NDN Blog

Enabling the Creativity of the Crowds in Politics

So maybe the Republicans are going to put up a fight in the new tools space after all. After repeatedly watching the Dems innovate with new internet tools, Mitt Romney’s campaign has broken out with an initiative to allow supporters to create their own television ads. The campaign is using Jumpcut, which Yahoo bought last year, as the tool for “mashing up” video, audio and photos in creative ways. The campaign provides a base of content to use, but they also encourage people to upload their own material to remix.

“Mash-ups” refer to repurposing material meant for one thing to communicate another. It’s similar to the more familiar “remixing” of music from original songs into new creations. The mash-up technique has been used somewhat in politics, though not in official campaigns. The most famous example is the “Vote Different” remake of the Apple 1984 done by a person who remained anonymous for several weeks earlier this year. Moveon blazed a trail in the 2004 campaign by creating a contest to create a TV ad about “Bush in 30 Seconds.” However, all the submissions were original and there was no material provided to create the ads via a mash-up.

The Romney campaign is drawing off both strands and creating a contest where people can use official material in news ways. This has its pros and cons. The good side is that it allows many more people to potentially get involved because they have all the tools and material at their disposal and don’t have to shoot original video, etc. The risk is that people hostile to the campaign might hijack the material and put anti-Romney messages up. This actually happened last year in an attempt by Chevy to get regular people to make ads about their Tahoe. Somebody organized a bunch of environmentalists who used the clips of the car to create ads lambasting the gas-guzzling vehicles. (See the NPI talk by Julie Bergman Sender for more on this episode.)

Despite the risks, Romney is going down the right path. The most successful candidates will be those who can harness the energy and creativity of large numbers of American citizens. No one candidate or small team of consultants can pull off an election victory these days. They need the ideas, passions and efforts of many, many people working together for a long, long time.

Peter Leyden

The New Politics Theme and NPI sightings in the Mainstream Media

Last week it was the YouTube/CNN debates. This week it’s the YearlyKos gathering of the Netroots in Chicago. It’s been quite a summer for anything to do with New Politics. And we’re just gearing up for what certainly will be an eventful fall. The mainstream media has been focusing an enormous amount of attention on all this New Politics, and the New Politics Institute has been one place where they have turned to for insight into what is happening. With that in mind, we post some links to stories that have been done recently in which we helped out and were quoted. This does not include the new media of the blogs or online world, but more the traditional media of newspapers, television and radio. And many of the non-print interviews do not have a presence on the web so are not included. We keep a running tab of these various media sightings for the New Politics Institutes at our website at www.newpolitics.net on the “buzz” page. You can follow the media conversation there, or check out some of the links below. Thanks

BBC.Com – YouTube Changes Face of US Debate - July 23rd

US News and World ReportA Hair-Raising YouTube Duel - July 29th

The New York Times – In a Highly Complex World, Innovation from the Top Down - July 29th

US News and World Report - Cyberactivists a Must-See for Candidates - Aug 1st 

San Francisco Chronicle - YouTube Steals the Dem Debate - July 24th

KCRW Radio: To The Point with Warren Olney – Will YouTube Change the Substance of Presidential Politics? - July 24th

San Jose Mercury News – Tough questions for Democratic contenders from the YouTube crowd - July 24th

Mother JonesInterview with Peter Leyden: New Politics Institute Director - June 29th

On the Media: New York Public Radio – Googlitics - June 15th

AP News via Tucson Citizen – Will YouTube revolutionize '08 presidential debates? Don't bet on it - July 27th

This Friday: NPI New Tools Campaign - Stage 2

Last summer NPI launched a campaign to get progressives to adopt four key new tools that helped boost prospects in the 2006 campaign. Come to an event on July 27th in DC where we launch the campaign around this year’s set of four more tools and explain why they are important and how to easily get started using them.

This Stage II Campaign will expand to promote “Reimagine Video,” “Go Mobile,” “Leverage Social Networks,” and “Target Your Marketing.” We also will update our previous pitches to “Buy Cable,” “Engage the Blogs,” “Speak in Spanish,” and build on our earlier use Search Ads to become the broader “Advertise Online.”

Each Tool will have a short, practical memo to politicos about why this tool is important to leverage, and how to get started using them. The memos are written by practitioners who deeply understand the tools and how they can be used by politics. Many of these experts will be at the launch event to talk and answer questions. They include:

Jed Alpert, CEO and cofounder of Mobile Commons, which helps political people leverage mobile media, on “Go Mobile.”

