Sarah McLachlan's $150,000
By David Weinberger, 10/24/2004 - 9:14am

Sitting semi-depressed in a motel room, each click of the dial ratcheting up my mopey forlorness, I came upon the World on Fire Sarah McLachlan music video. I'm told that Sarah McLachlan is a popular singer amongst the kids, so I am probably the last to know about this video, but it's well worth the 3 minutes as it explains how McLachlan spent the $150,000 that would normally have gone into the video's production.


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What Media Ought to Be For

For some reason, this reminded me of Joe Trippi's story of spending $100K on a summer 2003 anti-Bush TV ad in Austin. The pundits said it was a waste of money, but in addition to firing up the Deaniacs by being in Bush's face, the ad supposedly generated a million dollars in donations to Dean. (Of course, after you watch McLachlan's video, you may rue the thought of the millions wasted on our overlong election campaigns.) But in both cases, they are using media to mobilize people rather than to simply promote a candidate or sell a product.

McLachlan's demographic is more VH-1 than it is the kids. But she's tapping and expressing a sensibility that is very up-to-date (see Jon Stewart on Crossfire). That is, media ought to be for something more than entertainment and self-aggrandizement.

Can you imagine a present-day American politician, sitting on his multi-million-dollar campaign warchest, producing such an ad? I can't. But maybe, someday soon?

By Micah L. Sifry at Sun, 10/24/2004 - 19:59 | email this page

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