youtubification of politics

I was sitting last night watching the US election results coming in and it occurs to me that there's maybe something to write about for my next Campaign piece about the youtubufucation of advertising - as seen in political advertising.

Most of the ads I've seen in the last 10 days are absolutely, appallingly, awful. LIke they always are. Insulting to the intelligence,  ill-conceived and badly made. But they're not quite as bad as they used to be. And they're bad in a slightly different way than they used to be. There are more ads trying to be funny, more ads based on parodies of pop culture themes and more ads trying, vaguely, to be 'conceptual'.

And some of this must be down to political campaigns spotting the communications potential of YouTube  (and all the other video sites). They realise that if they're funny or interesting in some way they might get some kind of viral effect and get infront of more voters. (And, of course, they might get news coverage if they get popular enough).

Of course this all raises interesting possibilities for the next election in the UK but I think it also points at a future for marketing generally. As user-driven media ( as opposed to user-created media) picks up then the quality of branded creative work is bound to slowly increase. Surely.

Or am I missing something?

And I'm sure this is something that other people, smarter, more informed people, than me have written about but I can't find it. Partly because I never read political blogs. (Apart from Steve's) Does anyone know of anything anyone's written about this?

PS - I'm starting to find it really hard to let a post go up without a visual. So I'm now collecting generic images which will fit with anything. I've got a few that say 'post', what I need now is for people to start writing the word 'blog' or 'opinion' or 'waffle' on the streets.

 

Comments

[Flo Heiss]

How about this?:
http://www.redemptionblues.com/pictures/GraffitiWaffle.jpg

[Jason]

There was a piece about this in the NY Times by Alessanda Stanley a week ago.

"In a culture where growing numbers of viewers say they get their news from ''The Daily Show With Jon Stewart'' and ''The Colbert Report,'' and at a time when anything shocking or amusing on television can be downloaded and e-mailed instantly, candidates are co-opting the YouTube revolution.

They imitate the spirit of citizen-created parody spots, siphon off pop culture, and go to extremes to stand out and win a free ride on the Internet, on news programs and comedy shows."

The link is below - it's in their subscriber section now but Philips is giving free access this week as part of their "Simplicity" campaign.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0916F93E5B0C7A8EDDA90994DE404482#

[Ben]

I could talk about this for a while.

These two guys pretty much control the UK Political blogoshpere. When Newsnight refer to 'internet rumours' this is what they mean.

http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/

Iain has just started an internet TV channel called 18 Doughty St. Guido Fawkes has broken many a scandal and has a satirical channel called Guy News.

http://www.18doughtystreet.com/blog/

http://guynews.tv/

Can't leave without mentioning ConservativeHome which is used as a beta platform for many, many Tory ideas. And WebCameron deserves a mention too. Easy to ridicule hard to ignore.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/

http://www.webcameron.org.uk/

If the Tories win the next election those websites mentioned above will have a played a big, big part.

[Gareth]

David Kileyn has just written a short piece on the BusinessWeek blog on the youtube effect:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2006/11/the_you_tube_el.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_brandnewday

[Stan Lee]

I gave a talk a few months back at a PR conference in Melbourne. My topic was on the influence of the web or something like that.

None of the audience had heard of YouTube. None of them had a blog.

I talked about how blogs and YouTube could and would be used to build conversation around candidates and political topics in the upcoming US election.

Suffice to say I had a lot of PR folks wanting to chat with me once we broke for tea.

[simon]

Henry Jenkins talks about this today here
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/political_reality.html

[More than Basketball]

Well, "youtube" is certainly the new buzzword in political new articles (besides the now famous "microtargeting"), but really, what it comes down to is accountability.

Because you're able to track things (email open rates, number of video views, number of posts read, number of comments, etc) with technology that were never trackable before, you have suddenly added a layer of accountability to parts of politics that were 'best guesses' before. While before you relied on the "advice of experts" to tell you how good an add is, you can now test those experts and see if they're full of it. Not surprisingly, this has a lot of people scared.

[Scamp]

sorry, don't know much about politics.

but have you thought of accompanying a post with a picture of 'a post'?