Dan Manatt, CEO and Executive Producer of PoliticsTV.com, which focuses on internet TV for the Netroots, on “Reimagine Video.”

Laura Quinn, CEO of Catalist, which has built and operates a national voter database for progressives, on “Target Your Marketing.”

Henry Copeland, founder and CEO of Blogads, one of the very earliest ways to advertise on blogs, on “Advertise Online.”

Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD, one of the first political Blogs, and Coauthor of Crashing the Gate, on “Engage the Blogs.”

And Ali Weise, NDN Executive Director and former deputy director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on “Buy Cable.”

The New Tools Campaign, Stage II
Friday, July 27
Phoenix Park Hotel
520 N Capitol Street, NW
10am - Noon
Light refreshments will be served

Please RSVP to Tracy Leaman at tleaman@ndn.org or 202-842-7213.

Feel free to spread this announcement around. The more progressives who understand the powerful new tools and new media we now have at our disposal, the better. Thanks.

NPI and the New Era Marked by the CNN-YouTube Presidential Debate

The Presidential debate jointly sponsored by YouTube and CNN this evening represents a remarkable moment where new media finally takes its rightful place right alongside the old media. The symbolism of the moment will be as important as the practical outcome of this experiment in melding the best of the traditional political journalism world with the powerful new capabilities of the highly democratized and participatory world of web video.

I will be in South Carolina tonight to witness this coming of age in new media, represented by YouTube, the web video website owned by Google, which is the most prominent of a whole range of new media sites that are now making a big impact on American Politics. The New Politics Institute has been heralding this transition and the importance of these new tools since its inception more than two years ago. We have been helping progressives understand the magnitude of the changes happening in media and new digital technologies, as well as master the new strategies on how to successfully integrate these tools into politics.

For those who want a refresher before the debate on how these new tools play in politics, take a look at the report, videos of our public meetings, and other forms of content at our website at www.newpolitics.net or the various links to the side. Web Video itself has been the subject of quite a bit of recent content, including "The Exploding World of Web Video", a video from a recent event of ours that shows how web video is being used in politics. Then there's “Political Web Video World", an innovative video itself that gives an overview of more than a dozen categories of political activities where web video already is making its mark. Check out the written report by NPI Fellow Julie Bergman Sender on her approach to creating compelling web video, such as her famous “White House West” Will Ferrell impersonation of George W. Bush on a ranch in the lead-up to the 2004 election. Or check out our NPI blog, or the NDN blog, where Tuesday I will post my analysis on the debate and what made it different.

The week may start with the historic YouTube/CNN debate in South Carolina, but it will end Friday with an NPI event in Washington on the launch of Stage II of our New Tools Campaign. We will showcase eight new tools that are ready for widespread adoption by progressives at all levels of politics. We will build off last year’s tools - Buy Cable, Engage the Blogs, Speak in Spanish, and Advertise Online - by adding Re-imagine Video, Go Mobile, Leverage Social Networks, and Target Your Marketing. We will have experts speaking in DC, with video of the whole event, as well as practical memos about how to get started using these tools.

As the name of the debate indicates, the new politics will not be about the new media completely superseding the old, or the old media beating back incursions of the new. The new politics coming in this cycle and the decade to come will be about both old and new working together in unprecedented ways. The New Politics Institute will be there every step of the way, and we hope you will be there with us. Thanks.

NPI Invite: The New Tools Campaign, Stage II

Last summer NPI launched a campaign to get progressives to adopt four key new tools that helped boost prospects in the 2006 campaign. Come to an event on July 27th in DC where we launch the campaign around this year’s set of four more tools and explain why they are important and how to easily get started using them.

This Stage II Campaign will expand to promote “Reimagine Video,” “Go Mobile,” “Leverage Social Networks,” and “Target Your Marketing.” We also will update our previous pitches to “Buy Cable,” “Engage the Blogs,” “Speak in Spanish,” and build on our earlier use Search Ads to become the broader “Advertise Online.”

Each Tool will have a short, practical memo to politicos about why this tool is important to leverage, and how to get started using them. The memos are written by practitioners who deeply understand the tools and how they can be used by politics. Many of these experts will be at the launch event to talk and answer questions. They include:

Jed Alpert, CEO and cofounder of Mobile Commons, which helps political people leverage mobile media, on “Go Mobile.”

