Cover Oregon was officially scrapped on Friday, so in the first episode of his new show Last Week Tonight John Oliver cleverly rewrote one of the ads for us. I don’t like it when people make fun of Laura Gibson—though I have to imagine being spoofed by Lisa Loeb is kind of professionally hilarious—but I can’t really argue with the rest of that. (In a Facebook post, Gibson jokingly took full credit for the collapse of Cover Oregon, then noted that Oliver’s people gave her “very sweet” advance notice about the spot. The real culprit, of course, is Oracle, which utterly failed to deliver a functional health exchange.)
Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on. More by Alison Hallett
I was more irked about Gibson being made fun of than learning somewhere around a quarter billion dollars was utterly wasted on coveroregon.geocities.poop.
Maybe if Laura Gibson and those bearded actors had spent more time making a functional website and less singing a twee song, we wouldn’t be in this mess! What a bunch of idiots!
C C — I suggest you re-examine your values pal.
Bwahahah
I wonder how many bike lanes a quarter billion dollars could have bought?
Or helping schools…rebuilding roads…
etc etc etc
Instead we have people thinking “oh, poor Gibson”
There should be outrage.
Gibson is an adult and can deal with her decision to participate in a video that looks like (in the words of a previous commenter) “it came out of Wes Anderson’s asshole.”
Over at The Merc’s sister paper, The Stranger, they have a lively discussion about the failure of Oracle and this show’s highlighting it.
Dan Savages headline is the best:
“John Oliver Is Over Oregon’s Twee Bullshit”
But who cares about that stuff — poor Gibson.
You just might be taking CC’s comment a wee bit too seriously. Deep breaths and paper sacks, my friend.
Uh, it was sorta directed at Alison too, but perhaps you are correct MT.
frankieb, the failure of Oracle? Are you kidding? They will not lose a dime over this thanks to the incompetence of Salem not to include any performance stipulations.
“we” deserve this indeed!
Yes, Oracle is a culprit for the bad platform, and so are the people who cut the contract with Oracle. But I’m also fascinated by the response of North, the agency that took $10million to do branding and comms work for the platform, and which produced the ads featuring Laura Gibson.
I’m not going to slam Dave Allen, who has always struck me as a nice, smart British-born person, but he did quit North months ago just before this all came tumbling down. I do note, however, that he was the person to announce the contract win:
http://north.com/thinking/north-wins-contr…
…and that Mark Ray, the agency’s President, was left to carry the can with a response to John Oliver’s spot:
http://north.com/thinking/yes-john-oliver-…
The best quote? “But at North, we welcome stupid fucking idiots. And I’d do it all again just the same, proudly.”
That’s some ten-million-dollar-brass-balling, right there. Still, I doubt they’ll lose any sleep over it. Although I do note from their clients page that their past clients seem a little more prestigious than their current ones.