MoveOn.org just announced its ad contest for the 2008 cycle.  In 2004 their contest was for negative Bush ads, but this year they are wanting pro Obama ads.  It’s being run off of ObamaIn30Seconds.org and I suspect it will produce some great entries.  They received some quality ads for their 2004 contest, and with the fervent Obamania that exists, I suspect we will see more excellent entries.  Their list of judges includes quite the crew - Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Russell Simons, Julia Stiles, Adrian Grenier, and Moby to name but a few.

Via Wired, the story of online video just reached a minor milestone: an amateur clip slamming Mike Huckabee that was posted on YouTube in December will air tonight during a Fox News debate.

You may remember the video. It made quite a splash when it was first posted about one month ago. It features the mother of Carol Sue Shields, a young woman who was raped and murdered by a man named Wayne Dumond. Several members of the Arkansas parole board that released Dumond claim that Huckabee petitioned for his early release. At the very least, we know that Huckabee sent Dumond sympathetic letters in prison.

The YouTube clip has been reproduced for production value, but the script and cues remain largely the same. The original video was shot and produced by Keith Emis, a GOP political operative from Arkansas unassociated with any of the campaigns. After the clip made a splash on YouTube, Emis started a 527 group to collect funds to air the ad on television.

Alexander and Caveh, two of the creators of www.Straight2theCandidates.com visited IPDI Labs this week. They have developed a platform that allows many-to-one communications. It is sort of an inverse blog. We all know that a blog works by one person, or group, posting on it, then many people can read it. Their system allows many people to post questions, then other people can vote those questions up or down so that the most popular questions make it to the top of list. Whose list you might wonder? They originally developed it for communications with politicians, but it has many applications. A company, a famous actor, or a musician could all use this system to communicate with the masses. One nice feature is that anyone who voted on a question that gets answered automatically receives the answer.

In case that’s hard to follow, here’s an example:
Let’s say that Senator John Doe is using their platform. I want to ask John a question about his position on stem cell research. I go to his straight2who site and look over the questions that other people asked. If no one has asked my question, I submit a new question. But, if my question already exists, I vote for that question. If enough people vote for the question, it moves up the list. If the question makes it into the top 3 or so questions, John Doe will answer it. His answers will appear on the site as well as get emailed around to those people who voted on the question.

Alex and I had time for a little Q&A:
IPDI: How did you come up with this idea?
Alexander: As students we had another idea, but couldn’t receive a government grant. We wrote to and emailed the Chancellor, but because the Chancellor receives so much communication, all we received were automatic responses. She later started to talk directly to the citizens using videopodcasts on her website. One of the episodes was about announcing grants for innovative technologies. Sitting in front of the laptop Caveh wanted to jump into the monitor to tell her we are there, but there was no way to do that. And because we already knew that sending email resulted in automatic answers we just decided to set up the back channel to her. The result of hard time, working and sleeping in the office: a brand new way for everyone to communicate faster with politicians.

IPDI: How willing have politicians been to cooperate?
Alexander: The site has just started so it’s difficult to say at this point.

They did show us a few sites that have been setup for German politicians, and they informed us that the Chancellor answers the top three questions on her site every week. She usually responds within three or four days which is apparently unheard of in Germany. They said that it normally takes a few weeks to receive responses.

IPDI: If you could interview one candidate for the site, any candidate, who would it be and why?
Alexander: I have to stay neutral.
Laughter
IPDI: There is no one candidate that you really want?
Caveh: The candidate who is the best for the United States and the world.

IPDI: Technologically, what was the hardest obstacle to overcome?
Alexander: We used Ruby on Rails, but not everyone knew the language. Having everyone learn and understand Ruby on Rails was one of the most difficult parts.

IPDI: What new technology on the horizon are you excited about?
Alexander: The spread of video and video applications on the Internet. It started with plain text, then color text, then sound, and now video technology is getting popular. Many people said there wouldn’t be enough bandwidth, but its spreading quickly.

The site was nice to see in action. It has some other nice features such as the ability to make a video questions (CNN/YouTube anyone?) or to embed video that is hosted somewhere else. People are allowed to comment on the questions so that discussion can be person-to-person as well as person-to-politician. Of course they have a group on Facebook, and they said their software would integrate with the Facebook platform. I hope their platform gains popularity here as well so we can see easier interaction between politicians and the masses.

I’ve been playing around with the National Journal’s Political Stock Exchange all day and I’m completely hooked. It’s a fairly intricate predictions tool, with all the numbers pulled from Intrade, the leader in online futures markets. I’ve been buying up Mitt Romney as the Republican Nominee in the low 20s all morning, and Wes Clark’s weekend endorsement of Hillary Clinton has got me bullish on Wes Clark as Democratic VP Nominee at 20 National Journal dollars (NJ$) per share.

