On the heels of Mitt Romney’s pioneering politubing – engaging YouTube-using voters by requesting video responses to his question – John Edwards posts his own JFK-esque question for viewers to respond to, and the resulting increase in views of his videos is on a similar trajectory as Romney experienced last week.
It will be interesting to see where Edwards peaks in viewership, how many replies he receives (currently at 43 videos), and how long this and follow-up videos can keep interest high. Will all the candidates spin through this exercise with slight differences in question? Who will be the first to build follow-on momentum and how? It’s fun to watch this campaign laboratory and how each organization acts on the results… we’re witness to the primordial soup of politubing!
The first round for France’s Presidential election is this Sunday, and polls are showing Sarkozy and Royal in a dead heat. Pollsters are predicting the two will move on to the second round and both get 50% of the vote in that election on May 6th.
There hasn’t been a ton of online video activity this past week, which is a little bit surprising to us. We see much of what we described last week in this blog - here’s how it looks since 4-10:
It’s interesting that in a race with so many candidates, the two leading the pack are at the left and right poles. Many in the media feel that in the end, voters are going to choose based on candidates’ personalities rather than their politics. Is that accounted for in the polls already or does that mean those polled may change their minds at the voting booth? Perhaps we’ll learn the answer to that shortly.
Mitt Romney has shaken the politubing world (or at least the order that had been established –Dems are internet savvy and the Republicans are laggards navigating the “series of tubes”). Last week, Romney made a brilliant request for anyone to reply to his YouTube video with one of their own to describe, “What do you believe is America’s greatest challenge?” Much like the Ashley Tisdale contest, this has produced a large response (67 response videos to date, Blog PI watched and made notes on all 54 posted up through last Saturday, and PrezVid comments on some as well) and an even larger up swell in viewership of Mitt Romney’s video.
Looking at Mitt’s own YouTube views, it almost looks as if he wasn’t online prior to that video – he went from about 3K views a day to 125K on 4/13!
The overall effect on the top Republicans vs. top Dems is just as substantial.
From a marketing perspective, Romney is applying a modified version of the Tisdale contest model to the campaign, and it has gained interest. More importantly, however, is how it engages people in the process with Gov. Romney. Here’s a medium much more personal for the politician than a letter or an email, and maybe even a town hall meeting because in that setting the campaigner is going to hear so much in a short period of time that a single message might get diluted. Here, if Mitt watches it, he can watch it when he chooses and replay as many times to get the exact point. He could also ask others to rate the views presented and begin to use the same phrasing in his own message. He can see the non-verbal message and tone of the responder, too. And he receives (for the most part) well-thought and practiced ideas – bumping into someone at a town hall can make people feel rushed to get their points across and might not come out right. As you can tell, we love what’s happening here!
From the chart you can see the views have tailed off some, and from a little analysis you can find that the majority of Romney’s views were for his one video asking for information, not on videos where planks of his platform are espoused. Will Mitt be able to continue the debate on YouTube with the energy he just started? Going back to the Tisdale contest where a simple video saying “Keep ‘em coming!” produced another bump, I’m guessing he should be able to continue the YouTube presence, at least for awhile. Will this translate into people learning about his platform and ideals, or is it good enough that people engage in political participation and potentially help shape the direction of Romney’s campaign? If nothing else, it’s great to watch the responses and see what some caring, thoughtful, non-politicians think. Hopefully this new means of sharing views for improving the country doesn’t lose its appeal as it becomes more prevalent.
With the upcoming French presidential election right around the corner (April 22nd, with a final election taking place between the top two candidates on May 6th if no candidate wins over 50% of the vote in the April 22nd election), we decided to take a look at the online video viewership of the two leading candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy.
How do you say, Le Politubing?
