Philip de Vellis has resigned his position with Blue State Digital after the Huffington Post unmasked him as the creator of a mashup video featuring Hilary Clinton’s image being smashed by the legendary hammer-wielding thrower in Apple’s ‘1984’ commercial.
As an author of viral content, de Vellis has succeeded enormously in getting a message in front of thousands, and probably millions of people. His ‘Hilary 1984’ video mashed up the famed anti-IBM Apple Macintosh commercial with snippets of Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton speaking to the grey audience of drone-like watchers.
De Vellis’ identity became a point of fixed fascination for political bloggers of all stripes. The political machine for Illinois Senator Barack Obama denied involvement, suggestions of which were spurred on by the mention of his campaign at the end of the Hilary 1984 video.
The mainstream media became interested; the video has been mentioned in questions posed to both campaigns. Finally, Arianna Huffington claimed she had the mystery cracked:
Well, today I can end the guessing. Last night, we sent out a challenge to the HuffPost team asking them to hit the phones and contact all their sources. As a result, we have learned the video was the work of Philip de Vellis, who was the Internet communications director for Sherrod Brown’s 2006 Senate campaign, and who now works at Blue State Digital, a company created by members of Howard Dean’s Internet Team.
De Vellis said in a blog post that he independently created the ad that he calls “Vote Different.” He has left Blue State Digital because of all the attention spurred on since the time of his March 5th uploading of the video to YouTube.
The video mashup man explained himself in that post:
I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.
This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.
This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.
He spent a Sunday afternoon working on the video, taking care to make as few changes to it as possible as may be observed when viewing it and Apple’s original creation. After uploading it, he passed around the link to blogs and sat back to see what happened.
Now that we know, expect to see plenty of copycat efforts hit the Web next. De Vellis has staked out the ground for this, so he’ll likely be remembered after many of those potential copycats have been forgotten.