Dan Manatt, CEO and Executive Producer of PoliticsTV.com, which focuses on internet TV for the Netroots, on “Reimagine Video.”

Laura Quinn, CEO of Catalist, which has built and operates a national voter database for progressives, on “Target Your Marketing.”

Henry Copeland, founder and CEO of Blogads, one of the very earliest ways to advertise on blogs, on “Advertise Online.”

Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD, one of the first political Blogs, and Coauthor of Crashing the Gate, on “Engage the Blogs.”

And Ali Weise, NDN Executive Director and former deputy director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on “Buy Cable.”

The New Tools Campaign, Stage II
Friday, July 27
Phoenix Park Hotel
520 N Capitol Street, NW
10am - Noon
Light refreshments will be served

Please RSVP to Tracy Leaman at tleaman@ndn.org or 202-842-7213.

Feel free to spread this announcement around. The more progressives who understand the powerful new tools and new media we now have at our disposal, the better. Thanks.

Peter Leyden
Director, New Politics Institute

Political Ads Beginning to Shift Online

The Wall Street Journal does a good job overviewing how the presidential candidates are increasingly embracing online ads, particularly search ads, though they seem to spend more time focusing on the Republicans. The New Politics Institute has been hammering on this theme for the past year, encouraging progressives to shift ad spend to these new ad forums that have been proven by the private sector to be highly effective. Don’t take our word for it, take it from the WSJ. Here are a few passages to give you a flavor:

Look at the rate of rate of return on the spending:

In the first quarter, the presidential candidates spent collectively an estimated $1.7 million on Internet sites and fund raising -- including $100,000 on blog ads -- and collected about $22 million online, campaign-finance reports show.

Or here shows more directly McCain’s success with it:

It is also considered effective. Republican John McCain's presidential campaign raises about $4 for every $1 it spends to raise money online, according to Rebecca Donatelli, a consultant directing the online fund-raising strategy for the Arizona senator.

This puts the costs of it in context with the enormous costs of broadcast TV:

One reason for the increased Internet advertising spending: It is relatively cheap compared with radio and television. A one-week television-ad buy in Des Moines, Iowa, would cost about $90,000 to $110,000, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a political-advertising tracking firm. By comparison, one week of blog ads on 102 conservative blogs costs just $7,500. It costs about $24,000 to advertise for a week on 121 liberal blogs.

So the shift has begun. Look at Obama’s spend in the first quarter compared to all the spending on these ads in 2004 combined:

Sen. Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic nomination has also aggressively moved onto Google as an advertising platform, spending more than $72,000 on Google search ads during the first quarter, according to financial records compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine.com. By comparison, the Democratic presidential candidates in the 2004 presidential race spent about $87,000, records show.

More evidence to keep making the case….

Peter Leyden  

Mobile Content Starts to Fill the New Medium

We’ve been talking a lot at the New Politics Institute about the technological development of mobile phones morphing into mobile media platforms. The iPhone launch this month will simply kick that tool side into high gear. But the other side of the equation, content, needs to rapidly evolve to fit this new space. The content side has been lagging somewhat, which is to be expected as the new tech gets positioned in place. However, content is fast catching up.

The New York Times had a nice story this weekend that catches people up the excitement around mobile content. Simon mentioned it briefly, but I want to just add my two cents. The pattern for mobile content is following the classic trajectory. Niche content makers, like ESPN, go first and break the new ground, trying new forms of short content. The general TV content makers, like the big broadcast networks, go next, trying their old long form shows, but also trying mobisodes, as Fox calls them. And then, after the private sectors does enough trial and error, the political world will wade in. Watch for some of the presidentials to go beyond texting experiments very soon.

The other interesting side to the piece was the generational aspect. The graphic in there tells a lot, and explains why the private sector is so interested in his space. The Millennial Generation, those in their 20s and younger, live on their phones, and don’t particularly use traditional TV. So the next great market may well be pierced through the tiny screen rather than the big one. For more on this young generation, watch out for the release of a new NPI report later this week on “The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation.”

Peter Leyden  

NPI Event in DC next Thursday releasing New Report on Progressive Politics of Millennials

The younger generation of Millennials is turning out to be an amazing asset for progressives. When you look hard at the numbers in polls and surveys from all kinds of sources, a consistent picture emerges – this enormous generation thinks and acts and votes progressive.

The New Politics Institute commissioned a new report to survey all the data we could find to connect the dots and lay out what we do know about this generation. We will be releasing the report and laying out many of the findings at a free lunch next Thursday in a very cool new space that we are using for the first time.

