Sunday, October 12, 2008

Barrack Obama hearts Brian Eno

Barrack Obama's new ad about the losing loser John McCain is his second piece to make use of Brian Eno's ambient masterpiece Music for Airports.  The first ad to make use of Airports hit the air in August, back when there was still an economy and old man McCain couldn't remember how many houses he lives in.  

I don't know what this says about the Obama campaign other than that they are totally freaking awesome and have way better taste in music than their septuagenarian counterparts.  For example, did you hear the "music" in McCain's latest attempt at scaremongering?  It's just a synthesizer drone with a low pass filter wiggling around - that, my friends, is some low-rent, made-for-TV BULLSHIT.  America deserves better sound design.

2 comments:

Ben Coonley said...

Good catch. Eno is definitely on brand. Obama's campaign will go down in history as the best designed of all time. Starting with the logo:

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2008/02/27/campaign_logos/

The Obama "brand identity" is the work of Sender, a Chicago-based design firm:

http://senderllc.com/

All the other candidates are imitating Obama. Note that all the candidates' web sites (including Bob Barr's & Ralph Nader's) use the "sign up and continue" splash page that Obama developed almost 2 years ago, same political web 2.0 design scheme. But McCain's is all slightly "off" -- cheap looking and confusing. McCain's is the only one of these 4 candidates to put an auto-playing video on his splash page. The volume on the McCain video is cranked up too high, the effect is jarring. I suspect this drives viewers away from his page, or at best just makes them stay on the front of the site for too long -- so that they don't click to "find out more." McCain's web people also haven't figured out how to deinterlace video properly...inexcusable!

McCain's ads can not be played at "high quality" on YouTube. This means they must still be uploading low res videos. So many technical/design flaws with McCain's campaign...obviously symptomatic of a larger lack of vision and direction.

Anonymous said...

Maybe WAY past the time of relevance, but if you wanna throw up in your mouth a bit, the McCain camp used "Needle in the camel's eye" to back their internet ad "Mac is Back." you gotta listen close, but They hacked it to shit and threw cowbell and a big toby mac guitar-wank over it, That's kinda why I didn't vote for McCain.