There's been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press' moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment. The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board's announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge Web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally. The "why" of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use. Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible.
From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices. TechCrunch viewed AP's moves as being akin to the RIAA's moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantitites of music on to their PCs - legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music pubishing industry. TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a Web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other Web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member. Google CEO Eric Schmidtcommented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP that it's a good idea not to "piss off your customers"- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content. AP could certainly take some lessons from Google's efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.
The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time - and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it's not without its merits. Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the Web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 pecent of the original text of articles. Knocking out parasite Web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor. It's a shame that AP's initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarassing misfires - it's an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies.
But the larger concern is whether AP is really "getting" how to make money in the online publishing environment. The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP's intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from "authoritative" news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we've had such search engines for years already. The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they're not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they're not growing in any significant way. Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers' concerns?
The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money. In broad concept that's pretty much what AP's mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets. Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not "i-reports." The idea of "authoritative" news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses. With today's publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time.
This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations. Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?" In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way? With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world's attention span has permanently embraced this "Content Nation" as a source of information that they trust. That's a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it?
Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today's news organizations using whatever content - news, metadata, links, video, anything - will help them to make money. In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts. This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP's to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine. The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for its own sake and for the sake of its members.
A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals. With billions of Web publications vying to get people's attention and a relative handful of professionally produced publications to compete for that attention it's no small wonder many media executives are humming the now-familiar "content in context" meme as they ponder how to make use of the Web's ocean of content to promote their own wares. The sad truth, though, is that most publishers are ill-equipped to get any money from their content beyond their own online publications. Most media organizations have tiny content licensing business development teams that typically trudge through protracted deals with a handful of publishing partners, leaving the lion's share of potential revenues from partners on the table.
Attributor Corporation has been hot on the trail of how to close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to extract those revenues. The Attributor system works by listening to feeds of content from participating publishers. Attributor captures what they've published and then compares it to content that's been published on the Web. When Attributor finds content that's a full or partial match it compiles content usage reports for clients who can then can use automated tools from Attributor or their own methods to pursue the reuse of their content from a business and legal perspective.
How big is the opportunity for monetizing reused content? Recently Attributor shared with me some research based on content from prominent publishers' Web sites fed into its system along with Compete.com usage data that surfaced some profound statistics. The key thought-provoker emerging from this research is that the audience for people viewing content on sites that were not active syndication or licensing partners was more than five times larger than the audience on the publishers' own sites. Almost half of these largely "passive syndicators" were copying 90 percent or more of the content from publishers' articles and more than 70 percent of the copied articles were using at least half of the available content from articles. Before the publishers reading this post slip on their hair shirts and moan in protest, please consider this first: what publisher wouldn't want to have a 5X increase in potentially monetizable content inventory with no additional overhead?
The research also indicated that two-thirds of the sites using content from these leading publishers were providing links back to the publisher's sites, indicating that they were at least nominally cooperative in building traffic to their sites. Armed with data from Attributor, publishers can pursue on a more highly automated basis Web sites that use their content and turn passive syndicators into active publishing partners - and in the process of doing so shift the balance of traffic back into sites that will feed revenues to the publisher. Attributor projects that using their technologies could help to reduce non-cooperative passive syndicators significantly, potentially doubling traffic captured at publishers' own sites and nearly tripling the traffic visiting cooperative syndication partners. No doubt it would also help content reusers pressing the boundaries of fair use policy to understand what individual publishers considered to be fair use more quickly and effectively.
Attributor sees its data gathering and analysis tools as a key to unlocking significant new online revenues for publishers. It sees at least two basic options that publishers using its data can undertake to establish revenue streams rapidly. Option one: Attributor helps publishers reclaim their fair share of ad revenues from ads served up by existing ad networks on sites using their content. This could in theory help for managing both active and passive syndication partners. Option two: enable Attributor to funnel ads from existing networks and publishers' own direct ad sales to syndication partners. Obviously there are other steps that publishers could take based on Attributor data, but either of these options suggested by Attributor help both to reclaim ad revenues for legitimate publishers and syndicators efficiently and to reduce the revenues fed out by ad networks to non-legitimate syndicators.
