• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 21, 2007

A Web ad for Barack Obama that recently surfaced on YouTube is drawing a huge amount of notice this week. The spot, incorporating footage of Apple Computer's "1984" Super Bowl ad, is being hailed as an example of how consumers are repurposing professionally created content -- though it's not clear whether this ad, likening Hillary Clinton to George Orwell's "Big Brother," is in fact an amateur creation. Obama's campaign denied being involved in the ad and the makers haven't yet announced themselves.

At OMMA Hollywood Tuesday, marketing mavens Julie Roehm and Sean Womack showed the spot, using it as an example of the new YouTube world, in which users are spending time making and sharing their own content -- albeit with the help of professionally produced clips.

It's ironic that the Obama ad draws on this particular 23-year-old Apple spot, Roehm said, because that effort itself came to epitomize the era in which TV was at its apex. The original 60-second Apple spot, directed by Ridley Scott, aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, demonstrating -- and also solidifying -- the football game's importance to marketers.

Meanwhile, the new ad is also coming to symbolize the battle about the regulation of online campaign expenditures. Today's Los Angeles Times reports that federal laws don't regulate online ads nearly as stringently as ads on TV -- a state of affairs that troubles some observers.

While candidates must disclose online ad buys, they need not disclose names of those who help "carry out political activity on the Internet," the LA Times reports. Creating an ad in itself isn't seen as the type of expenditure that must be disclosed, according to the article. "The FEC lost track of the fact that a lot of Internet communication does cost money," former FEC commissioner Scott Thomas told the LA Times.