Miller Beer Ad Agency Has Connections To MoveOn.Org

Miller Beer has a connection to MoveOn.org: Most of MoveOn’s commercials are made by experienced operatives at a left-wing advertising firm in Santa Monica, California.

The firm of Zimmerman & Markman occupies a small suite of offices in a four-story building a few blocks from the beach. Bill Zimmerman, the agency’s strategist, has a PhD in psychology and got his start in politics registering black voters in Mississippi in 1962. He worked with Jane Fonda on anti-Vietnam War mobilization and has played a role in drug decriminalization campaigns. Pacy Markman, the agency’s copywriter, had a long career in commercial advertising (he wrote the indelible slogan “Miller Lite: everything you always wanted in a beer, and less”). MoveOn, he says, “is my penance.”

The assertion that MoveOn is centrist might be supported by the example of “Child’s Pay,” but Zimmerman and Markman are traditional partisan gunslingers. The spots they produce are deeply negative, hitting again and again upon a theme of dishonesty in the Bush administration and using a tagline that the agency chose soon after the president posed for the famous “mission accomplished” photos on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln: “We’re not being led, we’re being misled.”

“We were trying to push a more acceptable way of calling the president a liar,” says Zimmerman. “At the time, given his approval rating, liar would have met with too much resistance.”

“But yes,” says Markman, “I am telling you that the president is a fucking liar.”

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