The Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas has this piece today about the role of web video in presidential campaigns. Vargas focuses specifically on the varying quality and effectiveness of the web videos that presidential wannabes are putting out there. Guiliani, for example, talks at viewers by merely posting marathon-length speeches.
Humor, it seems, is lacking in quite a few of the official candidates’ videos, and people want to watch funny videos, it seems.
Similarly, Clinton’s most watched HillCast, titled “Roadmap Out of Iraq,” comes nowhere close in popularity to the video showing her singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” off-key at a rally in Iowa. The HillCast has been viewed more than 15,000 times since it was posted on Feb. 17, the out-of-tune moment nearly 1.1 million times since its posting on Jan. 27.
Georgetown University student James Kotecki has been posting his own reviews of the candidates’ videos that are quite watchable. Here’s a critique of John McCain’s video efforts.
Vargas and colleague Sam Diaz also have this piece today on George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet’s annual conference, which this year drew 500 attendees, mostly political consultants and campaign operatives. The discussions centered on the typical topics, such as Google ads, web video spots, email and message boards, although one entrepreneur had an intriguing suggestion for candidates: develop campaign-centric video games.
Scott Randall, president of BrandGames in New York, is trying to get campaigns interested in creating video games around candidates in the same way his company makes them for other products. “Candidates are brands and the power of video games, like a brand mascot, is to create an emotional connection with the brand,” he said, though he had not managed to persuade any campaigns at the conference.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:27 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times’ Alex Williams has this scoop in tomorrow’s edition (which, oddly enough, appears in the Style section) about MySpace’s launch of a political site called Impact channel. It’s a site dedicated to politics with a particular focus on the 2008 presidential campaign.
The News Corp.-owned social networking giant will offer links to candidate’s personal MySpace pages (10 so far), as well as separate campaign pages. It will also, MySpace-style, offer links to videos, pictures and other relevant material.
The Impact channel will also offer other benefits for candidates including the abiliyt to drag and drop their campaign ads onto the site’s pages. The site will also allow visitors to request voter registration materials.
The best part: visitors will be able to add candidates to their friends lists. As an aside, Barack Obama towers over any other candidate in terms of the number of current MySpace friends, according to TechPresident. As of today, he has 64,721 MySpace friends compared to Hillary Clinton’s 28,754. (Republicans are pretty friendless. Ron Paul (R-TX) tops the Republicans’ MySpace friends chart with only 3,936 friends.)
The launch of the Impact channel is almost a case of reality imitating art. Last week, Jon Stewart had this gag about presidential-possible Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and his MySpace page, which uses the MySpace unicorn as its wallpaper and has a photo of Dodd drinking beer with a funnel on the beach.
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