Ségolène is the candidate for the Socialist Party and Sarkozy is the candidate for Union for a Popular Movement. We admittedly don’t know that much about French politics, but from our understanding, Sarkozy represents the liberal-conservatives and more of a libertarian, free-market ideal, while Royal’s party is large and has a long history with several factions. While some might see “Socialist” and think of socialism in the Marxist sense (in opposition to capitalism), the majority part of the Socialist Party fall under the “Social Democracy” ideology which is more of capitalism moderated by social democracy to correct for injustices that might arise from a purely capitalist ideology.
In our American mindset where the left skews younger and the right skews older, we see more web video viewership with the Democrats. Interestingly, in the web videos views of French politics, we see less of a push from Ségolène’s camp, especially in the past several weeks, whereas Sarkozy’s campaigners have pumped out several videos recently, with 13 interviews put out on 4-10 alone and viewership an order of magnitude higher than for Ségolène. From across the Atlantic it’s difficult to know the state of either party’s campaign, but it’s clear that the Socialist Party is not as focused on web videos for campaigning, at least on YouTube.
We really didn’t know who Ashley Tisdale was until just recently. She’s a young singer/actress who is currently well-known for her role on Disney Channel’s TV series “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.” But her career in total is quite impressive – she was “found” at the age of 3 and has been doing commercials and Broadway shows ever since (see bio here). We noticed her after an impressive jump in online video views this past week – We “found” her because of some impressive new media marketing.
Check out the graph below. After bouncing in the 30K-50K views per day range on YouTube, she had a spike to nearly 114K on 4/6…what happened? After looking at her breakdown of videos, We see that she has one video that threw up an impressive 44K views on 4/6 from almost nothing. It’s a little 17 second clip of her thanking her fans for all the entries to her contest. Wow thousands of views for a thank you. We had to check out this contest.
As part of her new Headstrong album, Ashley asked people to create videos (in honor of being “headstrong”) detailing what their dreams are, because as she appears to have written and can be found on several sites such as ashley-web.org, “I want to hear from you - what are your dreams? If you could do anything in the world what would it be? Are you on your way? Let me know, maybe I can help get you on your way!” We’re not sure if that’s a promise or not, but it seems like plenty have entered. Or at least, plenty have watched Ashley in anticipation of the results. Her marketing folks know what they’re doing! They have found a way to have prospective customers market a music album (and Ashley Tisdale as a brand) for them through the creation of online videos. This is a great example of new media marketing – a contest with no clear end date, frequent unannounced winners (”keep checking back!”), and no clear prize (except maybe the signed 8×10). The only thing that’s clear is interest!
March Madness is over, and now that the dust has settled, it’s interesting to go back and see how this year’s tourney fared in the way of web video presence, especially in comparison to the NBA. We took a look at the aggregate of videos published on YouTube by CBS for the NCAA Tournament vs. those published by the NBA.
As one might expect, the hype of the tourney created a few major peaks of interest in online video views. One could simply conclude that the two large peaks for the tournament naturally occur from the weekly dose of tourney madness. But if you look at which videos make up the bulk of viewership (after all, there are a full menu of videos -182 - for just 3 weeks of viewing), you find that just two videos are responsible for the two large spikes.
Both are the highlights recaps that are done in conjunction with the R&B artists, Nuttin’ But Stringz, and their song titled, Thunder. There was a huge spike the first time it was released as part of the highlights on 3/20 (nearly 550K views). You can see that the highlight reel from 3/27 is the other notable spike (390K views), though reduced from the first weekend’s highlights.
Which brings us to the point that even in the world of CBS and NCAA Tournament action clips, content is king. Online video is as much a hits business as record sales, only online video has a much shorter shelf life.
To support this thought, we looked at what drove the jump in NBA viewership on 3/23 and 3/24. Here it comes down to two videos again; one on each day. The first, and larger spike is a result of a Kobe Bryant video (124K views) and the second is an Allen Iverson video (107K views). The message must be a scary one for big media – even though it’s all professionally done, it’s not just about putting up all your content, it’s making the hits and keeping them coming. And this is difficult in the world of online video because a game, or sitcom, or news piece has to be reduced to a poignant, 30 second clip.
If anyone has any interesting charts we should dig into on the blog, let us know!
