Fred N. Davis III will do just about anything to get your attention, even when you are already in his office. On a recent morning in late September, Davis sits in his $2 million canary yellow mansion perched a few hundred yards downhill from the Hollywood sign. The place looks like an A-list actor’s bachelor pad, as if it were decorated to mess with your mind after the after party. A stuffed two-headed calf overlooks the living room. A fox stares down on those who dare to use the toilet. Next to his desk, he has a custom-made Robert Duvall bobblehead that will start cussing at the touch of a button.

“You are either going to love us or hate us,” the Oklahoma-raised Davis says with a twang, after apologizing for not sleeping much over the last several days.

See TIME’s video “Inside the Mind of Political Ad Guru Fred Davis.”

These are, after all, busy times for Davis and his singular brand of irreverent marketing. In what is shaping up to be the GOP’s best year since 2004, Davis has become the go-to adman for Republicans who are unknown or in deep trouble or simply want to break every rule on their way to elected office.

See 10 elections that changed America.

Already this year Davis has digitally inflated California Senator Barbara Boxer’s head into a chattering hot-air balloon for one online spot; created a surprisingly successful “One Tough Nerd” campaign for Michigan gubernatorial contender Rick Snyder; and portrayed a rival California Senate primary candidate, Tom Campbell, as a sheep with demon eyes, an image so odd and amateurish that it became an instant online sensation.

See the best viral campaign ads of 2010.

When one client, Arizona’s Ben Quayle, faced ruin after revelations that he had helped out a soft-porn website, Davis put Quayle in front of the camera with a jarring script: “Barack Obama is the worst President in history,” said the cherub-faced Quayle, 33, who is former Vice President Dan Quayle’s son. For days, national cable networks ran the clip incessantly, all but erasing the soft-porn story line. Quayle won his primary.

And on Oct. 4, Davis struck again, this time in Delaware. When Christine O’Donnell shocked the nation by winning that state’s Republican Senate primary, Davis was among the first calls her campaign aides made. The Davis solution for O’Donnell, who has been beset by a long history of zany utterances as a television pundit: put her in front of a camera, light her like a movie star, and have her say, “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.” That sparked an instant viral wave giving O’Donnell millions of dollars in free national media time. “He doesn’t just push the envelope,” Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush’s former adman, says of Davis. “He blows it up.”

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Risk taking like that is old hat in the realm of corporate advertising, where animated geckos sell insurance, time machines push diet soda, and Walt Whitman hocks Levi’s jeans. But risk is still something of a taboo in politics, a profession dominated by data-driven pollsters and famously insular consultants. “If you innovate and lose, it’s because you innovated,” explains Evan Tracey, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group. “If you do the same old thing and lose, you had a lousy candidate.”

Davis has worked with his share of lousy candidates, but he has never shied away from innovation. He was forced into the business at age 19, when his father died unexpectedly, leaving the family’s Tulsa public relations business in the lurch. “I took it over as this kid with a goatee and long hair, right out of drama school in college,” says Davis, who never graduated or looked back. “I wore a coat and tie, every day, for seven days a week, for 20 years. It was like Forrest Gump, honestly. I was in the right place at the right time a lot of times, and one thing led to another.”

His first political client was his uncle, James Inhofe, a conservative Oklahoma Congressman running for Senate in 1994. “We basically made a deal where I wasn’t going to charge him much, but he didn’t get a lot to say about the ads,” says Davis. “I said, ‘You know, I’m in the real ad biz. In the political ad biz, you are years behind what the real ad biz is like.’ ” The first spot dressed prisoners as pink-clad ballerinas to dramatize a Democratic crime bill’s support for federally funded dance classes. “Everybody starts with message,” Davis explains. “I don’t. I start with what will stand out and be remembered.”

See the top 10 campaign ads of 2008.

See the top 10 TV ads of 2009.

