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
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