48 years later, this remains a super-fucked up ad.
Luckily for me, though, watching this and other old campaign ads actually constitutes research for my Politics & the Press paper (20 pages, aaaahh…) on media coverage of political advertising. Which has proven surprisingly easy to research. (Thank god for ProQuest.) Tonight I spent a couple hours searching for old news articles about campaign ads that ran in 1952, 1956, 1960, & 1964, and I actually found a few really interesting things. (Okay, so most of those were about the “daisy” ad, aka the one I embedded above, but still.) For example: During the 1952 election, there was an ad-related controversy at Columbia! (Surprise.) I think that the most interesting article I found was definitely this one (PDF alert!). Click if you’re interested in reading a long-form piece about ad agencies dealing with candidates & vice versa, and the scandalous ads that resulted, in 1964.
The thing of it is: I’m just really happy that I actually got some work done on a paper that isn’t due for a week. So unlike me!
