Getting Out the vote

Ad efforts to get out the vote in Chicago’s Cook County used to take a fairly dry approach, with celebrity talking heads “basically wagging their fingers at people and telling them it’s their responsibility to vote,” acknowledged Scott Burnham, a representative of the Cook County Clerk’s office.

This fall the clerk asked FCB for some ideas, and the result is a more humorous and edgy approach aimed at notoriously non-voting 18- to 24-year-olds, Burnham said. A TV spot has a clerkish fellow reading off a list of excuses “as a public service for those not voting.”