New Tools

The appearance of search ads in 2008 campaigns

Google someone in politics and you’re likely to see something similar to this: an official website, a link to a Wikipedia entry about them, and few (if any) sponsored links to the right or at the top. That seems to be the standard, except in the case of the average 2008 presidential candidate, who, with search ads, brings you to see what they want you to see.

Below are examples of what search ads are doing for two candidates with a good internet presence:

  1. Google Hillary Clinton and the first site that comes up is "HillaryClinton.com" with sub-links of the site that would take you to the "About" section. On the right side, where the paid links are, the first link is to "Clinton on YouTube." Below that? "Barack Obama in 2008."
  2. Google John McCain and the first site that comes up is John McCain’s Senate website. Above the news, highlighted in yellow, is another paid link, "John McCain 2008." To the right? "Mitt Romney in 2008" and a site that comes up on all of the Google searches for GOP candidates who have declared (as well as Hillary Clinton) "JoinRudy2008"

What does this mean? Why is this important? Well, like our New Politics Institute says:

"If the Internet is a new media like broadcast television in the 1960s, then search is the TV Guide of this era, the way to find all the content, and paid search is the most powerful and effective way to advertise."

As noted in the examples above, search ads are becoming increasingly helpful. For candidates and organizations who want their voices and issues made readily available to the general public, or a more targeted audience, search ads are an easy way to go. As our report mentions, it only makes sense for those in politics to utilize what search has to offer, especially since millions of Americans continue to be exposed to new tools allowing them to be involved.

At this point, it seems like most search ads will be dedicated to inform people about the various candidates and sometimes their opponents; but it is encouraging to see that the advice of NPI is paying off, as campaigns are incorporating this tool into their overall internet strategy.

(I'll be updating this post as the campaign progresses.)

For more information on NDN's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, click here.

MoveOn.org members talk to Presidential candidates about Iraq

Yesterday, in the first of a series of Virtual Town Halls, MoveOn.org members had a chance to ask questions of sevent leading Democratic candidates for the Presidency - Republicans were invited too, but none elected to participate.  This Virtual Town Hall series is another example of the success progressives are having in using new tools to break down traditional barriers and allow for more and better communication between candidates and voters.  You can watch all the video here, and below is one clip that illustriates both the quality of the questions submitted by members and the candor candidates are capable of in this environment.

MoveOn and more on how the internet is changing politics

Tonight MoveOn attempts a rather remarkable thing - a virtual townhall meeting with the Democratic Presidential candidates.   You can participate or learn more at www.moveon.org.

Additionally, the Boston Globe's Rick Klein has a must read piece on the meaning of the Democratic Presidential candidates huge 1st quarter fundraising advantage. It starts:

WASHINGTON -- Democrats appear to have erased the decades-long Republican edge in campaign fund-raising, building a network of well-off donors that rivals that of the GOP -- and that recently has generated more cash.

In dwarfing the sums raised by Republicans in the first three months of this year, Democratic presidential candidates capitalized on growing support from upper-income professionals. While higher-earning households overwhelmingly favored Republicans as recently as the start of President Bush's first term, the gap has narrowed to 4 percentage points among voters with annual household incomes of more than $100,000, according to the Pew Research Center's latest polls.

Democrats' recent fund-raising success challenges the traditional assumption of the Republican Party enjoying a reliable financial advantage -- and points to the outlines of a new Democratic coalition that could change the nation's political dynamics in 2008 and beyond, according to campaign finance specialists.

"It's a whole new world," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who was a top adviser to Vice President Al Gore, who was out spent by more than $65 million by Bush in the 2000 election. "To call it revolutionary is not a stretch. It is a game-changer."

The shift leaves Democrats confident that for the foreseeable future they will be able to compete dollar-for-dollar with Republicans, after decades of expecting to be outspent. By reaching a new crop of contributors -- largely through the Internet -- Democrats have tapped into a potentially powerful army of higher-income and better-educated voters who are increasingly aligning themselves with Democratic values, according to polls and demographic data.