To make it easier for publishers large and small to get an idea of the potential for Attributor to help them monetize content they have launched FairShare, a no-fee service that enables people to get data on sites using their content from Attributor analytics provided in an RSS feed. FairShare will pump out stats on individual articles and how they've been reused on specific Web sites, including data on what percentage of an article has been used, whether the reuser is using ads on the page on which it appears and whethe there are linkbacks to their original content. As an option FairShare makes it easier for people using Creative Commons licensing to map their license terms to the patterns of use found in Attributor's Web site analysis. Although launched just a few days ago FairShare is already tracking more than 150,000 articles and has found more than 3.3 million shared copies of content. As seen in the example to the right, FairShare is finding sites that use just fair use snippets of ContentBlogger's content as well as sites that seem to take more than their fair share. If ContentBlogger were ad-supported and Attributor were funneling this data to the ad networks that support content clippers I could be seeing some automatic revenues from these sites. A nice thought in a slow ad economy, no?
Attributor technology has been launched recently as an underpinning for FreeWheel, a service that enables videos from YouTube and other outlets that are embedded on other Web sites to be served up with the ads that benefit the original video publisher the most. FreeWheel calls this concept "Monetization Rights Management," as opposed to the Digital Rights Management packaging that tries to keep others from distributing content themselves. FreeWheel notes - quite rightly, I believe - that legitimate viral distribution of content needs to be encouraged so that content can find its most valuable contexts. Once content is in a valuable context it can be monetized with ads and other marketing mechanisms that benefit both the creator of the content and the publisher that found a valuable context for their content.
As major publishers mull over the capabilities of Attributor technologies, hopefully they begin to see that it offers a key solution to the dilemmas of how to make money on content in an era in which controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable. To borrow from the language of my book Content Nation, the world is now a nation of publishers, a nation whose value cannot be ignored by traditional publishers as a source of monetizable contexts. Since most non-subscription Web content relies on search engines to maximize their ad revenues, Attributor's search-based technologies can enable publishers to understand who's using their content with the same tools that those publishers use to drive monetizable traffic to their sites. Using Attributor data and tools can enable a highly automated and efficient approach to revenue generation from viral distribution that would eliminate friction with those outlets that use a publisher's content fairly and that can allow publishers to keep on top of "bad apples" on a daily basis.
As major publishers such as The New York Times and The Guardian begin to set their content loose via sophisticated programming interfaces the Attributor concepts of using searching and content identification to establish commercial relationships automatically with publishers using their content can open up an era in which reused content is creating higher value and revenues rapidly for publishers with lower audience acquisition costs. With revenue acquistion schemes such as Attributor in place publishers can concentrate more on making their content as useful and as accurate as possible - and leave the inventiveness of where it's going to be most useful to the world at large.
Certainly publishers will continue to compete to make their own publications a destination of choice, but with only thousands of traditional publishers and billions of self-empowered Web and mobile publishers the time has come to use technology to harvest the value of content in as many publishing contexts as posssible as efficiently as possible. Most especially in the news industry, where getting people's attention in fleeting moments is increasingly difficult, the ability to harvest revenues from content reuse and linking more automatically is an absolute necessity.
This need to chase the contexts of content use in order to make money in online media does not mean that copyright is a dead concept. Far from it: copyright ensures that the creators of original works of authorship have the ability to claim ownership of the intellectual property that is rightfully theirs, especially when it is used in contexts where its use is harder to verify, such as in enterprises and in private communications such as emails, photocopying and reprints. But it's important to remember that the concepts of copyright were introduced into law when publishing was still a relatively fledgling industry, with few commercial outlets available and with the need to support getting information and ideas out to the public via a still-young technology a crying necessity. The "printing press" of today is not any particular Web site or service but the Web as a whole: every person has the potential to play a role in the mechanism of publishing. As such, copy rights, while still relevant, have become less important than context rights - the ability to say how participants in a global peer publishing and aggregation process should recognize the value of a creative work. Nearly three years ago I introduced this concept at a presentation at BookExpo in Washington, DC, using the above square logo as a symbol for context rights.
