BILL HILLSMAN

Bill Hillsman runs North Woods Advertising, one of the nation’s most creative and successful marketing and political communications firms. North Woods is the smallest ad agency ever to be awarded the American Marketing Association’s Grand EFFIE, honoring the country’s single most-effective marketing campaign.

Hillsman has engineered some of the biggest upsets in American political history. In 1990, North Woods helped propel a little-known college professor named Paul Wellstone into the U.S. Senate. After taking over former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura’s struggling gubernatorial campaign weeks before election day, North Woods developed the strategy and the advertising which made him Governor of Minnesota.

Most recently, Hillsman and North Woods received national attention for helping progressive private-sector candidate Ned Lamont challenge and defeat three-term incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary.

Hillsman was the strategist and media consultant for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign and was the media consultant for independent gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington during the California recall election of 2003. North Woods developed creative concepts for Reform Party candidate Ross Perot’s 1990 presidential campaign and designed the high-profile campaign that led to international publicity for Kinky Friedman’s independent Texas gubernatorial campaign in 2006.

He is the founder of the organization Independent Voters of America, and a national authority on swing and independent voters. He has pioneered effective uses of the Internet in politics, and North Woods’ work received over 997,000 unique views on YouTube alone during the 2006 election cycle.

Hillsman’s work extends to cause, issue and advocacy communications, including environmental issues, universal health care, education reform, social security, civil rights, clean election legislation, instant runoff voting, tort reform and encouraging voter turnout.

He has served as advisor and director of communications for independent U.S. Senator Dean Barkley, and was appointed a Resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 2002. Hillsman has published articles and opinion pieces in major newspapers, including The New York Times, and he is the author of Run the Other Way: Fixing the Two-Party System, One Campaign at a Time, an exposé of the political consulting industry published by The Free Press in 2004.

Mr. Hillsman has teamed up with DHOB partner Dean Barkley on Jesse Ventura’s and Arianna Huffington’s independent campaigns for governor. He has worked with DHOB partners Laureen Oliver and Dean Barkley on Kinky Friedman’s independent gubernatorial campaign in Texas. He and DHOB partners Tom D’Amore and Laureen Oliver have worked on independent campaigns for governor in Massachusetts and Virginia, and Hillsman and D’Amore were essential to Ned Lamont’s recent victory in the Connecticut Democratic U.S. Senate primary. D’Amore and Hillsman have also teamed up on public policy campaigns for the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut.