Ron Paul is a hero on the Internet. In the mainstream media, not so much.
Paul has rabidly vocal supporters. The video has drawn over 4,500 comments on YouTube. Like most politicians, Paul’s campaign uses social media for outreach. He has 450,000 likes on Facebook, far more than his more scrutinized competitors like Michelle Bachman (15,000) and Jon Huntsman (13,000). (GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney trounces the field, boasting over 1 million likes.)
Paul’s ad mimics a movie trailer with everything from a green screen with the words: “The following preview has been approved for all audiences” to an overly serious narrator. The titles look like they can be in “Battlestar Galactica.”
The ad recalls Tim Pawlenty’s ad from earlier this year, which also used a fake movie-trailer theme. Pawlenty, of course, dropped out the race after coming in third, behind Ron Paul, in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa earlier this month.
Ron Paul’s treatment by the media is close to meme status at this point. The campaign even plays it up on his website. Parlaying that into winning the nomination remains a long shot.
More in Media

Creators are ditching Substack over ideological shift in 2025
The writers who left Substack in early 2025 represent a second wave after an initial burst of Substack creators left the platform in January 2024.

How Dotdash Meredith enlisted OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product, with Lindsay Van Kirk
Dotdash Meredith’s gm of D/Cipher discussed the publisher’s OpenAI deal in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit.

Publishers left guessing how Google’s March 2025 core update will reshape search
Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic.