Skip to footer

'Between Two Ferns' and the 8 wackiest Obamacare ads targeting Millennials

The Affordable Care Act needs young adults to sign up for the program to work, but getting their attention has proved difficult, and strategists are getting desperate. Here are eight of the strangest pro- and anti-Obamacare ads targeting Millennials.

Rapping Barack Obama by #GetCovered

Snoop Dogg may not be the first person you think of when you think Obama and health insurance, but the #GetCovered campaign set out to change that with a spoof on the rapper’s hit song “Drop It Like It's Hot.”

The video uses a similar simple beat plus black and white video to pay homage to Snoop Dogg's hit, and as a backdrop to famed Barack Obama impersonator Iman Crosson rapping about health insurance exchanges.

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

"I’m Commander in Chief and I’m two terms strong / Plus I’ve got this health care, which has got it going on"

 “So don’t stand and diddle, my healthcare’s the ‘shizzle’ / It’s chock full of top notch healthcare ‘provizzles’ / We’ll cover all your ‘vizzles,’ your ‘dizzles,’ AND your ‘tizzles / Now while you figure that out, it’s back to that ‘chorizzle’”

“Pres and I’m the man, been Pres since ‘Yes We Can’ / And I dealt with all this healthcare while dealing with Iran”

The ad has over 1 million hits since its December release. 

5 of 8
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.