As recently as 2002, 45 percent of voters with annual household incomes of more than $100,000 identified themselves as Republicans, while just 28 percent said they were Democrats, Pew polls found. But Pew's 2007 polling shows that gap closing to a 33-29 GOP advantage, with most former Republicans now calling themselves independents.

Just as working-class voters have been drawn to the GOP because of the party's emphasis on traditional values, many higher-income, higher-educated voters who once favored Republicans over tax policy have been moving toward the Democrats because of more liberal stands on social issues and a more internationalist perspective on foreign policy.

Those trends powered voting shifts toward Democrats in the suburbs in last year's congressional elections, where widespread dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and the Bush administration gave Democrats control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years.

"We're going through a period of transformational change," said Alan Solomont , a veteran Boston-based Democratic fund-raiser who is working on the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. "Business folks -- not ideologues, but entrepreneurs, new economy workers, venture capitalists -- are [looking at Republicans and] saying, 'This is not how I want my government represented around the world.' "

Throughout recent history, Republicans have been able to count on greater financial resources than Democrats, with an immense fund-raising operation that relied on big business and wealthy individual backers. Many observers predicted that the gap would grow wider in the wake of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform act, since Democrats had long relied on labor unions' unlimited "soft money" donations, which the 2002 law banned.

But Democrat John F. Kerry surpassed fund-raising expectations in his 2004 presidential campaign, bringing in $253.9 million, just $38 million less than President Bush, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Democrats built on that trend in last year's mid-term congressional elections, with the party's House and Senate campaign committees pulling to within $7 million of their Republican counterparts.

In the first three months of this year, Democratic presidential candidates blew past Republicans, raising a total of $78 million compared to only $52 million for Republicans. Two Democrats -- Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York -- surpassed $25 million apiece; the leading Republican fund-raiser -- former governor Mitt Romney -- hauled in $23 million.

"Clearly we've had more success with people who named themselves independents and moderate Republicans," said Hassan Nemazee , a New York-based fund-raiser for Clinton and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We're able to pick into areas where we haven't been able to in the past."

On one level, the tremendous amount of cash flowing to Democrats is a measure of Democratic excitement about 2008. Energy translates into campaign dollars, particularly with online tools making political donations the equivalent of civic activism.

While much credit is given to the Democrats' extensive efforts to use the Internet to raise money, no fund-raising tool can be effective unless potential donors have the resources to give to a party or cause. There, Democrats are encountering a political landscape that is vastly different than it was just two years ago, when some conservatives boasted of building a permanent Republican majority in the United States...

The Emerging Political Agenda from the Bottom Up

The bar just keeps getting higher when it comes to all the innovative ways new tools are being used in politics, and now, government. I’m referring to two very recent developments where average people are given opportunities to contribute their own ideas on what to  do about issues for a candidate, and for a sitting governor.

The first is Obama’s new feature on his campaign website where he gives people the opportunity to submit their ideas about what to do about the national health care problem. The ideas, and the supportive contributions, can take many forms: a written idea blurb, a written personal story, a video that sheds light on the issue, or a recorded audio message that people can  make with any computer with a microphone, which is most decent ones. The audio contribution was something I had not seen done before. But taken all together, the package opportunity is different too.

This appears to be just the beginning of many other tool rollouts for Obama. Healthcare is just the first issues of many that will soon appear but also the website indicates that there will be opportunities to collaborate in other ways too. Collaboration, after all, is the essence of the new power of what is called Web 2.0.

Then there’s Deval Patrick’s morphed campaign site. The new governor of Massachusetts, who rode the new tools and much bottom-up energy to his election victory, is now trying to harness them in governing. His nascent attempt gives residents a chance to propose and support issues that the governor should take up and try to enact.

It’s very early days in both these efforts, but they are telegraphing a trend that is bound to pick up steam in the months ahead. If this country is truly going to take on the new challenges of the 21st century in effective ways, then people in politics will need to tap into the creativity and brainpower of millions of Americans who have been shut out of politics and governing – until now.

Peter Leyden  

NDN Press Release: Statement on Presidential Campaign Fundraising

I released the following statement to the media earlier today:

"Today’s announcement by Barack Obama that he has raised $25 million shows that Democrats are clearly ahead of Republicans in adapting to the new opportunities and realities of 21st century American politics. 

