GOP Rep. Mike Kelly’s Americana Ad Uses Footage Shot in Russia
Kids riding a rollercoaster. A father and son hunting. It may look like Pennsylvania, but it’s actually eastern Europe.
Bill Clark
A new campaign ad for Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) features great American pastimes like playing baseball, riding a rollercoaster, football and hunting.
It’s a nice, wholesome video the likes of which one could expect any generic incumbent to be running. But in this case, the ad appears to use stock footage shot in Russia and Estonia.
One scene showing children on a rollercoaster matches stock footage from a location listed as Chelyabinsk, Russia on the website Pond5, which was flagged for The Daily Beast by the liberal American Bridge 21st Century PAC.
The footage apparently belongs to a multimedia production company called Pressmaster, according to the website, that works with “leading professionals in the visual industry from Russia and Vietnam.”
The name listed on the bio is Dmitriy Shironosov, whose LinkedIn lists him as a co-owner of the pressmaster production studio.
Another scene in Kelly’s ad, featuring a man and his son walking in a field to go hunting, looks exactly like a scene on iStock, a Getty Images site. That stock footage, entitled “Father and Son hunting for boar (slow motion)” lists Estonia as its shooting location.
Kelly, who represents Pennsylvania’s 3rd District, but is now running in Pennsylvania’s new 16th, after a court-ordered redrawing of the map, is in a race that the Cook Political Report rates as Lean Republican and one in which President Trump won by almost 20 points in 2016.
His campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.