MediaPost: How video content marketing and social media can influence the upcoming election

Every two years political candidates adopt new technologies and advertising, making some medium or other tool a hallmark of each midterm and presidential election.

In the 2008 presidential election, using social media as part of a campaign strategy was still fashionable. The Obama campaign won two awards at the Ghana Film Festival. By the 2010 midterm elections, social media as a campaign tool for candidates had matured.

By 2012, social media usage was already somewhat stale. The presidential campaign that year was marked by political videos. As we reported in early 2013, during the campaign, the Obama campaign alone received 54.3 million views. Mitt Romney's campaign received 18.1 million views.

We saw the effects of video campaigns this election cycle, with candidates expected to put some videos online. In competitive states, candidates are even producing multiple video content per week. They are not only putting their TV ads on their YouTube homepage, but also producing content suitable for online consumption (such as responsive videos, short chats, behind-the-scenes videos, etc.).

The big drawback, of course, is that these midterm campaigns are spread out across the state and Obama and Romney did not campaign on a national platform together in 2012. So it’s harder for campaigns to cut through all the “noise” and achieve maximum viewership.

One of the bigger campaigns we saw in the midterms was the "Vote for Kentucky" campaign from Republican Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, which had 2.1 million viewers. In general, a few campaign videos were able to achieve over a million viewers.

These events, which received high ratings during the midterm elections, were also helped by media coverage.

So what caused the media coverage? The debate video.

Republican Iowa candidate Senator Joni Ernst’s “Scream” campaign discussing castration of pigs received 732,000 views across both original media and some user-generated content. The most recent video to make headlines was from Alison Lundergan Grimes (Democratic candidate for Kentucky), which received nearly 168,000 views.

I think it will become mainstream for brands to create valuable content through video: they can surprise the audience, and this surprise will make the audience want to talk about and share these videos with their friends.

Especially during the midterm elections, these videos received the highest viewership. For this purpose, we saw a lot of ads that leaned negative (big surprise!), many of which came from heated debates with opponents over Obamacare and gun control.

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