current work
Lewis Lazare, the Chicago Sun-Times ad columnist, asked The Escape Pod to participate in an interesting competition. It was this. He asked us, along with several other Chicago ad agencies, to create a print ad for a presidential candidate. The kicker being that we would be randomly assigned the candidate we would promote. We had to agree to take part first. So we agreed. And we were ready to promote either candidate. We're in advertising. We sell whatever we're assigned to sell. That's part of the fun.
We drew Barack Obama.
And we created the above work. Our rationale was the following: people really vote against something rather than for something. And the Republican administration has been an undeniable disaster on several fronts. The economy being the most recent disaster. So we figured that's something we should leverage. Encourage people to vote against a third Republican administration.
Just as we would have leveraged John McCain's experience, war heroism, and guy-you'd-like-to-have-a-beer-with-ism had we drawn the assignment to sell his candidacy.
The more money a candidate has to buy media the better. And a lot of Americans could do with a little catharsis after eight years of Bush. So we had the idea to create and sell something fun that reminds voters of the failures of the Republican administration while raises money for the Obama campaign. Kill two birds with one stone as it were. We actually produced 125 of these plates that people can purchase from us. Via this website plates4obama.com
Mr. Lazare's idea was to put the ads online and have the Chicago ad community vote on which one they think is the most effective.