Interesting article by Steve Bryant on Reel Pop recently about how politicians are not taking advantage of YouTube to distribute their ads. Steve looked at the US midterm congressional and senate races are was surprised to see how few politicians were actively using YouTube to reach out to voters:
Some of the highlights of his research were:
- Television ads predominate. But they’re not very popular. Politicians either don’t have time to speak directly to video-sharers, or they don’t know how.
- Candidates don’t typically upload their own videos or go to pains to “own” their keywords on YouTube. Most videos are copied segments of national TV shows.
- If a candidate doesn’t try to control his/her keywords on YouTube, their opponent can use that weakness against them. For example, Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D) doesn’t have a good presence on YouTube. The most popular videos containing her name were uploaded by her opponent, Mike Bouchard (R). Those videos have titles such as Debbie Stabenow Doesn’t Want You to See This and Shh…Don’t Let Debbie Know You’ve Seen This.
A couple of these points stand out. One is that most of the ads that are on YouTube are as a result of ads that ran while a TV show was on. Candidates (or their political staff) are not taking advantage of YouTube to not only upload these 30 second commercials, but to also upload slightly longer versions of the ads that consist of more than a few sound bites.
Related to this, because candidates are not uploading the videos themselves, they are allowing opponents to tag them and their videos as Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D) is finding out. Why a politician would let their opponent control how their ad/message is tagged is beyond me.
Some cynics will say that the reason that there are so few ads on YouTube is because that demographic (i.e. kids) are not eligible to vote. I disagree with this view. With the skewing upwards of social media demographics, I believe that a sizeable portion of the YouTube audience can in fact vote and that politicians are missing out by not using social network sites like this to interact with voters.
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