World Wide Webbed: The Obama Campaign’s masterful Use of the Internet
Making Your Own Media Machine
The Obama campaign also masterfully used the World Wide Web and its emerging video capabilities for promoting its own message, for rebutting criticisms, and for circumventing the monopoly of the mainstream media in defining candidates. The first inkling of the ability of the web to grab attention for the Obama campaign was revealed rather innocuously in June 2007 when an independently-developed YouTube video of ‘I got a crush on Obama’ was posted by a buxomly clad Obama Girl, eventually garnering 12 million views. It was a huge sensation that drew attention to his campaign early on.
That was just the first example of the Obama campaign as well as his millions of supporters taking advantage of YouTube for free advertising and message broadcasting. The ‘Yes We Can’ mashup by the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, starring a handful of his famous friends, cost the campaign nothing and became a viral hit. The Obama campaign’s own YouTube channel turned out 1800 videos by election day, reaping 110 million views. Joe Trippi argues that those videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them or received them from a friend instead of having their television shows interrupted.
‘The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours’ Mr. Trippi said. ‘To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.’ Yet the Obama campaign paid next to nothing for that widespread exposure on the web.
The internet also let people repeatedly listen to the candidates’ own words in the face of attacks. Instead of being at the mercy of Fox News and its spin zone, Obama could react nearly instantaneously and have more impact on the public discourse. There was no better example of this than the controversy over Obama’s friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah White. While Obama’s opponents found ways to make sure that Reverend Wright’s incendiary words kept surfacing, people could watch and re-watch Mr. Obama’s speech on race. They could forward links to their own friends and associates. Eventually nearly 7 million people watched Obama’s 37-minute speech on YouTube, and the mainstream media reported on it in part because it became such an internet sensation.
‘[The Obama campaign] leapfrogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them once it was uploaded’, says Arianna Huffington, creator and publisher of HuffingtonPost.com.
There has also been a sea change in fact-checking, with citizens using the internet to find past speeches that prove a politician wrong and then using the web to alert their fellow citizens. The John McCain campaign, for example, originally said that Governor Sarah Palin opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Says Ms. Huffington, ‘online there was an absolutely obsessive campaign to prove that wrong’, which they quickly did, causing the McCain campaign to backtrack, making them look foolish. ‘In 2004, trust me, they would have gone on repeating it, because the echo chamber [of the mainstream media] would not have been as facile’, says Ms. Huffington.