Over time, Davis found that while he loved being creative, he hated managing a large company, so instead of building a big firm, he took another route, trading the Ozarks for the Hollywood Hills, where, he says, the “really talented crews and people” all live. His firm, Strategic Perception Inc., doesn’t work like other firms and has only seven full-time employees. “We never present three or four ideas, and you pick one. We present one,” he says. “You have to accept that maybe the way everything has been done before is not always the best way. And you have to accept that we have never done the same campaign twice in 40 years.”

The boy who had grown up staging neighborhood plays fell quickly for California’s glitz and glamour, where he didn’t have to wear a tie and his office address could be Mulholland Highway. He’s hired Lauren Bacall, James Earl Jones and Orson Welles to do voice-overs for him, and he once knocked on Jimmy Stewart’s front door to try to get him to do a corporate video. (Stewart’s wife answered the door, but the answer was still no.) The Hollywood perch also allows Davis some distance from the cautionary ethos of Washington, which he still eyes warily. “There is a culture of sameness that does not allow for leaders to evolve,” says Davis, who identifies himself as more fiscally than socially conservative. For a hobby, he is learning to fly a helicopter.

On this day, he is doing final edits on a spot for the Republican Governors Association. It’s an economic attack on Neil Abercrombie, the Democratic candidate for Hawaii’s governorship, that would be conventional if not for all the soothing music and the shot of a sunset and rolling Hawaiian surf Davis has added. The effect is jarring, like getting a Swedish massage while someone butchers a cow nearby. “People in Hawaii don’t like nasty, negative politics,” Davis explains. “They like calm, peaceful and reasonable analysis. So we sent a team over there, and they shot for three or four days every sunrise, every sunset and every wave they could find.”

Before the Internet turned politics into an on-demand arcade, Davis tried to turn VHS tapes into viral media. In 2002, he filmed a 10-minute movie for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue that depicted the sitting governor, Roy Barnes, as a giant rat with a gold chain stomping like Godzilla through downtown Atlanta. Davis screened the movie at a local theater and then sent VHS tapes in the mail to voters. When Barnes’ allies denounced the attack, it became a viral hit. In addition to those who received it in the mail, thousands attempted to download the video on dial-up Internet connections, overloading the campaign’s servers.

Sometimes the desire to break the box seems to take Davis too far. He will reluctantly admit today that he overdid one campaign he created for former Representative Bob Barr’s ill-fated 2002 re-election campaign. “Barr is just gooder,” ran the copy Davis wrote, spoken by a good-ol’-boy Georgia farmer amid unsettling closeup shots of horses. “It was a disaster,” Davis admits now.

Others have criticized some of his more recent work as doing as much harm as good. Why, for example, did Davis decide to have O’Donnell deny her pagan past — she admitted in a 1999 TV segment to having “dabbled into witchcraft” — in her first campaign video? “When your client is the featured joke on the opening of Saturday Night Live, and every Friday night the country breathlessly awaits what new scandalous old tape Bill Maher will show about her, you have to draw a line in the sand,” Davis says. “Say, ‘From this moment forward, this race is about things that are important.'”

A recent spot he produced for John McCain showed the Senator walking the U.S.-Mexico border, announcing to a local sheriff that he wanted to “complete the danged fence,” a dramatic reversal of McCain’s earlier position that the barrier was a distraction. Then, to highlight his point, Davis cut in a closeup of McCain’s rigid jaw. “You are selling tough,” Davis explains. Bill Hillsman, a Democratic adman who makes similarly memorable spots, says Davis is one of the few in the business who really understand the value of surprise. “Fred and I would agree foursquare that it is still all about content and getting the attention of the audience,” Hillsman says.

Davis oversaw all the convention videos for the GOP in 2008; when Sarah Palin asked him if her “brand” meant she should wear her hair up or down, Davis insisted on the former. The challenge of getting voters’ attention in the next cycle worries Davis a bit, given the current crop of potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012. What exactly, he asks, would distinguish Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels? “I have trouble figuring out where he or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty stand out.”