Today in the work of Attributor we see the beginnings of the effective monetization of context rights taking form. I am hopeful that publishers will finally begin to see the outlines of how to use technologies such as Attributor to forge more effective relationships with the global publishing mechanism of Content Nation to benefit the creative forces behind their content and to create new ways to define the value of their brands. It's a far different methodology than most publishers are used to, but in a world in which the fundamental nature of publishing has changed far more radically than most traditional publishers have dared to acknowledge, it is time for publishers to embrace context rights and to define their value propositions more effectively in a world whose very survival may depend upon the power of ubiquitous publishing to solve problems facing humanity rapidly.
(Full disclosure statement: I really have nothing to disclose, I have had no past or present commercial relationship with Attributor. I just believe that they are pursuing one of the most effective routes to content monetization available today and I hope that publishers pay close attention to their efforts.)
Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come along only so often. As I settled in to my train seat on the way home, I noticed that my friend Jim Hirshfield was sitting in the seat behind me. Jim and I had last seen one another at last year's Cluetrain@10 celebration in New York City, just as he was looking to re-enter the startup space. Today Jim is VP of Business Development of Zemanta, a European startup with development offices in Slovenia that has developed a nifty platform that enables publishers to enrich their online content via their semantic language processing tools.
Zemanta technology operates via a plugin for popular blogging and Web CMS platforms and with popular brower-based email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As with other semantic processing services that parse documents to suggest related links, tags and content, Zemanta semantic processing technology pumps text that's being typed in by a document author through its semantic filters to come up with relevant rich content that can be inserted into these documents. This in and of itself is not terribly revolutionary: publishing platforms have had similar tools for years to facilitate the development of rich content that can attract search engine traffic and keep audiences engaged in their content. What's highly interesting about Zemanta's approach is that it is a free download that can be integrated within seconds into platforms that are popular with both bloggers and professional publishers. A "pro" model is available that can be tailored for a publisher's own content on their own platforms.
Best of all, the stuff just plain works. As you type along, Zemanta's suggestions for images, links, tagging and related content pop up in convenient spots near a page's editing window. This real-time analysis is quite impressive and remarkably effective: it seems to take only a few sentences to get going and it gets only better as you type in more. A quick click or drag of the mouse and rich content is integrated into a blog post or article easily. It's giddily easy to enrich your articles: virtually every link, image and tag in this article was implemented with Zemanta. Zemanta's free download links into 10 million-plus items of content from free sources, including rights-cleared images from sources such as CrunchBase, Flickr and Google Maps, articles from key bloggers and Wikipedia as well as information posted on social networking services and content from Crunchbase, Amazon, YouTube and other popular sources. "Reblogging" content to other sites with trace linking to the original source is applied automatically to each post.
High-end services may provide more features, content and functionality for semantic content integration, but for publishers that don't have the time, money or project bandwidth for such solutions and that need to get more enriched content quickly Zemanta offers remarkable power in its free version - as well as the ability to upgrade to the premium version that enables publisher-specific sources to be integrated easily as well. This can be particularly important for a publisher that may have blogging or open-source CMS platforms that will not be so easily integrated into some of the high end semantic services. Zemanta allows these publishers to make rapid integration of content from their existing sources a very short project. In a world in which publishing platforms with 80 percent of what one would expect from a professional package now dominate the bulk of content being generated on the Web, Zemanta gives those platforms yet another "pretty-darn-good" asset that can help their content to compete effectively in online content markets. My thanks to Jim for being in the right place at the right time with a great tool for publishers of all sizes.
