When Senator John McCain’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination was in the doldrums last year — short on cash and with top aides jumping ship — his campaign strategists turned to YouTube.
“The McCain campaign was imploding,” recalled Julie Germany, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
“They decided the more strategic investment in battleground states in the primaries would be to put videos up on YouTube with high production values,” Germany said.
“They realized that by the end of the day they would be all over television news and network news and cable news and people would be talking about them on the political talk shows,” she said. “And they were right.”
The political ads posted on the free video-sharing site have been credited by Germany and other analysts with helping McCain revive his fortunes and stage an improbable comeback victory in the crucial New Hampshire primary.
McCain went on to capture his party’s nomination and build a warchest for his Nov. 4 presidential election bid, but his campaign has continued to make canny use of YouTube in the battle for the White House.
“They duplicated their efforts this August with attack ads against Barack Obama,” Germany said.
“The campaigns are putting video out on the Web knowing full well that their supporters will distribute it for them,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of techpresident.com, a blog which explores how technology is changing politics.
“There’s an entirely new political media ecology that’s been formed because of this platform we call YouTube,” he said.
Some of McCain’s hardest hitting video ads such as Celeb or The One, in which Obama is depicted as an over-hyped media creation, never appeared on broadcast TV, only on YouTube as so-called “ghost videos.”
But, as intended by the McCain campaign, they took on a life of their own, being picked up by TV networks, sent around as links on the Internet and written about by bloggers and mainstream print media.
The costs of producing the Web-only videos were a fraction of the costs of a traditional TV or radio advertising buy.
YouTube has not only been used as a vehicle for free campaign advertising, it’s also allowed the candidates to get their message directly to the public.
Both candidates have their own channels on YouTube: youtube.com/barackobama and youtube.com/johnmccain.
“The thing about video online, but text as well, is that candidates now have new ways of talking to voters,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project at the Washington-based Pew Research Center.
“Candidates still depend to a tremendous amount on traditional media carrying their message but they are now increasingly taking advantage of these other opportunities to bypass the media and speak directly to voters,” he said.
AFP
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS