“So Who’s in control now?...Anyone with a camera.”
—Mark McKinnon, media advisor to George W. Bush
Much attention has been focused on the explosion of video on the web and the excitement around this new media space. Big media companies and advertisers have quickly come to understand the power and influence of online social networks that can move online video. The impact is not just being felt in the commercial media space, but in politics. A recent AP/AOL online poll found that 43 percent of likely voters get political news from the internet – placing digital video increasingly at the center of every campaign, every election.
The 2006 political cycle was filled with examples of the power of this online video revolution. Take the example of Michael J. Fox’s political ad in favor of candidates supporting stem cell research, where he is shown visibly shaking from the effects of Parkinson’s disease. Fox’s ad probably would not have traveled around the internet and over the national airwaves the way that it did if Rush Limbaugh’s cruel attacks on the authenticity of Fox had not been caught on video and uploaded to YouTube. There was something especially powerful about actually watching Limbaugh’s grotesque and heartless flailing in addition to hearing his verbal assault. Additionally, many now credit high YouTube viewership of the Michael J. Fox ad and Limbaugh’s response, and the airings of both videos on mainstream television around the country, for nationalizing the stem cell issue and helping create the victory in the Missouri Senate race that the Democrats needed to take control of the Senate.
The camera can bare witness, capture truth, and tell a story in ways that a written version of the story just can’t. Today it’s not just the written word of a journalist or a blogger that can get these everyday stories out, but powerful visual documentation. Video on the internet is a new and increasingly powerful tool, still young and evolving.
While a great deal has been written about the explosion of viral video on the web, very little has been written about how to create great content that gets virally distributed. The tools for creating the content are potentially available to all progressives, and include iMovie packaged standard on all Macs, software for creating your own flash animation, downloadable effects packages, etc. Yet knowing how to harness these tools still calls for an understanding of storytelling and how to create narrative in a visual medium. Fluency in the technology does not always translate into mastery of the medium.
Even less has been written about how progressive organizations and campaigns can create and use video content to expand the reach of their political messages. There are screens everywhere – in our homes, in our hands, even at the car wash. And figuring out how to capture the audience on all of these should be a big part of future political communications strategies. No matter what size the screen, no matter how vast the outreach capabilities through the internet, the content is still the engine that drives viral hits. And just because everyone has access to the tools doesn’t mean that there isn’t some technique, and often professional execution behind the stuff that really works.
Good viral video begins with a good story. There are many points of entry when trying to gain people’s attention so that you have the opportunity to engage them, keep an ongoing relationship, and move them to action. You need to find a compelling way to hook them and “brand” the effort – much the same way that large corporations think about how to engage consumers and create a lasting relationship with them.
Trying to get something to “go viral” rests on one’s ability to be both authentic to the mission while being inventive enough to capture people’s imaginations in such a way that they feel compelled to share the video with others – immediately – and that they are also suitably impressed with the humor or the pathos of the piece that they want to dig deeper and learn about the organization or campaign that has created it.
This is why viral content is a visceral experience, not an intellectual one. People often mistake viral video for a purely informational tool, when it is more accurate to describe it as a more complex cultural tool, with informational aspects. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for important ideas to be part of the story; it means that you must be tactical about wanting to capture people, in order to show them an introduction to a longer and more meaningful dialogue.
Before there was YouTube, MySpace, and whatever the next bottom-up video phenomenon will be, we saw a first generation of online politics pave the way for the current one. It may seem like ancient history, but the 2004 presidential election was a launching pad for internet video and social networking. Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time working in this new media space, producing films, commercials and political ads for the web, distributing them online and figuring out how to engage the larger popular culture. The bulk of my work has been in finding ways to take progressive ideas and strive to engage constituencies or “the audience” in all the places and through all the mediums where they can be found. Despite the problems with America’s current “infotainment” model, we must work to find effective ways to communicate our values and ideas to a broader audience using the existing and evolving media landscape, the good and the bad.
This paper will shed some light on the process behind conceiving, executing and distributing viral video content in order to expand the horizon of how progressive politicos communicate with our known constituencies, and how this medium can even be helpful in cultivating constituencies beyond the base. What follows are case studies of previous examples of political viral video that worked. They are based on my own professional work, not because I think it is better than the work of others, but because so much of creating content is about process, and I feel more comfortable sharing my process rather than trying to climb into someone else’s head and presume to deconstruct hers.
The hope is to set forth some working models of what has worked professionally, so that other professionals and growing numbers of amateurs can use these insights as we all work toward the next phase of experimentation and innovation.
