(Almost) Everything You Know Is (Going To Be) Wrong
Eventually, the entire dynamic of American campaigns will change. Because of the intertubes.
All fretting about interest levels in the Texas campaign aside, I think there’s an interesting trend becoming visible in this election cycle. Ad revenue is still very important for a campaign – the donations must come rolling in, especially for statewide campaigns, so that you can be on TV as much as you need to be. It is obviously helping Chris Bell in Texas, and sudden influxes of cash have helped Democrats in other races around the country.
However, after Ned Lamont’s primary victory in Connecticut proved once and for all that there is literal power to be had by leveraging the internets to your advantage, other smart candidates have taken notice and started stomping on the digital terra. There is no sign that this won’t work.
For instance, a YouTube account is free. A statewide cable ad buy is not, although it is far less expensive than a statewide network TV buy. So, let’s say you’re a relatively small Congressional campaign like Shane Sklar or John Courage. A perfect example of how the new model could work is up at Burnt Orange Report right now.
Basicallty, as a candidate, you pay to create an ad. It gets picked up by BOR (or, in a more competitive federal race, by Kos or MyDD), or failing that, you make an account for your campaign and post it in a journal and then beg until it gets pushed to the front page. Now you’ve guaranteed that the built-in audience for that blog, be it three thousand people or three hundred thousand people, will at least see your name and are likely to watch your ad. That’s way better exposure than you might get with a bargain cable buy. Hell, you don’t even have to pay for hosting or bandwidth anymore – the blog pays the transfer costs and YouTube hosts the video on its server.
So in a model where you become a netroots star and get pushed on major blogs, the cost you pay to get your campaign ad in front of a potentially limitless audience is far less than paying for a media buy that would have a potentially similar effect. Most media buys in campaigns are underfunded so they end up being a huge expense for the campaign with very little return, because it isn’t done right, or to the extent it needs to be done. And there certainly isn’t a mechanism embedded within the commercial to allow the viewer to immediately donate money to the campaign, as there is with a blogpost with an embedded ad.
There are a lot of “ifs” in that model, and of course nothing is certain, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that downloadable content can replace ad buys within the next two years. However, the preponderance of broadband internet’s availability and the shift among the 18-35 demographic to a preference for downloadable entertainment, gradual as it is, signals to me that the cost of advertising to a large audience may drop significantly in the future, even for large campaigns.
