Political Technology

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 Report – A 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 Jones – Interview 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

New numbers on text messaging adoption from Jupiter Research, as described in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

"About 52 percent of the roughly 226 million cellphone users across the country sent a text message in 2006, according to JupiterResearch. That's up considerably from 44 percent the previous year.

And the growth is expected to continue through 2011, when 6 out of every 10 wireless users are texting, according to JupiterResearch."

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.

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.

Analyists vary, but the most recent estimates are that Apple has sold up to 950,000 iPhones to date, and the most recent estimate is that roughly by the 2008 election, there will be about 14 million iPhone users.

As I've mentioned before, this is a key number in and of itself, but also as it forces the competition to raise the bar on friendly media capable phones... and makes mobile media in general more of a factor for outreach for the 08 timeframe and beyond.

Also, the very high satisfaction rating current iPhone users are showing also points to the iPhone as living up to a good deal of Job's hype for the product. Good for Apple. And good for the industry as a whole. And it should be an accelerant for mobile media effecting the politcal sphere as well...

An article in the Baltimore Sun today discusses the fact that more and more Americans are relying on their mobile number as their sole phone line. Some of the findings reported in the article include:

• Between 25 and 30% of 18-27 year old Americans are cell-only users (up from only 6% in 2003!).
• 54% of people living with unrelated roomates rely solely on cell phones.
• Blacks, hispanics, and singles are more likely than the general public to be cell-only users.

As we at NDN and the New Politics Institute have been saying for some time, the disappearance of land-line phones will have a profound impact on political practices. Mobile phone users are, among other things, much more difficult and more expensive to reach for polling or fundraising purposes. Learning to reach mobile users is quickly becoming critical in 21st-century politics.

As we at NDN and the New Politics Institute often emphasize, the advent of new technology continues to reinvent politics. The ability to reach and speak to various groups of people has become easier because of emerging tools and strategies like microtargeting, an extremely sophisticated way of maximizing the relevance of a candidate's message to their desired audience.

Microtargeting has become more and more of an asset in politics due to its potential to yield results - results which have caught the eyes of presidential campaigns like Mitt Romney's. And the media has begun to pick up on it. This June article from the New York Times mentions Romney's use of microtargeting as part of his broader advertising strategy. More recently, Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post did an in-depth analysis of the Romney campaign's use of microtargeting, the follow-up to which is featured today on Cillizza's blog, The Fix.

These articles underscore the value of being able to deliver consumer-specific messages. This is why we also recommend using techniques like search advertising and spending advertising dollars on cable instead of broadcast television.

Advertising takes another leap forward.  From the Times today:

Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called “behavioral targeting,” that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach.

“Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.”

The announcement of SmartAds also comes while Yahoo is recovering from an extensive reshuffling in the executive offices, including the departure of its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and Wenda Harris Millard, the company’s longtime chief sales officer. Yahoo has struggled to catch up with Google in search advertising and has disappointed investors with its ad sales the past few quarters.

SmartAds is one attempt to catch up. Although the technology is complex, the goal of SmartAds is simple: show the right advertisement to the right person at just the moment that he is about to pull out his wallet to make a purchase.

SmartAds is being tested on Yahoo’s network of sites — which includes local newspapers as well as its own portal — by two major airlines, although Mr. Teresi would not name them. He said the system will be offered to other industries in the coming months, including automobile companies and retailers in the fall.

The technology will also be applied for free across advertisements bought on Right Media, the online ad exchange that Yahoo purchased this spring (although the deal is still pending). The new feature may give Right Media a competitive advantage over other exchanges — like a new one created by DoubleClick, the online company that Google agreed to purchase for $3.1 billion in April. (The Google-DoubleClick merger is pending an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission.)

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement....

Read the rest of the piece here.

It's interesting to read (thank you, Technorati) some of the blogs pointing to the Post article Simon Just mentioned. My favorite so far has been written by John Bell, who works at the Ogilvy PR's 360 Digital group...

John writes:

"I have posted before about wpp's investments in mobile marketing and their view of 2007 as a 'try-and-learn' year for most marketers in North America and even Europe. That means that terrific things are possible...

So, we have built mobile marketing into our strategic plans for all 360° Digital Influence projects. Sometimes it extends a concept. Sometimes it leads the creative thinking. But there are several milestones that are being reached right now that will make this very timely:

• The rise of mobile broadband
• More broadband-friendly phones
• Care about the user experience, like what Iconmobile does
• The use of mobile by the 2008 US Presidential campaigns
• Continued growth of a generation who sees their phone as the mobile device not the thing you plug in at home.

'...As a Mass Media, mobile has six unique benefits, that are not able to be copied anywhere else.

1. Mobile is the first personal mass media (even the internet is only semi-personal)
2. it is the first always carried media.
3. It is the first always on mass media
4. Mobile is the first mass media with a built-in payment channel
5. It is the first media device available at the point of inspiration
6. mobile is the first mass media with near-perfect audience information'"