As Google tries to trumpet its new YouTube system for identifying copyrighted video materials you'd think that they would be getting some slaps on the back from commercial video producers. Instead Google's YouTube initiative, which was eagerly awaited only a few months ago, constitutes in the minds of many media companies only a partial and proprietary solution to the question of how to manage copyrighted materials in social media outlets. Google itself recognizes this when it notes in its description of its new service:
No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves. This means that copyright holders who want to use and help us refine our Video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us recognize their work. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible.
So how best to handle managing copyrighted materials across social media environments? Several media and technology companies have joined together to define "User-Generated Content Principles," an online document that provides a general framework of requirements for managing copyrighted materials in social media services. Although not a binding legal document the language of UGCP is clearly legally oriented, with the typical onerous one-sided expectations that any corporate legal team is likely to insert in terms of unconditional legal surrender. Moreover, if one tries to abide by this framework a social media service provider must consider the following claim in the UGCP:
Copyright Owners should not assert that adherence to these Principles, including efforts by UGC Services to locate or remove infringing content as provided by these Principles, or to replace content following receipt of an effective counter notification as provided in the Copyright Act, support disqualification from any limitation on direct or indirect liability relating to material online under the Copyright Act or substantively similar statutes of any applicable jurisdiction outside the United States.
In other words, even if you do everything that we ask you to, don't expect that copyright holders still won't give you a hard time. There's comfort for you.
The main rub in the UGCP document is that while it is broad enough to provide a general requirements framework to develop more universal copyright management services it does nothing to ensure that copyright holders will provide any significant standardization of copyright identification technology, filtering processes and reference materials referenced in the document. In essence it suggests to social media sites that they must be ready to institute whatever technologies that any number of publishers find to be acceptable to their needs. Given that Microsoft is one of the technology companies that has signed on to the UGCP one can imagine that there may be some proprietary interests in play on this front.
The UCGP document does cite some good best practices for managing copyrighted content in a social media environment, but it's far from clear that it brings the content industry any closer to a significant agreement on how copyright should be managed in online materials. Even as Google gets slammed by some for rushing to get some sort of filtering and identification system in place on a rapid basis we are no closer to copyright holders agreeing to a common framework for them taking on some reasonable portion of the burden of implementing tools that will make the universal identification, filtering and referencing of copyrighted materials simple and reasonable to manage.
To some degree the rise of digital watermarking and identification schemes that eliminate onerous DRM packaging are pointing towards a more workable solution. Being able to allow publishers to identify their content using reports from social media sites and their own scanning tools can help them to determine when the reuse of copyrighted materials is worth pursuing as a legal matter or as a business development opportunity. But until these technologies are implemented more broadly it's unrealistic to expect social media outlets to respond aggressively with their own solutions if the see Google getting slammed by UGCP members for its efforts. We seem to be creeping towards open solutions that will enable publishers to get around the copyright conundrum without huge proprietary investments but don't expect the pace to pick up until some publishers have proven how to do it cheap, simply and in a way that won't be irksome to the creative talents that are driving online content value.
In browsing through YouTube today I was thinking about the importance of the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax in bringing obscure American folk music to mainstream media outlets. Through Lomax's recordings in the mid-20th century we gained access to pivotal and influential artists such as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and other performers who have become icons of American culture. Their songs have been "mashed" (covered) countless times by popular artists, creating a legacy of profitable operations for music publishers everywhere. Lomax' subjects were far from slick: some were in or just out of prisons, sitting on tin shack porches in the backwaters of the deep South, up in the mountains of Appalachia - it would be fair to call most of them "nobodies" by the standards of any day.
Today I can turn to YouTube and get a catalog of folk performances with breadth that far outstrips anything that Lomax was able to acquire through his years of sojourns. The average teen humming a song on the edge of her bed in front of a webcam is not likely to become a new Jelly Roll Morton, much less a Sade, but voices such as this have restored the concept of folk art being something that anyone can create for anybody. Which of these performances is worth watching? The new Lomaxes of the world are us, the audience, providing accolades through our use and ranking of their content. Mainstream content being transformed in this environment through mashing is the equivalent of a seamstress cutting up scraps from a designer dress to make a beautiful quilt - it returns the content to its roots as a resource for new folk communication.
