# Demon Sheep In February 2010 [[Carly Fiorina]], a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard running for the U.S. Senate in California, posted a video of more than three minutes attacking her main rival for the Republican nomination, former congressman [[Tom Campbell]]. It opens on sheep in a sunlit meadow. It ends with a man in a sheep costume, his eyes glowing red. It never ran on television. Within a day it had gone viral, and the conversation was about the sheep, not about Tom Campbell. ## The ad A narrator praises fiscal conservatives while real sheep graze. Then lightning strikes, a sheep falls over, and the tone turns. Campbell, the voice says, is not what he claims: he has voted for taxes and refused to sign the [[Taxpayer Protection Pledge]]. He is an "FCINO," a fiscal conservative in name only. He is a wolf in sheep's clothing. At which point the costumed figure with the red eyes looks out from behind a tree. The coinage is a play on "RINO," Republican in name only, the label used in primaries to mark a candidate as insufficiently conservative. ## Who made it and who paid The Fiorina campaign released it on its website on **February 3, 2010**. It was made by Fred Davis, a California ad-maker already known for the 2008 [[John McCain]] spot that compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The *San Francisco Chronicle* reported that it cost less than $15,000 and was assembled largely from stock footage. Davis said the candidate loved it. ## Reaction Ridicule, at once and from every direction. Reviewers called it confusing, bonkers and the best bad campaign ad ever made. A third candidate in the primary put up a parody website warning of demon sheep taking over California. Campbell's campaign passed the video around itself. Democrats later produced a sequel that cast Fiorina as the sheep. Davis followed it with a seven-minute video portraying the Democratic incumbent, Senator Barbara Boxer, as a giant blimp drifting over the state. ## What happened next In the weeks after the video Campbell's lead in the polls grew. Then Fiorina, who spent heavily and kept up the attack on his tax record, passed him, and she won the June 8 primary easily. She lost to Boxer in November by ten points. Whether the sheep helped, hurt or made no difference is still argued, which is itself the notable thing: an ad nearly everyone called a disaster did no visible harm to the candidate who made it. ## Why it's on the map - **Attention was the product.** The video cost almost nothing and bought no airtime. News coverage and sharing did the distribution. Davis understood before most people in politics that online, an ad's job is to be passed along, and that strange travels further than persuasive. - **Mockery is not the same as failure.** The lesson campaigns took was that being laughed at is survivable and being ignored is not. That calculation runs through a great deal of the political media the wiki tracks from the following decade. - **It is a purity test in costume.** Under the sheep is a familiar primary argument: my opponent is not a real conservative. The specific charge, refusing the anti-tax pledge, is the enforcement mechanism described on [[Taxpayer Protection Pledge]]. The ad appeared in the first primary season of the Tea Party era, when that argument was remaking the Republican Party. - **It marks the move from television to the web.** Every earlier ad in this collection was built for broadcast. This one was built to be embedded. ## Connections - [[Carly Fiorina]] · [[Tom Campbell]] - [[Taxpayer Protection Pledge]] · [[Grover Norquist]] · [[Americans for Tax Reform]] - [[Tea Party Movement]] · [[2010 Midterm Elections]] - [[Political Ads Hub]]