In the meantime, Davis has no trouble standing out as a Republican admaker in Hollywood, willing to do what he must to win. Shortly after the 2008 election, he appeared at a local panel discussion attended by stars of stage and screen. “I got booed before I even said a word,” Davis remembers, having been announced as a key strategist for McCain’s presidential bid. Afterward, Jason Alexander, the actor who played George Costanza on Seinfeld, approached Davis. “As nice as humanly possible,” Davis recalls, “he looked at me and he goes, ‘Honestly, how do you sleep at night?’ ” The answer, with elections around the corner, is that Davis isn’t sleeping much these days. Which is just fine with him, because the nation is paying attention.

Politicians are always starved for attention, and in this YouTube era, nothing attracts eyeballs like a good viral video. As election season heats up, TIME takes a look at some of the campiest, craziest and creepiest campaign ads of the year.

Campaign Ads Gone Viral:
Listen Up: Dale Peterson Is No Dummy
Old Spice Dan
Dwight McKenna”s Monstrosity
How to Speak Alabaman
Carly Fiorina”s Postmodern Masterpiece
Rick Barber”s Revolution
John McCain and the “Danged Fence”
A Clean Campaign
Billy the Bailer
Alan Grayson: Coming to a Theater Near You?
Tommy Gun Gorman
Of Mama Grizzlies and Pink Elephants
The Terrible Twos
Hayworth the Huckster
A November to Remember
Mike, Mike, Mike Weinstein
Tattooing Crist
Worst President, Best Ad
On the Job with Tom Perriello
Dan Fanelli”s Skewed Views

Republican media consultant Fred Davis III has a vision for the future of American politics, one in which building-size rats roam the landscape, babies in strollers wear enormous brown toupees, and demon sheep with red robotic eyes feed on rolling green hills. He envisions a democratic process driven by viral oddities and visual tricks, campaign ads so weird that no one can look away.

What’s more, for Davis and the candidates who employ him, that future is already here. “My whole deal in life is, if nobody sees it and nobody talks about it, you have wasted your money,” says Davis, who is best known for creating the famous Barack Obama “Celebrity” ad as a media consultant to presidential candidate John McCain.

On Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Hollywood-based political auteur released his latest creation: a three-minute YouTube spot attacking Republican Senate candidate Thomas Campbell on behalf of his rival, Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO now running in the GOP Senate primary. The ad was so weird — employing montages of pigs and sheep, a robotic wolfman dressed in wool, graphic illustration evoking Monty Python — that it spread online like swine flu on a pig farm.

“Carly Fiorina Is an Internet Genius,” declared New York magazine. “The Most Bizarre Ad in Recent Memory,” blared the Huffington Post. “Demon Sheep Goes Viral,” announced the Washington Post on a front-page Web headline. The tag #demonsheep quickly spiked near the top of Twitter’s trending topics, and Rachel Maddow played the spot on her MSNBC show, calling it “so bad, no one wanted to believe it was real.” Not wanting to be left out of the controversy, the third Republican candidate in the race to unseat Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, Chuck DeVore, responded by launching a website — Demonsheep.org — that asked people to “pledge your efforts to stop these Jawa-like, Terminator-esque Demon Sheep from taking over California.”

Davis, meanwhile, watched the explosion with a sort of mischievous delight. “In California, it costs almost $5 million to fund one 30-second TV spot statewide,” he explained in an interview on Thursday, Feb. 4. “We have to go out of the way to get attention. I would say we probably got more attention on this little sheep film that they would get for $10 million of advertising.”

And the object of all of that attention was Fiorina’s fiercely negative message: that Campbell, the front runner in the polls for the GOP nomination, was not a true fiscal conservative. Rather, he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a “fiscal conservative in name only.” The Campbell campaign responded by deploying its new-media consultant, Mindy Finn, on Twitter to try to direct the viral buzz. “If the GOP has any hope of taking back the senate it won’t be by accusing each other of being #demonsheep,” she wrote in one post, having already rated the spot a “marketing fail.”

