Social media transformed the 2008 presidential campaign, and it’s set to play a major role in the 2012 race, too. It’s an example of how election campaigns are often early adopters of new marketing techniques that later become widespread in the corporate realm. What emerges from the 2012 campaign could be very interesting indeed.
Social media was in its infancy during the 2008 race for the White House. Twitter recorded fewer than 2 million tweets per day in late 2008, compared to more than 200 million tweets today. The Obama campaign saw the potential of social media and used it very effectively to raise huge sums of money from small donors and to organize supporters around the country.
Both the McCain and Obama campaigns were quick to exploit YouTube, where their videos amassed more than 200 million views. Online video reached the mainstream, with 39 percent of voters acknowledging they watched some sort of campaign-related video online, according to the Pew Research Center.
The use of online video by the Presidential campaigns helped open the way for established brands to venture into this new territory. As a result, since 2008 online video advertising has skyrocketed, reaching $1.8 billion last year, according to eMarketer.
Online video will again play an important role in the 2012 race, but with a difference: Both the Obama and Romney campaigns are using video to an extent never before seen in a presidential race, with a cascade of videos posted to their YouTube channels and distributed to supporters. Successful ones move virally across the Internet, even making it to broadcast television.
This new marketing model turns conventional campaign strategy on its head. Instead of creating a single message and repeating it over and over, campaigns now deploy multiple messages with even greater frequency and aimed at narrow audiences.
Lee Raine of the Pew Research Center described this in a recent NPR segment:
“‘The old conventional wisdom was that you had to hammer home the same message consistently a lot of times before it would actually sort of penetrate the consciousness and begin to shape the opinion of voters,’ Rainie says.
“Now those days seem quaint. Today it’s all about constant stimulation, everywhere, all the time.
“‘People’s attention is so fragmented, their sources of information are so fragmented, that consistency doesn’t necessarily have the same power that it might have had in days gone by,’ he added.”
Campaign videos today don’t reach big audiences, but they don’t need to reach a lot of people to have an impact. Thanks to the data campaigns now have on the electorate, it’s possible to micro-target video messages, and the cost of distributing them over the web is a puny compared to buying television ads.
Could we see corporate brands adopt this strategy? Targeted video used to market products is already on the rise. But it’s more interesting to speculate on whether issue-oriented messages featuring corporate executives might emerge, and in significant volumes, just like the presidential race.
Companies that already have a strong identification with a public issue, like education, science, health or the environment might be the first ones to test the waters. It’s not hard to imagine a technology-company CEO in a video speaking about science education. It takes a little more imagination to see a bank CEO offering a view on financial regulation, but it would be a very effective way to reach key supporters.
And who knows? If the video takes off a political career for the CEO could follow.