It appears that the collective Democratic field has raised about 50 percent more than the collective Republican field.  When the official FEC filings come out next week, there is little doubt that Democrats will far exceed Republicans in the number of people who have donated as well.

No matter how you measure it - money raised, sign-ups on social networking sites, people at events, downloads on YouTube and of course as the recent Pew poll showed, party identification - Democrats are structurally ahead of the Republicans in mastering the new politics of the 21st century. 

The 100 dollar revolution that started in 2003 continues to radically change American politics.  A combination of more states voting earlier in the primary process and an acceleration of the adoption of new tools that are making it easier for people to participate in politics will mean that by late February of 2008, tens of millions of Americans will have voted, donated, volunteered, blogged, signed up or taken some sort of action on behalf of a candidate. 

There also should be little doubt that effectively managing and tapping into the new prominence of average people in our 21st century politics is going to be one of the most critical tests of our political leaders.  

Another measure of how Democrats are better adapting to the new realities of the 21st century is the historic diversity of the Democratic Presidential field: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden look like the diverse America of the 21st century."

MySpace Primary: Social Networking Gone Wild

Social networking is going to play a big role in the politics of this cycle, but I think having a primary on MySpace might be going a bit far. We’ll see.

The MySpace primary seems to me to be gimmicky at this point, and I hope that does not turn off political people from the idea that social networking tools can be a powerful way to do what politics has always been about – connecting up people and their “social networks” of family and friends behind a campaign or candidate.

I made that point in an interview I did today around the breaking news. Separate the importance of social networking from the potential relevance of the MySpace primary. They should be evaluated on their own terms as two separate things.

There is no question that social networking will be big in politics – not the least because it is a critical medium to reach the Millennial Generation, that increasingly important young constituency.

There are a lot of questions about how a MySpace primary will fare in a real-world primary world. But you never know. I could be wrong….

Peter Leyden   

Google & Echostar Partnership: a first step towards buying political ads on satellite TV?

As television audiences become increasingly segmented through technologies such as cable, DVRs, and satellite TV, a broadcast-only strategy of reaching viewers just doesn’t work anymore. Satellite TV subscribers, for example, are among the most difficult for political advertisers to reach because ads can only be bought nationally on the non-local channels.

Simply put, while a political advertiser can buy ads on popular cable channels such as TNT, TBS, and A&E by buying through their local cable company, it’s been impossible to buy ads on those very same stations on satellite networks.

Today’s announcement by Google and Echostar could change this dynamic. Google announced today that it will sell TV ads on the 125 stations distributed by Echostar Communications’ DISH network.

The TV ads will work much like Google’s online search ads do – advertisers specify how much they’re willing to pay, and through an automated auction, the ads with the highest price are selected. What’s more, just like in the online search ads, advertisers can choose by geographic region:

Mr. Desai said the television ad system would work much like Google’s existing online and offline advertising systems. EchoStar would make some unspecified amount of air time available to Google’s advertisers. Advertisers or agencies would upload video spots to the system along with their desired target audience or network and would specify the price they are willing to bid for the air time.

Google’s ad system would then select the winning ads and play them on the air. Using information collected by EchoStar’s set-top satellite boxes, it will be able to give advertisers a report showing how many people viewed any ad and whether users tuned it out in the first few seconds.

Google will also use information collected by EchoStar to deliver the ads to their target audiences more precisely, the companies said.

Advertisers will not be able to designate specific households, but will be able to choose individual networks like ESPN or MTV and a time of day. Alternatively, they could choose a demographic group or geographic region, and Google’s system would schedule the ads across a variety of networks.

This is still a pilot program, but it could be the beginning of a significant change in political TV ad buying.

NPI Video Report: The Political Web Video World

Below is the email that went out to NDN and NPI members earlier today, highlighting NPI's newest report, an innovative video report "The Political Web Video World."  Watch the video below:

Web video and the power of user-generated content created by cheap digital tools has taken the political world by storm in recent weeks.