“People have been mocking the campaign for releasing this type of ad,” says James Fisfis, a Campbell spokesman, noting the criticism that has spread on blogs. “We sent it out to our supporters to raise money on it.” The fundraising e-mail claimed that “Carly’s campaign is hitting the panic button.”

Davis, a rare blow-dried Republican in liberal Los Angeles, has played this card before. He first made his mark on the national scene by producing a 10-minute movie for 2002 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Sonny Purdue that depicted the sitting governor, Roy Barnes, as “King Roy,” a giant rat with a gold crown, stomping like Godzilla through Atlanta. That was before the advent of YouTube and viral videos, so he screened the film for journalists at a movie theater; the next day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an image from the spot on its front page. Purdue went on to win the election.

In Illinois last year, Davis produced a six-minute video for Republican Senate candidate Andy McKenna that put Governor Rod Blagojevich’s hair on the state capital and most of its inhabitants, making it a symbol of corruption in the state. The ad was called “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow,” and though it generated significant media coverage, the McKenna campaign eventually pulled it from circulation. “While the ad was running, we gained countless points in the poll,” he said. “But they got cold feet on the hair.”

Not all of Davis’ clients — a roster that includes Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley and Tim James, who is running for Governor in Alabama — request the viral boost he offers. But Davis says Fiorina’s corporate-world background in marketing predisposed her to this kind of risk taking. “She loved it,” he says of Fiorina’s reaction when he screened the demon-sheep spot. “Do you go into it knowing it is going to get negative blowback? Absolutely you do. But at the end of the day, my only goal, and the campaign’s only goal, is to get people to wake up to the fact that what Tom Campbell’s telling you may not be the real Tom Campbell.”

A day after its posting, YouTube recorded more than 120,000 views of the spot. By contrast, Davis points out, the campaign had released a straight two-minute bio video about Fiorina on Feb. 1. Three days later, it had garnered 611 views on YouTube. “What would the normal chattering class say you should do? Run a serious ad,” Davis continues. “No you don’t. Nobody is interested in that.”

This is Davis’ campaign mantra for a new era of political communication, one in which free viral attention is just as valuable as costly television time. “I just say there are two choices,” Davis says of his advice to his clients. “You can pay a whole lot of money to get your message in front of eyeballs, or you can go out on a limb a little bit.” For Davis, that’s a no-brainer.

What if the McCain campaign had run ads using footage of Barack Obama dancing with Ellen DeGeneres to show his coziness with celebrity? Or followed up on its Paris Hilton ad with others featuring Donald Trump and Jessica Simpson? All of that was on the drawing board of Fred Davis III, the advertising whiz that John McCain has used for almost all of his campaign media and one of the most talented conservative political operatives in America. Oh yes, he also had an Internet ad up his sleeve that would attack Obama’s celebrity by associating him with Oprah. But in the end, he scotched that one. “We decided you don’t really fight Santa Claus or Oprah,” he says, “so we removed her.”

In an extended interview with TIME, Davis detailed what might have been in the campaign ad war — and what self-censorship the McCain staff imposed on themselves regarding the issue of race. For most of the campaign, Davis functioned as McCain’s silent partner. While journalists hounded McCain’s senior campaign aides, people like Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Rick Davis (no relation), Fred Davis worked in the shadows. He designed and often wrote the scripts for the most stinging of McCain’s spots — the Web ad that depicted Obama as a messiah, the kindergarten ad that suggested Obama wanted to teach young kids about sex and the many others that questioned Obama’s qualifications for the White House. (See the best Obama pictures from the campaign.)

“My favorite ad of the campaign was as simple as it could be,” Davis said. “And it started out something like, ‘Long before the world knew of John McCain or Barack Obama, one of them spent five years in a hellhole because he refused early release to honor his fellow prisoners, while the other one wouldn’t walk out of a church after 20 years of the guy spewing hatred towards America.’ And the last line was, ‘Character matters, especially when no one is listening.’ ” The ad never ran, however, because McCain ruled the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the preacher of Obama’s Chicago church, out of bounds shortly after he locked up the Republican nomination.

