There are others: an ad in Illinois's 13th District envisions GOP Rep. Rodney Davis in first class on a plane, ordering up champagne and lobsters ("Rodney Davis cares more about first class than the middle class," the ad says). And one in New Hampshire's 2nd District, targeting GOP candidate Marilinda Garcia, pictures a female doctor being arrested and put in the back of a police car for performing abortions ("Sending doctors to prison? Marilinda Garcia is extreme, even by tea-party standards," it says).
"There's humor when it's appropriate, there's intensity where it's appropriate, there's the feel of the district," said John Lapp, whose firm, Ralston Lapp, produced the Bost ads. "It's not screaming and yelling and insulting the voters, it's presenting them with information."
The DCCC isn't the only group experimenting with more original footage and unique ideas. Aides for its GOP counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee, say the committee has done 19 original TV shoots this year, many of them for direct-to-camera testimonials from voters in the districts in question. (Another, in Georgia's 12th District, features a live monkey.)
A series of those ads is running in West Virginia, where Republicans hope to oust longtime Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall from office next month. Featuring interviews with coal miners and residents in the district, the ads paint a picture of an incumbent who is out of touch with his district's needs.
"I don't know what I'm going to do if I lose my job. The EPA and the Obama administration is regulating us to death," says Joe McCormick, a coal miner from Seth, W.Va., in one ad. "When Nick Rahall votes with Barack Obama, that tells me that Nick Rahall don't really care about southern West Virginia."
NRCC spokeswoman Andrea Bozek said the ads are helping to shift momentum to GOP candidates in these key races. "Our ads are moving numbers in every race we have invested in," she said. "Our team has put in a lot of time and effort to produce strong effective that resonate with voters."
There's also the Tom Steyer-backed group NextGen Climate, which has run a handful of ads that are original—and at times a little strange. One 60-second ad in Iowa, which ran this summer, envisioned a smoke-filled, closed-door meeting with the Koch brothers laughing maniacally while talking about Ernst's tax pledges. The ad puzzled the D.C. political class, seemingly a bit too outside-the-box.
It's tough to tell how effective these ads will be at breaking through the clutter of cookie-cutter outside ads and candidate spots in the final weeks of the election—all the ads are running in tough districts, with candidates and incumbents facing difficult races. But ad-makers say it certainly can't hurt to be original.
"You certainly notice when a good ad goes up from an outside group," said Jon Vogel, whose firm, MVAR Media, made the New Hampshire ad. "You want something that's going to cut through a little bit better "¦ it's not a narrator just yelling at the voters about why the opponent is a terrible human being."