Bigfoot Stars In Fantastic New Political Ad For Congressional Candidate

So many things could have gone wrong with a new TV spot from Minnesota's "Dean Phillips For Congress" campaign. On paper the idea is hokey - it's rare to see anyone pull off a talking Bigfoot to any real comedic effect - and, come on, a serious run for Congress associated with a "Bigfoot ad"? Well, nothing goes wrong with this new ad. It's fantastic.

By Will Burns contributor to Forbes

Give it a watch and I'll break it down:

Creative strategy is smart.

I'd speculate that the creative brief said something like, "How do we convince the voting populous that Congressman Erik Paulsen has been invisible to everyone but special interests?" That's a strong starting point, but the creative strategy of finding a mythic beast even more elusive than Erik Paulsen to tell the story is brilliant.

Bigfoot hatches a plan to try and find Erik Paulsen.

But what's even better is that, while the strategy is to convince people that Paulsen is invisible, the Bigfoot character actually finds him. The elusive Paulsen is found apparently taking money from a big-pharma company. Nice cold-hearted, but strategic, plot twist there.

But overall this spot is impossible not to watch when it comes on. Which brings me to the craft of execution.

Writing and acting are superb.

This whole thing could have been a disaster if the writing was lazy and, more importantly, the acting were trite or over the top. Both were excellent.

A deadpan-serious Bigfoot says, "I mean, how can you have tens of thousands of people looking for you all the time and not one of them find you?" A perfect balance of conversational - funny coming from a Bigfoot - and irony since that's exactly what people say about finding Bigfoot.

Source: Forbes