REPORT CARD
Getting caught napping can get you detention in high school. But if you’re the mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, it can get people wondering if they really want to vote for you as mayor again.
Mayor Adrian Perkins had struggled through his term as mayor, falling short on promises to reduce crime and unemployment, abruptly announcing he was running for US Senate just one year into his term, and getting caught seemingly dozing off during several City Council meetings.
Our mission was to create a piece of video content that clearly communicated Shreveport voters’ frustrations concerning Perkins’ recent track record and show undecided voters that he wasn’t a good choice for the general election of November 2022.
Deciding to veer into the realm of sarcasm for this piece, we created a 30-second narrative imagining Mayor Perkins as a high school student called to the principal’s office to be read the riot act for a litany of failing grades.
While casting an actor as the mayor would have been the easy way to film the spot, we made the creative decision to use deep machine learning computer vision technology to digitally superimpose Mayor Perkin’s face over our actor’s body. It’s the kind of digital wizardry that has been dazzling audiences of movies and TV shows for the last few years now, such as the creation of a young Luke Skywalker in the 2019 season finale of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian.”
The design was to have voters asking themselves two questions: “How did they do that?” and “Why would I want to vote for this guy?”
In the piece, Perkins appears as a high school student who is marched to the principal’s office and told that he’s receiving F’s in all his important classes, including Public Safety and the Economy. The school secretary bursts into the meeting to submit additional evidence, one of the pictures of Perkins appearing to take a power nap at a public meeting.
Our plan worked. Shortly after its release, the video caught fire in Shreveport and North Louisiana, amassing thousands of views, comments, and shares. Local news stations dedicated entire articles to the piece with headlines like “Louisiana Political Ad Uses ‘Deepfake’ Technology And Goes Viral – Is This A New Trend?” (KPEL)
From the overwhelming response to the ad, we felt confident heading into election night, and in a result unprecedented in the city’s political history, Mayor Adrian Perkins finished a distant fourth in his bid for re-election, failing to even make the run-off election.