‘war on religion.’ The ad takes a hard line against the President’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell - which allowed LGBT people to openly serve in the military.
On YouTube, the ad has drawn an incredible 3.22M views since it was uploaded on December 6th. But what has made news is that, amongst the viewers who have either ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ the video, over 440,000 people have ‘dis-liked’ the video, while only 11,000 have liked it. For comparison, the 440,000 number already eclipsed the 257,000 people that disliked Rebecca Black’s infamous “Friday” YouTube video – which was noted as a large number at the time.
These 440,000 people didn’t just decide to gang up on a random political ad on their own; they came to the video after being referred to it by memes mocking the ad on other sites, particularly Tumblr.
In one day, and with millions of online impressions, savvy internet memists co-opted the Perry campaign’s message and used it against them in a series of satirical memes.
On Tumblr – the blogging site that lets users re-blog posts out to their networks of followers – the Rick Perry ad seemingly touched a nerve amongst the young people that populate the site, many of whom were likely in favor of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and for whom the issue of religion isn’t the biggest concern.
Because the Perry campaign put their ad on YouTube – a tactic that is normally a no-brainer if you subscribe to the ‘all press is good press’ theory – the Tumblr demographic, which is vastly different from the Iowa demographic, reacted to an ad that the Perry campaign had no intention of them being targeted to see.
Their response was to create a meme to satirize the ad. In doing so, they provided influential political commentary.
Yesterday, a Tumblr account was opened titled, Rick Perry’s Unpopular Opinions. It features a photo .gif from the video with a fake quote from Governor Perry that serves as the creation of a meme. Internet memes are single ideas propagated around the internet. The single idea that Rick Perry’s Unpopular Opinions presented was that Governor Perry offers remarkably unpopular opinions.
Harp Disrupts: Politics + Social Media, Digital Communications, & Online Organizing
Hey there, I’m Jordan Harp, and this is Harp Disrupts — a collection of my notes on political campaign strategy online: social media, digital communications, and online organizing.
Politics is changing, and it’s largely due to the new avenues to political activism born online.
Through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we are all broadcasters to our audience of friends, family, and followers.
Campaigns are leveraging these networks, combined with other online outreach tools such as their websites, mobile apps, and email lists, to reach out to volunteers and voters alike.
This has streamlined the network effect of traditional grassroots organizing, bolstered by social media conversation and data management software that has led to the coined term, ‘online organizing.’
This blog will give you industry-insider tips and best practices, and keep you up-to-date on the political campaigns that are devising disruptive online strategies to win in 2012.
