Thursday, July 16, 2009

Effective Political Advertising in the 21st Century

As J.J. mentioned in his post this increasingly politically active generation will no doubt change the political landscape of the 21st century. In this past election we have already seen several campaigns attempts to reach out and tap the powerful force that is the younger generation. As J.J. also mentioned 66% of people under 30 voted for Barack Obama. This shows not only a platform that tended to agree with the younger generation but also an extremely effective targeted campaign to make communications with this group. How did the campaign reach out to such a large number of the youth? Effective advertisement of the candidate through the mediums that this particular people group uses most, specifically the Internet (social networking, youtube and email) and cell phones (text messages, calls and apps). During the campaign roughly 13 million people were on the email list for the Obama campaign, these people received as a whole over 1 billion emails over the course of the campaign. (Vargas) Social networking was also used to communicate with large numbers of supporters as well as better determine the preferences of the voters and rally more active support. Obama had over 5 million friends on over 15 different social networking sites, this includes 3 million friends on facebook alone.(Vargas) These are just a few of the staggering numbers that the Obama campaign showed as far as the use of popular media in a political campaign.
Another campaign that pulled staggering numbers using social media was Ron Paul. Running as virtually an independent in the GOP Ron Paul's grassroots campaign was one of the largest of any candidate. This was through an effectively run website that allowed supporters to sign up to receive information about the course of the campaign as well as ways to support the candidate. Also, the site featured other ways to help and be kept informed by becoming facebook friends with the "Campaign for Liberty" and Ron Paul himself. YouTube also played an important role with media exposure being as Ron Paul received very little mention on television or in newspapers. This could be part of the reason most younger voters on the republican ticket leaned towards Ron Paul. In fact in a breakdown of supporters by age group Ron Paul doubled the support of any other republican candidate in the 18-24 age range despite the other candidates being more "mainstream". (usaelectionpolls.com)

What does this show? This shows the power of the politically active youth and demonstrates to future political hopefuls that they must be able to effectively reach out to this group in order to succeed in their campaign. Just as the GOP saw in the 2008 election it is essential to be able to effectively communicate with new voters to earn their support and I believe all candidates will no doubt heed this lesson in the next election or will surely be disappointed with the outcome.

-PsyCHN

P.S.
For anyone who wanted a full look at the social media numbers from the Obama Campaign











(Source: Edelman Report)
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 16, 2009 at 11:08 PM

    I don’t think it’s only effective advertising.
    I think it has a lot more to do with appeal. Yes, Obama did have many advertisements with his campaign, but McCain could have easily did the same. Many of McCain's advertisements were derogatory towards Obama, and nobody likes that.
    Also, Bush was driving us deeper and deeper into
    the rabbit hole that we wouldn't be able to get out of easy, and any connection a candidate had with him wasn't very helpful. You didn't see George Bush running around with McCain's campaign. We couldn’t have another four years of that now could we?

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  2. RichardWestJuly 17, 2009 at 8:50 AM

    66% of the people under 30 didn't even vote. So let's make it clear that 66% of the people under 30 THAT VOTED supported Barack Obama. Doubt you meant to make it sound that way, but it still sounds as if 66% of the people under 30 in the U.S. voted for Obama. As well as the fact that exit polls are sketchy at best [which is where this probably came from]. A great deal of people didn't want to say they voted for "the white guy over the black guy." Remember, Mr. Obama only won by a few percentage points in the general election...

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  3. AnonymousJuly 17, 2009 at 1:47 PM

    But why would they lie at an exit poll? What's done is done, and ultimately we weren't surprised by the conclusion. And yes, Obama did win only by a small amount of percentage points, but he had more than enough electoral votes to solidify his position. Unlike the Bush-Kerry elections in 04. The percentages were even closer and one or two states could have made a huge difference. But here, not so much, McCain had a lot of votes but not enough in one state to get its electoral votes. McCain was too busy maintaining what he already had instead of expanding it. You don't have to win by many votes to win a state's electoral votes, and McCain lost some serious "Republican States" that usually wouldn't vote democrat.

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  4. RichardWestJuly 18, 2009 at 1:57 PM

    It's well known that exit polls aren't always accurate. Dewey won didn't he?

    And Obama didn't win by a small amount of percentage points, he won by millions of votes, but that's besides the point.

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  5. AnonymousJuly 18, 2009 at 3:28 PM

    Touche.
    Indubitably, every poll has some bias.
    But I was just merely explaining why, "Mr. Obama only won by a few percentage points in the general election..." There's no doubt about it that he won by millions of votes. Good to be in agreement.

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  6. J. J.July 19, 2009 at 9:15 PM

    nice to hear the good commentary and dialogue! keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete

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