When one goes into a major city you're surrounded oftentimes by street performers of various kinds, usually average at best but often enough inspiring in both their content and in the context in which they've chosen to perform. YouTube makes everyone's home a street corner, re-integrating our modern American culture that has been decimated by the automobile cult with its look-alike shopping strips that discourage folk activities in favor of consuming finished goods. Finished and packaged content still matters in a very important way, but I think that we're only at the very leading edge of understanding how profoundly human communications have been affected by services such as YouTube. The emerging dominant culture of the 21st century will be unplugged and unmediated folk culture, free to be free or commercial or whatever it desires to be in the moment. What Lomax exposed through 20th century technology YouTube will unite through the 21st century's direct communications between folk artists and their audiences.
Download Squad highlights a new experiment on YouTube to embed advertising in its online video footage, using a small text box appearing under the live video box with a link to the advertising video. According to Download Squad a limited number of video clips are being exposed via this method in the YouTube site, with ads not appearing when clips are embedded into other sites. Download Squad sees this as a plus, as the embedder of a clip does not benefit from the ad revenues.
But on the other side of the coin, what if the site DID want to benefit from the ad revenue stream? Sites such as TheNewsRoom allow a viral distributor of their videos to take a piece of the revenues from their pre-roll ads, which they hope would entice users to choose their footage from major video outlets for embedding. But there seems to be some push-back from webloggers and other social media outlets on pre-rolls in embedded content. Embedding is a form of personal endorsement for the core content being inserted: the person choosing the content being embedded doesn't necessarily want to endorse a brand advertiser as well. Enabling the embedder to participate in the revenues seems to mitigate this somewhat, but the magic formula for embedding viral video for profit seems to be elusive.
The YouTube experiment seems to point in one key direction in finding a good balance in embedded video ads: sponsored links. As with Google search results in which AdWords sponsored links exist alongside non-sponsored search results the text bar appearing under the video clip enables a viewer to be exposed to the concept of looking at and ad while looking at the clip in question. The key concept of the ad gets exposed to the viewer without creating an interruption. Presumably Google's AdSense infrastructure could enter this picture and allow sites embedding YouTube content to turn on these sponsored links and to participate in their revenue stream.
This Google/YouTube experiment holds promise, but traditional video advertisers are going to want more out of the equation. And perhaps they can get that - for a price and in specific contexts. But in trying to define a new common-denominator formula for online video ads Google's enormously successful experiment with AdSense and AdWords may point to approaches that will be drawing video advertisers away from interruption-driven advertising and towards a level of engagement that may put their content in front of more highly engaged eyeballs.
CNET News and many majors go all apey over an announced distribution alliance between NBC Universal and News Corp. to provide full-length ad-supported and premium video content to media-friendly portals AOL, MSN and Yahoo. CNET and others hint at talks with Google about bringing this presumably rights-protected content into their YouTube video portal, but it sounds like speakerphone-ware at most for now. In general the whole effort sounds a little panicky and ill-formed, with partners confused about what's going to be free or not and no real details as to how this will all hang together. There are promises of user-generated content being in the mix but no sense as to how it would fit in with centrally produced video content.
At the end of the day it's probably going to be a step in the right direction for media companies to get more aggressive about building broader distribution of content with their own monetization built in to the packaging. But for all the talk about "ubiquitous" distribution it's a very limited initiative with scads of professionally-produced content well outside of the packaging schemes - including some of News Corp's and NBCU's flagship shows. It also increases the sites at which one can get content from these partners from two to a whopping...five. Wow. Bump it up to thirteen and we could fill up an old-timey television dial.
It's all a sadly inadequate response to user-generated distribution that doesn't begin to provide video the flexibility that will be required to respond to the user-generated media phenomenon. At most it's an acknowledgment that a significant portion of their audiences would be just as glad to receive programming over an Internet connection instead of a digital cable or broadcast service. This will be a plus as PCs become more integrated into home entertainment centers: why muck around with distribution deals with other partners when you can stream the programming that audiences want right to their PC/HDTV server. But a response to YouTube and other user-dominated distribution channels? Hardly.