(If this doesn’t make sense, here’s how it works: All contracts pose a question, say, “Will Fred Thompson be the GOP nominee?”  If the outcome is true, then you get the full value of the contract, which is 100. If it’s false, you get zero. Until the contract matures- in our example, when the GOP nominee is decided- the price fluctuates based on market activity. So if you buy Thompson as the GOP nominee at 40NJ$, and he wins the nomination, you make 60NJ$. If he fails to win the nomination, you lose 40).

Predictions markets are a very popular method of perception peer production. Justin Wolfers has a brief explanation here. He suggests they’re a useful tool. Others aren’t so sure. You may also remember the furor created by DARPA in 2003 when they tried to use a futures market to predict terrorist attacks. That program was axed, but online futures markets have become popular for those who want to make predictions on a whole range of pop culture questions.

And because I know you’re wondering, in National Journal’s exchange, Hillary Clinton is leading the Democratic field at 69.2NJ$. In other words, the market puts Senator Clinton’s chances of winning the nomination at 69.2%.  Fred Thompson leads the GOP field at 40 NJ$.

Last week, Bill O’Reilly did a huge favor for the netroots, Ron Paul supporers, and Hillary Clinton. The back-story in one long sentence: Bill O’Reilly slams a corporate sponsor of YearlyKos because of the insane comments that some stray souls sometimes leave on the site, and Hillary Clinton (who is a featured speaker this year) defends the conference and launches a counter-attack on O’Reilly, making the valid point that a few stray comments do not makeYearlyKos a fringe event.

Patrick Ruffini notes a victory for user-generated content. The press isn’t even covering the story, as there seems to be a growing understanding that an inflammatory comment on a blog doesn’t make a candidate fringe. The Sunday Times Magazine profile of Ron Paul illustrates this well:

The head of (a) Pasadena Meetup group, Bill Dumas, sent a desperate letter to Paul headquarters asking for guidance:

“We’re in a difficult position of working on a campaign that draws supporters from laterally opposing points of view, and we have the added bonus of attracting every wacko fringe group in the country. And in a Ron Paul Meetup many people will consider each other ‘wackos’ for their beliefs whether that is simply because they’re liberal, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, evangelical Christian, etc. . . . We absolutely must focus on Ron’s message only and put aside all other agendas, which anyone can save for the next ‘Star Trek’ convention or whatever.”

Paul’s campaign probably has a higher concentration of politically non-mainstream supporters than any other, some of whom leave comments about the ‘9/11 inside job’ or the New World Order. I know that the majority of Paul supporters are totally mainstream, but if you mix those vocal folks on the fringe with Paul’s distributed online campaign model- Duncan Riley & Todd Zeigler have more on this- than you’d think you’d have a PR nightmare. But the Times piece is one of only a very few that even brings up Paul’s eclectic range of supporters, and there hasn’t been much of anything trying to smear him with what’s been said by his non-traditional proponents on blogs or in forums.

Back to Ruffini, he points out that many of the recent web faux-pas were wounds self-inflicted by the campaigns. My favorite, the McCain MySpace fiasco, illustrates the point. McCain’s campaign made the mistake, nobody else. Ruffini concludes:

When it comes to user-generated content on campaign sites, the best defense is a good offense. If you make a robust embrace of the social Web, the press and outside observers will eventually come to discount the bad stuff as a byproduct of the sheer volume of content you’ve made available. If you embrace it only tentatively or not at all, the scrutiny will be incredible — if not unbearable — the minute you open up just a bit, and your mistakes will be magnified tenfold. Why? Because you’re more likely to get your arm chewed off by a Rottweiler that you’ve starved as opposed to one you’ve overfed.

If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a campaign advertisement on television – or on YouTube, for that matter – then CampaignAds.org has a challenge for you!

Starting yesterday (July 18) through August 15^th, CampaignAds.org is running a contest for Best User-Generated Candidate Ad. The winning ad receives airplay on broadcast television.

The ground rules are:

Must be 30 seconds.

No copyrighted material or inappropriate content.

Make sure you have a high-resolution version of your ad. 720×486 quicktime is recommended.

For more information, visit http://www.youtube.com/group/campaignads1.

We’re hoping to catch a few gems in the coming weeks.

What happens when you target a specific constituency, add a good old fashioned campaign song, and thow it up on the web? Why, you get Amigos de Obama!  Via PerezHilton, Amigos de Obama appears to be a third party effort to reach Latino voters on behalf of the Illinois Senator. The home page features the “Obama Reggaeton,” an impossibly catchy tune avaible as an MP3 or ring tone. You can find the lyrics here.

Earlier this week, we attended The Exploding World of Web Video at New Politics Institute. Check out their video project – an archive of the many different types of political web videos.