Good advertising men are almost always mischiefmakers at heart, the sort who don’t mind a little confrontation and who revel in a bit of controversy. And so Davis is wistful at the missed opportunities of the McCain campaign. “I made a list once, which no one will ever see, of all the reasons that my hands were tied on this campaign,” he says. “And I’ve never had a list this long.” One of his biggest struggles, Davis says, was to come up with negative spots against a historic, groundbreaking candidate without stepping on taboos. “One of the big hands that I felt was tied behind my back was [that] so many things — like [Obama’s record on] crime — you would logically do were perceived as ‘Oh, we can’t do that. That was playing the race card,’ ” he says, adding that the campaign created a whole series of crime attacks against Obama that were never aired. “Reverend Wright? ‘Oh, can’t do that; they’ll say we are playing the race card.’ [William] Ayers? For the longest time, ‘Oh, can’t do that. We’re playing the race card.’ ”

Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain’s ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. “We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist,” Davis says. “How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?” He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. “We were held to a totally different standard,” he says.

Nevertheless, the McCain campaign was unable to escape the charge that it was playing the race card. An Associated Press analysis called the campaign’s invocations of the once violent 1960s radical Ayers “racially tinged” because they evoked the word terrorist. McCain was also accused of playing on race for running an ad that highlighted Obama’s relationship with Franklin Raines, a former executive at Fannie Mae who is black. Says Davis: “I never saw anybody play the race card but the Obama campaign.”

Still, for Davis, it was an exhilarating if frustrating experience. In addition to the McCain account, his firm oversaw ads for five Senate races, including the hard-fought Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu campaigns. It was a career high point for Davis, who started in advertising at the age of 19, after his father died and he had to take over the family public relations business. At the height of the campaign, Davis, who is the nephew of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, oversaw nine edit shops, producing up to three spots a day, as well as the stage production for the Republican National Convention. “You wouldn’t know what tomorrow’s need was until tomorrow morning early,” he says. “And it needed to be out that day.”

By all rights, Fred Davis III should be living in a red state, a place teeming with clapboard churches, cowboy hats and gun racks. Instead, the Oklahoma native has chosen to live in sunny Santa Barbara, Calif., and has located his company, Strategic Perception, in sinful Hollywood. But he’s had to pay a price for it all. The neighbors haven’t exactly been friendly. Every day for about six months, he put a “John McCain for President” sign in front of his home. And almost every night it would be stolen. “I wanted to leave a note there and say, ‘You idiots don’t get it. I have an unlimited supply,’ ” Davis says, still laughing about it.

After the election ended, he participated in a panel discussion before a crowd of Hollywood bigwigs. He was met with disapproving grumbles when he was introduced as the guy who made McCain’s Paris Hilton ad. “It wasn’t a good evening really,” Davis says. As he was trying to leave the hall, former Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander confronted him. “He basically wanted to know how I sleep at night.”

Even with the limitations on his ads, Davis says he holds no ill feelings toward Obama. He says the McCain campaign’s plan, which was largely dependent on tactical attacks on Obama, was working well until the financial meltdown, which began to accelerate in mid-September. “You’ve got to look at it and say, my Lord, it was just Obama’s time. You know, his stars aligned right,” Davis says. “And I think he’s an incredibly gifted candidate. Let’s hope, and I do hope, and I hope I’m right, that he’ll be a very gifted President. And I hope he’ll rule from the middle. And I hope he’ll, you know, be inclusive of Republicans. And if he does those things, he could be one of the great Presidents in history.”

Such kind words for Obama may be surprising coming from the man who oversaw the media campaign to destroy Obama’s reputation. But Davis is not the kind of Republican operative who looks on liberals with personal animus. At the end of the day, he still has to live among them.

1. New York Times editor Bill Keller

2. Sarah Palin

3. Steve Schmidt

4. Washington Post legend Dan Balz

5. McCain adman Fred Davis