As America Votes
Today is Super Tuesday, likely decision day for the Republicans (McCain) and another step toward resolution of the Democratic Party’s contest between Senators Clinton and Obama. What has interested me about Campaign ’08 is the change in communications mix, away from traditional advertising and toward public relations.
Karl Rove’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday made two important points. First, TV ads don’t matter as much as they used to. “Voters are discounting advertising…relying more on personal exposure, information from social networks, alternative information sources like talk radio and the Internet and local media coverage.” Second, he suggests that the PR person is more important to a candidate than the advertising person. “The 20th century’s closing decades saw the rise of the TV ad man as the most potent operator in presidential campaigns. The 21st century’s opening decade is seeing the rise of the communications director and press spokesman as the more important figures on the campaign staff.”
I reflect on my own experience in this cycle. As an early donor to the Obama campaign, I have been kept fully up to date through emails from campaign manager, David Plouffe. I receive digitized video of stops on the campaign trail, easily forwarded to friends. I saw a terrific video over the weekend from a variety of artists supporting Senator Obama, at www.dipdive.com. All of this on top of the aggressive campaign in “free media,” in particular maximizing endorsements by Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy. This stands in vivid contrast to the costly decision by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to forego the early primaries, thereby dropping out of the news cycle, rendering him irrelevant despite saturation advertising in the Florida primary.
While at the World Economic Forum, I spent time with Steve Grove, Director of news and politics for YouTube. His job is to screen and organize the user-generated content by candidate and by issue, so that all Americans are able to vote in an informed manner. Apparently while in his second year at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Grove approached the school with a request for a grant to do exactly this type of work; now it is a key part of the media for the campaign. Note the effective Romney campaign video of the candidate’s son making a prank call to his father mimicking Governor Schwarzenegger as the Terminator.
As the world moves toward technology, some things still don’t exactly work well. The voting machines in our precinct in New York City on the Upper West Side were not operating today. So it was back to the paper ballot and the “make your mark” instruction from the nice woman in charge. My only request of all of you; whether your machines work or not, get out and vote.