With that in mind, The New Politics Institute partnered with PoliticsTV.com and created a new kind of think tank product that we’re calling a “video report.” We've created a web video that gives an overview of the entire political web video world, breaking it down into a dozen categories that are seriously beginning to impact politics today.

Each category is explained and analyzed, and then portions of an example or two are laid out. You can watch the entire overview piece of all 12 categories taken together, or view each category as its own video piece. There's also a short accompanying written report that gives the link to every web video referenced.

NPI soon will be holding an event in Washington DC that will gather some of the most knowledgeable people on political web videos to deepen our understanding of how these powerful new tools work. More information on that event will be coming soon. For now, the report draws on the longtime experience of PoliticsTV.com’s CEO and Executive Producer Dan Manatt, and yours truly.

We welcome feedback on this innovative video report, and expect to do more experimentation the year ahead. Keep an eye on the New Politics Institute website, at www.newpolitics.net, where you can find work from a community that’s thinking deeply and strategizing about how politics is being changed by the transformation of technology, media and the demographics of the country. Please join us there throughout the coming political cycle – which promises to be a very interesting cycle indeed.

Links:

Click here or on the picture to watch the entire video

Watch individual sections of the video

Read the accompanying written report with links to web video discussed in the video report

Read Julie Bergman-Sender's NPI paper Viral Video in Politics: Case Studies on Creating Compelling Video

Read Simon Rosenberg's essay TV ads feel different this cycle, and are

Watch other video content from the New Politics Institute 

Visit PoliticsTV on the web: http://www.politicstv.com

Visit NPI on the web: http://www.newpolitics.net

Crowning Edwards King of Social Networking?

The Washington Post analyzes John Edwards' embrace of social networking sites. Comparing his efforts to the rest in the 2008 field, the article shows that while Sen. Barack Obama might be more popular, Edwards is more visible:

All the presidential hopefuls are online. Everyone's got a Web site. A few hired full-time bloggers and videographers. Most have MySpace profiles, just a click away from "friending" a supporter. Yet Edwards has taken his Internet presence a step further, fully exploiting the unknown possibilities (and known pitfalls) of the social Web, online strategists say. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), judging by the number of friends on MySpace or number of views of his YouTube videos, may be the most popular online candidate, Republican or Democrat. But Edwards arguably has the most dynamic Web presence -- he's everywhere, doing everything.

But exactly where is he?

...the former senator is signed up in at least 23 socnets -- more than any other presidential candidate. And that's not counting John Edwards One Corps, his own networking site that campaign officials say has 20,000 members and 1,200 chapters across the country.

For more information on how candidates can leverage the internet and its possibilities, check out the work of our New Politics Institute.

The Eventual Merging of the Online and Offline Advertising Worlds

Google’s attempts to evolve its advertising offering from the online into the offline worlds got a promising review in the New York Times. The short version of what’s going on is that Google is taking its online targeting ability, enhanced by technology, and trying to evolve it into the advertising world of traditional media.

One frontier is traditional radio, otherwise known as terrestrial radio (because  of the various new kinds like web-based radio and satellite radio). The Times piece interviews some of the early clients in the experiments and shows that they are encouraged that is seems to be working, thought the jury is still out. There is also a lot of worry from the traditional players and some legitimate concerns about whether it will ultimately work in a significant way.

Another frontier is the newspaper world, and those experiments seem to be going even better than radio. That makes sense because newspapers are text based and more fully integrated into the online world anyhow. But it’s interesting to see many of the top papers and chains talking about how it seems to be working.

The final frontier is the biggest one, television. Here’s one paragraph that gives you the sense of what is at stake:

Television advertising could prove particularly fruitful for Google, because the company might be able to combine its technology with that of cable systems to show different ads to different viewers based on demographics or personal interests. The company has said it is conducting a small trial with a few partners.

The point for politics is that all of the traditional broadcast media are evolving to take on more of the targeting capabilities of online advertising. This might take a long while to transition, but the trend is taking shape.

This is a good thing for those political people who take advantage early. It will allow you to use more effective, less expensive advertising to reach the people you need to reach.

Peter Leyden  

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