Occupy Wall Street Airs TV Ads

Not content with how the movement has been covered in the mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street supporters are now buying TV ads to get their message out.

The first ad (embedded below), which aired this weekend on Fox News, CBS Sports, ESPN, and other stations, features several protesters speaking into a camera, one by one, about what they’re hoping to achieve. “I want corporations out of the government, and people back in,” one says. “I want the top wealthiest Americans to be taxed higher, and that money to go to education,” adds another.

The 30-second spot, put together by director David Sauvage and composer Glenn Grossman, appears to be an attempt to debunk the conventional wisdom that the movement lacks coherent goals. With a cast of healthy, smiling, well-adjusted-looking activists, it also appears to challenge popular images of the protesters as dirty hippies or fringe characters.

Sauvage told MSNBC, “I want people to see it and say that the people that are protesting are real people with meaningful concerns that I can relate to. And hopefully, in a subtle way, the ad helps shift the conversation.”

Two more ads are also in the works.

So how does a leaderless protest movement buy advertising on national television? Crowdfunding.

Using a startup called LoudSauce, online organizer Matt Ewing and the ad’s producers cobbled together money from 168 donors to pay for the first ad, LoudSauce co-founder Colin Mutchler told The Slatest. Though the ad directs viewers to the Occupy Together website, a hub for protests in cities around the country, no official organizers for Occupy Together or Occupy Wall Street were involved, Mutchler said. Occupy Together confirmed in a blog post that it had nothing to do with the campaign.

Ewing, Sauvage, and Grossman are following up with another LoudSauce campaign to buy time for two more ads, plus repeated airings of the first ad. As of Wednesday evening, the site indicated they had raised $2,840 toward the goal of $15,000.

Because LoudSauce uses the Google TV Ads platform, the ads air nationally, but only for customers of DISH Network, Direct TV, and Verizon Fios, Mutchler noted.

The campaign’s page on the LoudSauce website further explains the rationale behind the ads:

The mainstream media doesn't get it. They're trying to discredit the #occupy movement as bunch of uninformed extremists who don't know what we want. But, we know who we are and we know what we want: we're a big, diverse movement that's fighting for an economy that works for all of us, not just the top 1%.