See below for the formal invite with the details. Please rsvp if you are coming and spread this around. The event is open to everyone, particularly young people. We want to spread this very good news....

How much do you know about the politics of the Millennial generation, those young people born from 1978 to 1996?

Did you know that...

    •    Millennials are deeply bothered by income inequality.
    •    Millennials believe in multilateralism over military strength to provide American security.
    •    Millennials believe that government should promote prosperity and community over self-reliance and low taxes.
    •    Millennials want to protect the environment more than promoting economic growth.
    •    And did you know that the Millennial Generation is bigger than the Baby Boom, will have nearly 50 million members eligible to vote this cycle, and are voting in much higher numbers than past generations of young people?

To learn more about the Millennials and their progressive political tendencies, join the New Politics Institute for the release of a new report built on a comprehensive survey of recent data.  We will connect the dots between disparate polls and surveys that have emerged in the last several years to give a much better sense of this remarkable generation and show how fortuitous this development is for progressives.
 
Joining me will be:
 
Ruy Teixeira, an NPI fellow who coauthored the new Millennial report, and the author or coauthor of five books, including The Emerging Democratic Majority.
 
Heather Smith, Executive Director of the Young Voter Strategies, who will talk about the new tools and strategies that have proven to connect with these young voters.
 
Farouk Olu Aregbe, the founder of One Million Strong for Barack, a grassroots group that began on the social networking site Facebook. He initiated an effort that signed up a quarter million young people in its first month to support Barack Obama’s presidential bid.
 
The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation
Thursday, June 21
American Institute of Architects
1735 New York Avenue, NW
12:00PM - lunch will be served
 
For more information or to RSVP you can contact: Tracy Leaman at 202-842-7213 or email at tleaman@ndn.org

Spread the word to those who might be interested in learning more about one of the most important yet underappreciated political developments happening today. Thanks.
 
Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute

The NPI Web Video Event Now Available For All

The New Politics Institute held a terrific event on the exploding world of political web video last week. We had four outside experts come and talk about how to use this increasingly valuable new tool.

The event was well attended by those within Washington DC, and was selected to be covered by C-Span, which was rerunning the event for days. We had announced the event to those on our national list with the promise that we would video the entire thing and post it for all to see. (How could we not use the medium as the message?)

So here are the various ways to view the material: 

Here it is off the front page. You can  watch in a small screen there.

Then here it is anchoring the video page, with each part laid out, including each  speaker’s section, and each question  from the audience followed by the entire panel’s answers.

Then here is C-Span's version as flowed through the web. We have it on our Buzz page:

Stay tuned for more events in this video space. We will continue to keep pushing the boundaries with our ongoing “Re-imagining Video” series.

Peter Leyden 

Friedman’s Big Swing on Green Geopolitics

You gotta hand it to Tom Friedman. He’s not the first guy to spot a trend or big idea, but he has a great way of popularizing them. He’s great at squeezing down big ideas into slogans. Or forcing simple parallels that make you think. “If this, then that.”

Anyhow, he did it again this week with a terrific cover story in the New York Times Magazine. He lays out a big idea about how the United States can completely rework geopolitics and regain global leadership by truly taking on climate change, or, in his words, going “geo-green.” By taking the lead in alternative energy and a comprehensive environmentalism, the United States could help solve three of the biggest challenges of the early 21st century.

1/ Solve global warming, which does have the potential to remake the world – and not for the better.

2/ Solve the quandary of globalization and the new global economy. The United States could spawn the next generation high end technologies that could serve the needs of the world – and would not be easily replicated by low end labor. We could have a thriving next generation economy that could include all Americans.

3/ Solve our era’s security challenge of global terrorism, sustained by a militant radical Islam that is fueled by the oil regimes of the middle east. We cut our dependence, and ultimately the world’s dependence, on that resource and that region, and we undercut our biggest threat.

I could not agree more with his framework. This is a massive opportunity for the progressive movement and Democratic politics in general. The conservatives have completely failed on all these fronts – starting with their obstinate denial of climate change long after all evidence showed denial to be a sham.

Progressives have always taken the lead on environmental matters, and now they can extend that core competency into the reworking of the global economy, and a convincing strategy to truly make the world more safe.

Bravo to Friedman, who has done much to move this meme into the mainstream. Inevitably this piece will be his next book, and judging by the success of his other books, it will be a bestseller for a long while.

Peter Leyden

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