Veteran adman Stan Cotton, who throughout his career has successfully used outrage and sharp-edged humor to promote his clients' interests, has hit a wall. The media he needs to reach key audiences won't take his money, or his issue ads. He's been turned down by The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine won't sell him classified space. The problem, it appears, is that Cotton has the radical idea that people who pour millions into the coffers of elected officials usually get what they want. He has the even more radical idea that US energy policy, including the tons of cash flowing into terrorist-friendly Persian Gulf countries, is dictated by Big Oil. His most radical idea is that the best way to change things is to name politicians who appear to "be obedient" to Big Oil and vote them out of office. He calls this "taking back America by moral means." To recruit John Q. Citizen into the effort, Cotton produced a huge ad spelling out how the system is broken, and showing how voters, working together, can fix it. The ad's headline, referring to today's behind-the-scenes operations of Washington business lobbyists, states In the Good Old Days, Big Business was More Honest. Below it is a 1937 picture of a union organizer being beaten at a Ford auto plant. To place the message where the money is, Cotton submitted the ad to the The Wall Street Journal. After weeks of foot dragging, the publication gave Cotton a lengthy list of editorial changes required, before the ad could be accepted. To buy the ad space, Cotton would have to kill the auto plant beating picture, the descriptive copy, and any reference to Ford. He would also have to change the wording in and about a "citizen inquiry" prominently offered to help voters learn quickly where House and Senate members stood on Big Oil and its political contributions from those members' own responses. The paper's representative was particularly strong on this subject, describing Cotton's approach as "threatening" and "entrapment." If I had made their changes, Cotton said, the ad would have looked like one of those pages you get back in response to a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department. In their 35 line rejection E-mail, the only thing they got right was a mistake we made in attribution. We attributed a profit projection to an oil company, when the source was a third party. The ad's primary purpose was to recruit small contributors, who would, in turn, fund more voter education ads in other publications. With that avenue blocked, Cotton proceeded to rethink the issue and came up with another approach. If he couldn't start with a lot of small contributions, he would go after a few very big ones. He does not take rejection well, particularly when the facts are on his side. Right now, he's not saying what the next steps will be. He does say that "The only people with the right to own a Member of Congress are the voters, and we will get that message out. When we do, it will be with truth and a little humor. You can guess who just got added to the list of stodgy, risk-averse institutions to be made fun of."
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