Befriending the internet

The election of 2010 may have been known as the ‘television election’ in the UK, but in the US it was the year of online video. Hundreds of campaigns across America used the tool for the first time to broadcast their messages and generate social appeal for their causes.

The 2008 presidential campaign was the first time we saw how online video could catapult a campaign. Remember the ‘Yes We Can’ video in support of the Obama campaign? The video went viral on YouTube, with 5.4 million people watching it in the first month, receiving over 11 million hits in total. It also gave Obama powerful legitimacy in popular culture – a priceless asset for any campaign.

By 2010, at least 38 governors had videos on YouTube, and every state had members of Congress on the platform. YouTube spotted the proliferating of political videos, and in June launched the You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit. It offers politicians and candidates a free Politician Channel, which can be branded. Politicians can also take advantage of Google Moderator to engage directly from their channel with constituents, and measure channel performance with Google Insight.

YouTube also offers paid campaign tools: promoted videos; call-to-action overlays linking directly to fundraising pages, candidate websites or email sign-up forms; in-stream ads during professional online programming on YouTube and its partner sites.

Around 450 candidates in the US registered for the Politician Channel during the mid-term election, and in the weeks during the run-up to the election, half of the top videos on the YouTube Viral Video Chart were related to it. One source claimed that the top US campaigns are spending 85 per cent of their online budgets on video.

Internet videos aren’t exactly new, so it’s worth asking, “why now?”. For one, increased broadband efficiency combined with the population’s tech appetite and savvy has lead to more people watching videos online, and particularly political ones. Seven in ten adult internet users say they've used the internet to watch or download video. That’s 52 per cent of all adults in the US. And since 2007, viewership of online political videos doubled, from 15 to 30 per cent of all adult internet users.

Remember Obama's ‘Yes We Can’ video? It went viral on YouTube, with 5.4 million people watching it in the first month

Meanwhile, with free distribution channels like YouTube, and the ease of embedding video into websites and social media platforms, online video is no longer the exclusive domain of 'techies' and major production companies. Indeed, the home-made feel of many online political videos is compelling to voters who crave a more authentic dialogue with their politicians.

Online video has some major benefits for campaigns. It costs a fraction of what a television ad does, offering smaller, less well-funded campaigns the chance to compete on the airwaves. It also has the added bonus of being able to roll for much longer than the constraints of a 30 or 60-second TV spot.

Plus, online videos often gain a wide and captive audience. In-stream and pre-roll videos are shown before or during other streamed content, which almost guarantees an engaged audience, and research is showing that consumers react better to ads delivered through online video than through traditional TV; they are more attentive. One specialist firm in Washington said that web video format gives an almost 100 per cent view rate for political ads, with around 80 per cent watching the video all the way through. Even campaign emails with ‘video’ in the subject line are opened more frequently.

At the same time, online video is not without its pitfalls, as we all recall from Gordon Brown’s disastrous YouTube debut.

Candidates are still experimenting with how to attract and keep an online audience’s attention. A longer video format requires tactics such as attention-grabbing ploys and humour. These can backfire, resulting in negative media or parody videos that get more views than the original.

Meanwhile, a growing number of special interest groups and individual voters are producing their own political video material, which often competes with official campaign spots and dilutes their influence.

Finally, in the push to be original and drive audience figures, there's the risk of losing focus on finding and influencing voters in a candidate’s own district. It may be entertaining for a New Yorker to watch the YouTube hit of a gun-toting cowboy running for Alabama agriculture commissioner, but on Election Day, that viewer won't offer any additional votes to this candidate. Online political videos will only make a significant electoral impact when combined with clever online geo-targeting.

The use of online video in campaigning is still in its infancy, and campaigns will gain sophistication in using the tool. For now, the public is tuning in, by the millions, to online videos. Surely this is good news for the future of politics and for every politician vying to be heard?