This shows great judgment from the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC).  They award something called the 'Pollie Awards' for good ads or something.  It's kind of a dumb process.

Webb for Senate also won both silver AND bronze for "Best Use of YouTube" on the Macaca video.  Bizarrely, "Macaca" was beaten out for Gold by something called "See Dick Run."

See Dick Run has 4000 views or so on Youtube.  The Macaca video has been uploaded several times, and each individual instance has several hundred thousand views.  Macaca far out-earned any other Youtube clip in terms of free media, and probably won what was at the time a really longshot race for Webb.  

By any metric, Macaca is a better choice.  I don't know anything about the Pollie Awards except some vague pitches that people have made to me about them.  I get the sense though that the profession of political consulting as a whole though is not super-in touch with reality.

It's kind of like Best Picture going to the English Patient.  Ok then.

Pollies are not all bad. BlogPac got one in the '04 cycle, and my old firm Political Technologies won a Pollie last week in the internet category for persuasive online advertising for the '06 campaigns. It was for the blogads by Sherrod Brown's campaign during the period just after Hackett and Brown entered the race, where we ran a large buy of blogads with the message of non-fundraising for the primary, and instead for the general:

Of course, it wasn't the blogads that accounted for Hackett's dismal show, but that was a short-rough-but-fun primary slugfest, with a good general outcome too.

Update [2007-2-24 21:23:42 by Matt Stoller]: Sorry, but an an award with such a questionable judgement process is not an award.

Update [2007-2-24 22:12:18 by Jerome Armstrong]: Full credit for the Sherrod Brown's primary blogad narrative/creative would include Tim Tagaris and Miles Kurland. I do know that Donnie Fowler was one of the judges. Perhaps Bob Brigham could get an interview.

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