The RightWing blogosphere has finally realized what Markos has known for many years: to truly capitalize on the Internet, you must enable a community to interact. Initially, Extremists like Hugh Hewitt and others vilified Markos for allowing his readers to post opinions, claiming that they were driving the Democratic Party away from the Center. Many of those same critics have now incorporated unto their sites the same features which they once disparaged, and which have made DailyKos the most popular political community in the country.
http://www.alexa.com/...
We can't stop there. We must now transform DailyKos into a community that can provide not only provide rapid feedback to Democratic media strategists as they produce TV spots, but can also provide sketchbooks of potential 30-second TV spots.
The Super Bowl has convinced me that this is not only possible, but potentially very rewarding.
Among the most effective ads aired during the Super Bowl was a Doritos spot produced by an amateur....
http://online.wsj.com/...
User-generated ads -- those created by consumers, rather than ad agencies -- created a buzz. Maybe the biggest winner of the night was 21-year-old Dale Backus, an amateur filmmaker who won Doritos' contest for a member of the public to produce a Super Bowl commercial. Doritos are made by Pepsico's Frito-Lay.
In the latest example of how the user-generated content trend has swept Madison Avenue, Doritos revealed the winner publicly only when the ad aired. The high quality of the spot, featuring a guy getting into a car accident, had some on Madison Avenue a bit nervous. "It's kind of scary that a consumer can come up with stuff that good," says Simeon Roane, executive creative director at the New York office of Publicis USA, a unit of Publicis Groupe.
Doritos seemed to agree. Yesterday, the company announced that the top five finalists in the contest would run on national television through March. The company also decided at the last moment to air the runner-up in the contest -- a funny ad showing a supermarket checkout girl -- during the Super Bowl broadcast.
The New York Times adds....
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The three advertisers whose Super Bowl spots are being talked about the most, according to preliminary data from Cymfony, are Anheuser-Busch, the Doritos brand of snack chips sold by Frito-Lay and Nationwide Financial. All three surrounded and supplemented their Super Bowl commercials with elaborate Web-based campaigns.
Whether we realize it or not, we, are constantly selling, even if we're not in Public Relations or Advertising. Whether it be selling our boss on a much-desired pet project, or pitching a company to a private equity firm, we are always marketing. Therefore, it should not be too surprising to believe that we can add significant value to political campaigns.
Two ways to do this.
One is by providing feedback to political consultants as we screen their proposed ads. They provide us with a virtual knob that will enable us to calibrate our feedback to a spot. What Frank Luntz does in focus groups, we can do virtually. The following comes from a Luntz interview on PBS.
http://www.pbs.org/...
What are you measuring with the dial technology? [A mechanism Luntz uses whereby people in a focus group register their moment by moment responses to a speech or presentation.]
It's like an X-ray that gets inside your head, and it picks out every single word, every single phrase [that you hear], and you know what works and what doesn't. And you do it without the bias of a focus group. People are quiet as they're listening, and they're reacting anonymously. The key to dial technology is that it's immediate, it's specific, and it's anonymous.
It's so immediate, it feels instantaneous.
But it is, because politics is instantaneous. Politics is gut; commercials are gut. You're watching a great show on TV, you now come to that middle break, you decide in a matter of three seconds whether or not you're going to a) flip the channel; b) get up; or c) keep watching. It's not intellectual; it is gut.
Two, we can have a political consultant come to the community, provide us with the message they want to convey, and have us come up with home-produced spots or a sketchbook that enables the Democrat to better establish a repertoire with the TV audience.
I realize that most most of the DailyKos community is more left than center, but we can correct for that, in the same way that pollsters correct for non-representative polling samples.
I haven't been a member for more than one year, but I believe that the DailyKos community is brilliant. Every day, more than 500K committed Democrats come to this site to interact with like-minded members of the center-left community. I refuse to believe that there isn't a way we can harness the brilliance of our minds, and leverage them into a competitive advantage for the Democratic Party.