Seth in CA (for the summer)

A Terrifying Message from Al Gore: Creative and effective ways to get your message out

June 24, 2006 on 12:07 pm | In climate change | No Comments

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)

Atrios remarked a few months back that if the right viral video came along, Lieberman would be toast. (Was Lieberman’s bear ad the unintentional answer?) The PoliticsTV guys enlisted Moby’s help in the fight for Net Neutrality. Now Al Gore and the creators of Futurama enter the fray.When I saw Al Gore’s global warming presentation at Harvard, he quite memorably used a clip from Futurama:

Now Gore appears with Bender in a short animation on YouTube advertising An Inconvenient Truth

This is probably a good time to mention ShareTheTruth, which I found linked from Larry Lessig’s blog.

ShareTheTruth and the Moby and Gore videos are great examples of the ways that politicians and activists are making creative use of the Internet to reach out to people. I know I certainly want to see more of this. And I’ll bet there are lots more celebrities out there willing to lend their star power to a cause in a more compelling way than the press conference. But celebrities aren’t essential: just check out the most popular videos on the front page of YouTube I’m collecting other similar examples of viral videos, creative website and e-mail campaigns, banners, and technological advocacy and messaging etc. Post what you’ve seen works in comments.