Instead of circling the wagons of "friendlies" video producers need to face head-on the challenges of making user distribution of their content a plus rather than a frightening minus. The longer that they wait on this inevitable requirement the tighter their circle of wagons will be as the user "savages" develop increasingly flexible - and entertaining - alternatives to traditional video media. We'll see how this goes, but my bet is that in the short term it will be a fairly large ho-hum as users wait for the dust to settle around a less-than-spectacular service debut.
The 2008 U.S. Presidential election is expected to attract more than a billion dollars in spending by some estimates, with the lion's share of that funding being funneled into media buys. But as noted by the New York Times the 2008 election is also likely to be the first election in which freely available content from candidates in social media portals will play a key factor in their media strategies. In addition to MySpace pages for candidates the presence of candid clips of candidates on YouTube turned out to play a pivotal role in key 2006 U.S. elections, providing an outlet for content that major news outlets had to cover and by doing so shape the dialogue. The New York Times today whines that all of this openness makes it difficult for candidates to shape their messages.
Yet what could be a better channel for getting your message out to the masses? Already one of the more interesting clips of the still-young 2008 campaign was concocted by an amateur, playing on a 1984 ad for Apple's Macintosh computer to the detriment of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton:
While the eventual impact of this clip is still hard to determine, it has already been viewed more than 900,000 times, not too far from the number who viewed the original Lyndon Johnson "daisy" anti-war ad in 1964's presidential campaign. If this is what one person with only the most nominal technology at their disposal can create, what could a campaign with sophisticated production equipment and messaging goals do on YouTube? Unfortunately for the campaign consultants whose fees rely in large part on placing ad buys in traditional media outlets the best buys in the 2008 may turn out to be free placements on outlets such as YouTube where the message is the star of an ad-supported show. The "daisy" ad, after all, gained most of its impact not from its original airing but from the coverage that it received as content in other ad-supported shows.
In the YouTube era it can be as important to get your message into the flow of conversation as much as to push it down people's throats with endless repetition. Services like YouTube that monetize the conversation as much as the content itself allow the "push" to come from the audience instead of the media outlet, providing a peer-level endorsement through voting and distribution that's difficult if not impossible to replicate via traditional media channels. It means, of course, a whole new spin on marketing in general: instead of creating messages that can't be questioned or voted upon YouTube and other social media outlets require marketers to create value in the midst of conversations that supply an implied endorsement far more powerfully than interrupt-driven advertising has done to date. Content finds its own level in these conversations, favoring multiple small engagements rather than high-risk big engagements.
I think that we'll see the "daisy" effect in 2008 via YouTube and other social media outlets far more than we have in past elections. Smart candidates will use their own producers to create a forest of interesting "quick-hit" messages for audiences to wade through online, and will aim their loyal followers through weblogs and email campaigns to the most popular of these messages as well as to amateur messages that seem to be resonating with voters. The most popular of these messages may wind up being promoted to broadcast media usage, reversing the flow of clips in a Current-style editorial process that allows tried and tested content to work its way towards broader audiences. The implied endorsement of these born-online broadcast ads is likely to be far more potent, as their airings will capture the attention of people who have already seen them and discussed them online and who are ready to tell their family members or friends, "Watch this, this is cool."
Ultimately this may mean lower budgets for traditional media spends, but I don't think that we're going to see a great lessening of spending in 2008 - only a more well-targeted spending that focuses more on creating online endorsements through social media more aggressively. In the long run, though, established media outlets will have to come up with new ways to make money off of political campaigns than can compete more effectively with outlets that use political ad content as free programming that can attract other ads. Politics in an era of user-driven distribution is certainly going to be a different animal.
UPDATE: The creator of the "Hillary 1984" video has been identified as Phil de Vellis, a Web developer associated with Democratic campaigns, including the Barack Obama campaign. He has resigned his position, but in an interesting post on The Huffington Post de Vellis notes "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
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