Randy Stearns was old enough to drive, but not old enough to vote, when he put up signs for Walter Mondale in the mostly Republican city of Mountain View, California, in the run-up to the 1984 presidential election. While studying printmaking at Northwestern, he says, he did a little volunteer work. In 1992, while working as a freelance graphic artist and temp, he called voters from Evanston on behalf of Bill Clinton. Politically involved? Sure. Influential? Not so much.
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It took some time for Stearns to get where he is now. In 1993 he designed interactive CD-ROMs and Power Point presentations as the production manager at Gemini Consulting, where he learned about the Internet from colleagues. When his office closed, he joined a Web start-up called Extreme Fans that offered sports news, commentary, fantasy sports advice, and interactive features like contests and chat rooms. AOL bought the site, changed its name to Real Fans Sports Network, and sold it to CBS Sportsline. One of its founders, Hank Adams, went on to launch Ignite Sports Media, which provided up-to-the-minute sports stats and scores for various online portals. That company later merged with Sportvision, best known for the yellow first-down lines it projects on the field during football broadcasts. Stearns stuck it out until Sportvision dumped its Internet side in 2004 and his job ceased to exist. “I could move to New York—most sports stuff is not happening here in Chicago—or go to a big Internet firm like Sears.com,” he says. Instead he decided to strike out on his own: “I knew how to design, I knew a lot of people, we’d see what opportunities came up.”
Articulated Man was officially incorporated in June 2004 with two employees: Stearns and Brandon House, a designer who’d worked with Stearns at Sportvision. Their first clients were involved in auto racing, football, and the arts. (The company continues to take some nonpolitical work.) Eric Carbone, who’d been Stearns’s boss at Extreme Fans and now puts together rapid-response and other Web sites to involve the public in the political process, was his first political client. Before the birth of Articulated Man, Stearns had helped Carbone build a site for Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign. Once the firm was up and running, Carbone hired him for more projects. One of their earliest collaborations was zellout.com, which urged Georgia’s nominally Democratic senator Zell Miller to switch parties after he gave a keynote speech at the 2004 Republican convention. Today Carbone runs Internet operations for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and continues to hire Stearns for projects. Articulated Man, he explains, “really listens to what you’re trying to accomplish and then figures out the best way to a) make it look amazing and b) make it easy to use for your visitors. I never feel like I have to translate what I’m trying to do into techspeak with them. That is huge when you’re trying to do something fast and online.”
Bashara, who’s been with Stearns since graduating from Northwestern in ’91, signed on as communications director in 2006, after 13 years in direct-response television advertising at A. Eicoff & Company. That year the company nearly doubled its client base and worked for successful candidates in several high-profile races, including Nick Lampson, who replaced Tom DeLay in Congress, and Ben Cardin, who filled Paul Sarbanes’s U.S. Senate seat from Maryland. Some of Articulated Man’s counterparts think their work turned certain close states, “like Virginia in 2006,” Bashara says. But Stearns hesitates to give his company too much credit. Web sites, he says, merely lay the groundwork for a campaign, giving candidates “a way to communicate their message early and begin the organizing/fund-raising process.”
“It’s an exciting time to be in this business,” says Bashara. “We come from agnostic businesses. Now we can believe, and believe out loud.”v
