The original John McCain “Lipstick” ad was pulled from YouTube today due to a copyright claim from CBS. In any case, here is a “fair use” version (while it lasts), along with Barack Obama’s response:
John McCain’s campaign did not come close to their potential video views this week. Why? For one, it took them four days to get up a Sarah Palin video after she was announced as McCain’s running mate. Also, during the GOP convention, rather than post speeches into John McCain’s official YouTube channel, all speeches were posted into a separate “GOPconvention2008” channel, confusing some people (myself included). Perhaps because of this, the videos of Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech that ended up getting the most views were pirated clips.
Obama has an entire team managing his online presence, but I doubt that McCain does, given these delays. Maybe, as my friend at Talking Head TV suggested, this is a calculated move on McCain’s part–with limited resources, his emphasis can’t be online, which sways younger, and instead needs to be on TV (hence their brief YouTube success with traditional attack ads). Our loss, I guess.
Sphere: Related ContentLast Thursday, Barack Obama’s views from his official videos on YouTube totaled 778,373, more than seven times John McCain’s total (102,064). Although some of this is doubtlessly due to VP rumors, much of the spike was caused by Obama’s foray into attack ads with “Seven,” which had 464,883 views yesterday, knocking Obama out of a recent lull in which McCain was consistently beating him in daily views for the first time since 2/11/08, and 11/29/07 before that.
UPDATE: McCain’s latest attack ad, “Joe Biden on Barack Obama,” gives him the lead again, upping the ante in this exciting attack ad tit-for-tat.
My brother spotted this (hilarious, and increasing in popularity):
For the uninitiated, this is a variation of the “Rick-Roll.”
As we reported here, John McCain surpassed Barack Obama in daily YouTube views for the first time since the primaries last week. After being forced to remove his popular “Love” video because of a copyright claim by Warner Music Group (which we noticed last Friday and Silicon Alley Insider covered here), McCain managed to make another video go viral, an attack ad making fun of Obama’s celebrity status (below). Apparently, McCain’s (sustainable?) strategy for making videos go viral is to make fun of Obama. A little lighthearted ad hominem never hurt anyone, right?
Ron Paul is substantively irrelevant, but continues to lead Hillary Clinton in cumulative video views aggregated across sites, despite her recent lift in viewership from the Pennsylvania primary. Why? Hillary mostly posts professionaly-produced ads with canned, one-word titles, interspersed with speeches that do not do her justice. Contrast this with Barack Obama, whose campaign understands the genre and posts stirring campaign appearances with occasional vlogs. Obviously, demographics and other factors are at play here, but the results are pretty unforgiving.
Of course, none of them can compete with Chris Brown music videos; if only Tocqueville had lived to see this apathy:
(Candidates’ cumulative viewership across sites and Chris Brown on YouTube only).
Which is ironic, because it was online video that helped expose Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s controversial ministry in the first place. Obama’s response to the firestorm took the form of a nuanced speech about race, which millions flocked to watch online. As is often the case, online video magnifies and reinforces deeper political (or other) trends, often ahead of time. And according to a poll released in today’s Wall Street Journal, Obama did indeed weather the storm. Speaking of today’s Wall Street Journal, we were mentioned as a tool utilized by the Obama campaign 
(Barack Obama across YouTube, Brightcove and MySpace and the YesWeCan video).
1 comment March 27th, 2008
