Scott Brown Ad Features Footage of Foreign Businesses
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Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images(BOSTON) — It was a web ad with a patriotic message that went viral. But it turns out that the web ad released by Scott Brown campaign for the Massachusetts Senate race last week — “Let America Be America Again” — featured some scenes that were shot in Europe.
The two and a half minute ad is a critique of comments made by Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren in 2011 which echo President Obama’s now infamous “You didn’t make that” comments regarding successful American businesses. The Brown ad features video of past presidents talking about free enterprise, interspersed with footage of businesses throughout the country and, it turns out, in Ireland and Spain too.
The Boston Globe reported that the ad, which has received over 800,000 hits since it was released, features stock footage of small business. One scene — about a minute into the video — features a man standing outside of O’Connor’s Family Butchers. O’Connor’s, it turns out, is located in Dublin, Ireland. Another shot features a man standing inside a restaurant kitchen — a kitchen which is in Barcelona.
The Brown campaign had no comment.
Why are these foreign businesses featured in the ad? The images are licensed to Getty Images, which sells stock footage used by thousands of companies here and abroad, so logic dictates the footage was an easily-explainable situation writ larger by Team Warren to try to dig up something negative about the very successful ad against its candidate.
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