We were particularly interested in what Karina Newton, Director of New Media for the Office of Speaker Pelosi, said about the way video has become an important supplement to her web presence:

Everything we have in writing [on our website] we also try to have in video.

Karina has been using video for over a year to reach audiences that are not going to Speaker Pelosi’s website. Sometimes, even the driest archival-seeming footage contains gems, from blunders and bickering to inflammatory statements.

Karina points out that web video has become a way increase transparency and accountability in the House, and YouTube, the site Karina uses to post videos, has become a forum for both.

And video has become particularly good for rapid response – just as it has begun to be used in the world of political campaigns.

This week also saw the advent of a new political video site, CampaignAds.org, created by Republican new media strategist Laura Crawford.

Laura originally envisioned the site as a library of professionally-produced political videos into a vehicle for individuals interested in politics to post their own political content – for political candidates and issue advocacy groups.

CampaignAds.org also measures the top videos, which are tabulated through votes, and Laura wants to air the video with the most votes on television.

I asked Laura about her predictions for web video in 2008 – on and off her site. She said

All videos will have an impact.  User-generated content will make news if it’s effective enough.  What I’ve found most interesting when I’ve spoken at various places about advertising and the Internet, is that during Q&A, I’m always asked “Why do you have to do so many negative ads?  Why can’t we just have positive advertising for a change?”  Ironically, it’s the public who are producing negative advertising – ads that wouldn’t be approved even by the campaigns themselves.  And they’re having fun making them.

One prediction I have is that there will be so much negative user-generated content that ads produced by the candidates will trend positive.

Trend positive? We’ve noticed something similar. However, we can’t seem to shake something Chuck Todd mentioned a few weeks ago: the presidential candidates, he told us, appear to be using YouTube more for opposition research (trackers!) and negative ads than positive ads.

One thing seems certain: armchair political quarterbacks like us tend to see web video and web video sites like YouTube (and CampaignAds.org) as an important part of the 2008 campaign. We have to admit that we, too, are infatuated with web video – perhaps a little too infatuated. We’ve even dabbled in the medium ourselves.

I turned to YouTube’s Steve Grove to explain why web video garners so many warm fuzzies from people like us.

The great thing about video in politics is that it’s a medium anyone can use. Video cameras, broadband access, and YouTube make is possible for both campaigns and voters to have a political dialogue across the same level platform. I think people feel empowered by the fact that they can capture and post political moments on video and contribute to the discussion in this way.

I think the 2006 election had several moments in which it became obvious that YouTube was changing politics in America. Moving forward both candidates and users will engage on YouTube in a way that I think will make the political dialogue much more authentic. Because online video on YouTube is an interactive experience, there’s something about video that strips away the pretense and really gets to the heart of who a person is. And that’s very important in politics as voters and candidates try to make informed political decisions based off the issues, identity, and experience of those running for office.

and the Republicans…

Rudy Giuliani

Positive Videos – 13

Views – 309.057

Text Responses – 1486

Video Responses - 1

Number of Times “Favorited” – 1368

Negative Videos – 11

Views – 438,811

Text Responses – 1,774

Video Responses - 3

Number of Times “Favorited” – 558

John McCain

Positive Videos – 10

Views – 2,579,341

Text Responses – 262

Video Responses - 1

Number of Times “Favorited” – 274

Negative Videos – 10

Views – 2,402,766

Text Responses – 832

Video Responses – 6

Number of Times “Favorited” – 612

Mitt Romney

Positive Videos – 12

Views – 579,276

Text Responses – 2,725

Video Responses – 71

Number of Times “Favorited” – 381

Negative Videos – 18

Views – 633,271

Text Responses – 6,668

Video Responses – 12

Number of Times “Favorited” – 1,145

We just posted some of the top notes of our quick-and-dirty look at the top 40 YouTube videos for some of the presidential candidates.

We want to know what you think. Some of our numbers are below.

Hillary Clinton

Positive Videos – 13

Views – 1,237,687

Text Responses – 4,650

Video Responses – 0

Number of Times “Favorited” – 633

Negative Videos – 17

Views – 6,084,326

Text Responses – 16,603

Video Responses – 11

Number of Times “Favorited” – 7,634

John Edwards

Positive Videos – 9

Views – 321,350

Text Responses – 884

Video Responses – 10

Number of Times “Favorited” – 355

Negative Videos – 5

Views – 475,350

Text Responses – 1,822

Video Responses – 4

Number of Times “Favorited” – 676

Barack Obama

Positive Videos – 12

Views – 1,277,361

Text Responses – 6,627

Video Responses – 17

Number of Times “Favorited” – 6,603

Negative Videos – 2

Views – 571,745

Text Responses – 1,348

Video Responses – 0

Number of Times “Favorited” - 265