Kurt Bills and a talking donkey too: the Wellstonian roots of PoliDemic's dramatic entry

The Book of Proverbs tells us that fools dwell in the house of mirth, but the roots of Kurt Bills' movie trailer that drew so much attention yesterday are anchored in Bill Hillsman's North Woods Advertising, where director Vaughn Juares once toiled as creative director.

North Woods Advertising's off-beat ads worked for Paul Wellstone in 1990, Jesse Ventura in 1998 and Alan Grayson in 2008.

Having begun his career in providing "content and advertising strategy that catered to the music and entertainment industries for Spanish-language markets", Juares now runs PoliDemic, which touts a Facebook app that:

PoliDemic empowers campaigns of all types to establish an instant and sophisticated social media presence for an extremely low cost.

Juares last appears as a spokester for Hillsman in Nexis in a Pioneer Press article about "The Second Fraud: a Ponzipalooza," a documentary about the Petters case. And then there's his sci-fi cloning horror flick, "I'm not Jesus, Mommy." Before there was PoliDemic, there was FilmDemic.

There's a lot of Wellstonian recycling in the Bill's campaign. Talking another page from the Wellstone playbook, Bills has painted a schoolbus--but since one flagbus is so 1990, Bills has three buses.

The Wellstonian element missing from Bills' adapatations? Humor.  This stuff is painfully earnest.

But "Staring at the Future" isn't PoliDemic's only video production. There's a Youtube from April, Track A Donkey," featuring a talking donkey. Shrek it's not:

Perhaps this is where Mike Parry got the notion of bragging about the DFL tracker he shared with Allen Quist.

Photo: Vaughn Juares. Source: Wikipedia.

Comments

[Phoenix Woman]

Hmmmm. I think you may have hit on something here.

Paul Wellstone -- sense of humor, funny (and effective) ads

Jesse Ventura -- sense of humor, funny (and effective) ads (and I say this as someone who didn't vote for him)

Alan Grayson -- sense of humor, funny (and effective) ads

Kurt Bills -- no sense of humor, ads come off like soulless karaoke covers.

The Jesse Ventura Action Figure ad (where he fights Special Interest Man) may well be the single best TV political ad ever done. If there's a better one out there, I'd like to see it. It was clever, funny, gently poked fun at the candidate it backed (thus showing he could laugh at himself), and most importantly, it worked with a broad swath of normally-apolitical persons. (That was how Ventura won: Instead of concentrating solely on poaching existing voters, he got habitual non-voters into the voting booths.)