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TV advertising and the coolest new media to win the elections
President-elect Barack Obama used a wide array of media and new forms of communication to bring his message across with great efficiency and without shunning costs.
The successful closing of the campaign was done by Barack Obama on 29 October using a classical political 30-minute TV ad, shown on TV One, BET, CBS, NBC, Fox, MSNBC and Univision and costing over $ 4 million.
The quantity of ads counts: the Nielsen Company measured the number of ads bought by each candidate, showing that on 28 October, McCain had bought 1,543 ads whereas Obama had invested in over the double (3,160).
Obama also broke all records in Presidential campaigning in terms of the “coolness” of his media choices. One example is the use of the micro-blogging platform Twitter, to which 125,506 people registered.
Another example is paying for an electoral billboard inside a videogame. On 14 October, gamers noticed an Obama for President billboard in the video game “Burnout Paradise”. The poster featured a picture of the Democratic presidential candidate with the words "Early voting has begun” the website voteforchange.com and most importantly, the statement “Paid for by Obama for President". This activity is seen to be the first time that a presidential candidate has used a video game to advertise his campaign.
As much speculation followed this news regarding whether the poster had merely been “photoshopped” by a gamer, Electronic Arts, publisher of the game, confirmed this advertising was real. Holly Rockwood, director of corporate communications at Electronic Arts, stated that that advertising is common in its games and could “confirm that the Obama campaign has paid for in-game advertising in Burnout... Like political spots on the television networks, these ads do not reflect the political policies of EA or the opinions of its development teams."
The amount of political campaigning due to the spread of the Internet, its ease of use and availability on mobile phones has skyrocketed through websites and blogs.
People are able to post their views on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in order to discuss their ideas and connect with others who hold the same views. The amount of political campaigning has grown on these sites since the last election in 2004 as then Facebook was only open to some university students but now anyone can join and take part. MySpace started in 2003 and its use as a political platform has certainly grown, the home page now has a whole section on “Election 2008” with blogs, news, organisations and events happening.
Currently on Facebook, there are many groups and applications for both presidential candidates. For example, there was the group Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) with 798,521 and its opposed group, Stop Barack Obama (One Million Strong and Growing) with 194,408 members. There was also an Obama application which “lets you share with your friends the news items, blog posts, speeches, and videos that most inspire you to support Barack Obama.” The question is whether any of these are paid for by the campaign or merely by interested citizens.
On MySpace, each presidential and vice presidential candidate had their own website where they posted their speeches, photos, views, campaign promises and people could become their “friends.”
Each presidential candidate also had their own blog, Barack Obama’s is: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/ and John McCain’s is http://www.johnmccain.com/Blog/ both seem to be updated on daily basis and contain news, issues the candidates are focusing on, how to join the team and make a donation along other items.
Political blogs can have both positive and negative consequences for politicians. A positive example is in the case of early democratic presidential candidate (he lost to Senator John Kerry) Dean Howard whose use of the blogs and his own website helped him raise a large amount of campaign funds in 2004. US President George Bush however has many blogs devoted to the mistakes he makes, whether they be grammar related or falling off his bicycle.
A report in 2006 showed the changing landscape of political campaigning and its use of the internet. The Bivings Group undertook a study to see the use of the Internet in Senatorial campaigns and found that the use of the Internet for political campaigns increased by a huge amount since 2002. In 2006, 97% of Senate candidates had websites as opposed to 55% in 2002. However, despite the amount of publicity that blogs and podcasts received, in 2006, only 5% of campaigns were podcasting and 23% were blogging. Both presidential campaigns have however learnt how important campaigning on the Internet can be and are using it to their advantage.
Online political campaigning has proven to help obtaining campaign funds. According to a report from April 2008 in the Washington Post, nearly 60%, about $112 million, of the amount Barack Obama had raised has come from online contributions and 90% of them were in amounts of $100 or less. The internet has helped previous unknown candidates to reach out to the general population. According to a Pew Survey released in January 2008, nearly 25% of Americans said that they frequently learn something about the Presidential campaign on the Internet. This number jumped to 42% with voters under 30.
Overall the Internet, if used properly, can be a tool to fund and promote one’s campaign but one must also look to see that other blogs or sites are not slandering them at the same time. The voters also are affected, as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has said “there's a dark side to this, of course. Voters can only read and watch and interact with everything they agree with, creating a hyper-partisan and largely uninformed electorate. But there's also a bright side where an informed and engaged electorate can participate in discussions that are relevant to the political process. Which way we'll eventually go, we'll have to see."
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Sunday, 05 September 2010 
