The Living Room Candidate

The online exhibition The Living Room Candidate has launched its 2008 edition today. Curated and hosted by Museum of the Moving Image on its website (http://movingimage.us/livingroomcandidate or http://livingroomcandidate.org), The Living Room Candidate offers more than 300 commercials from every presidential election since the start of television campaign advertising in 1952.

The redesign and relaunch are made possible through a grant from the Verizon Foundation, which will highlight The Living Room Candidate on Thinkfinity.org, Verizon’s free comprehensive program and online portal that provides more than 55,000 educational resources for teachers, parents, students and afterschool programs.

Among the new features of this election cycle’s Living Room Candidate are:

• Ongoing tracking of John McCain and Barack Obama commercials and third-party advocacy and independent commercials as they come out
• Access to both official, broadcast commercials and web video/third party commercials from a single timeline interface
• Commentaries on the Museum’s selection of the top campaign commercials of all time
• Annotated playlists of commercials, past and present, selected by noted political consultants, cultural critics, scholars, and media celebrities, including John Dickerson (chief political correspondent, Slate) and Leslie Savan (author of The Sponsored Life)
• A function that enables site visitors to create their own playlists of commercials
• Activities that allow visitors to explore the decision-making process of ad design and production
• Upgraded classroom tools for students and educators

The Living Room Candidate demonstrates how advertising techniques and styles have evolved over the years, even as basic strategy has remained the same. The exhibition includes such landmark ads as the groundbreaking “Eisenhower Answers America” spots of 1952, the notorious “daisy girl” ad from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ads from 1984, and the controversial attack ads run by George Bush’s 1988 campaign. Site visitors may also see how the strategies and techniques of persuasion have been played out more recently in third-party and web ads, such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn commercials from the 2004 election.