You are sitting around bored at home, so you and your friends venture onto Youtube: hilarity ensues. Why should the laughter ever stop? Yes, the election is a serious matter, but people are (hopefully) more attracted to the brighter side of life. Introducing the “Five Friends Campaign” where a group of our favorite celebrities were directed by Steven Spielberg, telling us to go out and vote; well, that’s not entirely true… See at first we were told to not vote. Why does voting matter? The videos slowly flip to every reason why we should vote. Then we are told to go out and tell five friends to register to vote. As Sarah Silverman puts it, when everyone’s starts telling their five friends it will be “rampant, like herpes, but for positive.” This campaign proved it genius, with each clip getting well over two million hits and it being shared across cyber space through emails and social networks and even word of mouth.
Youtube had tons of campaigns on its channels beyond the “Five Friends Campaign”. The Youtube You Choose ’08 Campaign featured all the registered party candidates. While on that channel you could see speeches, behind the scenes, informal dialogues and more. You could comment or video a response to something, showing your voice and maybe getting a response back.
The point of all these Youtubes, like the point to much everything else discussed, is to gain the younger vote. The younger generation rarely opens up a newspaper at the breakfast table or sits and watches the evening news. For one of the first times, candidates and their campaigns have realized this and have decided to take action and it absolutely paid off. According to CIRCLE (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagements, the youth statistics have soared in the 2008 election. They estimate that between 21 million and 23.9 million youths have turned out to vote, making the election the second highest turnout since Nixon’s 1972 election win.
Many of the Youtube campaigns were actually run by non partisan groups. The “Five Friends” campaign was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and the You Choose was run by Youtube themselves. This cost the candidates little to no money. The great thing about Youtube is it provides all the benefits of a television ad, minus the extreme costs of airtime, as Newsweek puts it. Had Obama and McCain bought the equivalent airtime on television, it would have cost Obama upwards of $46 million and McCain $1.5 million. The little costs it takes to produce the Youtube video is minimal in comaprision with these costs.
** Youtube had plenty of campaigns not talked about here such as the Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama music video. Check it out yourselves when you have a minute on youtube!
Resources:
Presidential Candidates Turn to Youtube by Mike Sachoff
YouTube, You Choose
The Big Picture by Jessica Ramirez
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Great post! I am a huge fan of those videos and thought they were a great way to get more voters. Even now, when the election has been over months, I still stumble across them and get a few good laughs out of it. It really made the younger voters realize that their vote counts.
ReplyDeleteThat was brilliant. Celebrity involvement was so integral to the Obama election. Nice to see you picked up on that.
ReplyDeleteCelebrity involvement was a definite factor in the recent election. After Obama was made president, he went to more youth-based events than any other president I had seen before.
ReplyDeleteObama had the ability to use Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. to connect on an internet-yet-personal level. He use the growth of technology and celebrity status to have a profound effect on today's youth.