The Long Tail of Online Political Video

I'm glad that TechPresident blogger David All posted the "I've Got a Crush...on Obama" video this morning, because it opens up a discussion that Josh Levy and I started having yesterday when we got the same email tip about the video that I presume David got. First off, do watch the video--it's hilarious, the lyrics are priceless ("You're into border security...let's break this border between you and me...Universal health care reform...it makes me warm"), and BarelyPolitical, the comedy team that wrote the music and filmed the video, should probably get hired by Saturday Night Live. (They're up to nearly 30,000 views on YouTube, by the way, as of this morning.)

But is this a political video mashup or a job application? And in this day and age, should we care if it's both at the same time?

When we coined the term "voter-generated content" (credit goes to our publisher Andrew Rasiej for coming up with it), we thought that the most interesting new force in 2008 would be the rise of bottom-up political messages and initiatives that anyone could start and, if they were compelling, the network-called-the-internet would spread it far and wide.

That's obviously going on, and we're just beginning to get a sense of how big and broad a phenomenon this is. In the wake of Phil de Vellis's "Vote Different/Hillary 1984" video, online video mashups about politics are popping up constantly. This is JibJab on steroids. YouTube shows 16,000 hits for videos tagged with the word Obama, for example (though when you sort by "view count" the total drops to about 5,000--not sure what they means.) But it looks like we have to start drawing some distinctions between stuff that is clearly professionally made efforts by PR firms or comedy improv groups looking to promote their own brands, and stuff that is more purely voter-generated. Four recent examples that caught our attention will help illustrate my point:

Republican presidential candidates talking about "enhanced interrogation techniques" inspired this brilliant mashup with Monty Python's "Spanish Inquisition" skit:

That video has jumped from a few hundred views yesterday to more than 16,000 today, so folks are clearly beginning to pass it around, no doubt helped by coverage from BoingBoing and NPR. The person who made it is a photographer named Christopher Ambler who appears to specialize mostly in photoshoots of scantily clad women.

Then there's this musical perfomance by "lonelydem07," which goes after Democrats for "being a bunch of p---ies" for not going after Bush and the Republicans with more teeth:

Lonelydem07 had more than 53,000 views as this morning, and she and her team of writers/musicians/actors definitely have some chops. But is this really a group of political activists who want to make a serious point (they are explicitly critical of the LonelyGirl15 marketing ploy) or a comedy troupe looking for some paying work?

Then there's this mashup of John McCain's appearance on ABC "This Week," which makes him look like he's a complete dunderhead:

That one's just under 5,000 views, and it's hard to say whether it was made by a random voter or someone affiliated with one of McCain's competitors. The person who uploaded it uses the moniker "fechristie11" and this is his/her first video, it appears. I learned about it from a post by Matt Margolis (the founder of Bloggers for Bush) on GOP Bloggers, so I doubt it's a Democratic operative's ploy.

Finally, there's the Ray Hopewood campaign, which is a hilarious parody of a presidential campaign website and video, that even has its own Flickr page and merchandising on CafePress. Fans of TechPresident will especially enjoy "candidate" Ray Hopewood's paean to technology as the centerpiece of his campaign (Direct quote: "Help Ray install his Message of Technology on every voter in America"). It's all pretty amusing, until you realize that it's actually a PR firm's "viral messaging" campaign for an enterprise software company called BigFix. Feh! (Hat tip to Steve Garfield for alerting us to this one.)

I have all kinds of conflicting thoughts about these videos. I don't like being played by PR firms, for starters, for the same reason that I hate product placement in movies and abhor the "pay-per-post" idea. (Read Jason Calacanis's attack on the latter if you don't know what I'm referring to.) At the same time, I think it's great that all kinds of comedy writers and singers and improvisational troupes are trying their hand at making viral online video, since I'd rather watch and share a funny, well-done piece of political satire than something completely amateurish. Clearly, we can't have a flowering of online expression that doesn't include all three types of content: stealth corporate marketing, talented outsiders, and rank amateurs.

I've been somewhat wary of posting about these new mashups, partly because I realize that TechPresident is getting emailed about them precisely by people who are hoping that we'll fan their flames a bit. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as Applied to Politics comes into play here, which is that we can't comment about this phenomenon without affecting it at the same time. Not much I think we can do about that, except take care not to get played by stealth marketers. I'd like to see ideas spread on their merits as much as possible, not because someone wrote a six-figure check to some advertising honcho.

It's important to recognize that what we see developing is the "Long Tail" of online video. Most of the stuff being posted online is only going to be seen and shared among a small group of people, the same way a typical blog post is probably only read by the blogger's actual friends and acquaintances, along with maybe a few people who stumble on it thanks to search engines and tagging and the like. This stuff isn't insignificant, however. Even if a political video I make and share with ten friends who share it with ten others only manages to get, say, 1,000 views overall--don't forget that we are most influenced by personal word-of-mouth. Campaigns that fail to think about how to feed this beast with useful video clips ignore this end of the long tail at their peril.

But what makes a random video into something seen by tens of thousands or millions? There are lot of people--some acting purely as mercenaries and others as talented opportunists hoping to launch a career and some who just want to make a statement--who are posting some pretty sophisticated stuff. Call them the "magic middle" of online video's long tail. (Um, my smarter little brother already came up with that for mid-linked blogs.) There's going to be a lot of churn here, as the network-called-the-internet sifts and shares and larger blogs that act as switching stations point more attention to the stuff that is really compelling or unavoidable.

One thing that does appear to be different than the dynamic of attention-accretion in the blogosphere, however, is the role of the big video-hosting sites in driving attention at some of these videos. I have no idea what YouTube's process is for deciding to highlight a video on its front page--do you? Same with MySpace's Impact Channel. Will deals with paying advertisers affect what gets highlighted? This is yet another example of why new media giants like Google/YouTube, MySpace and Facebook all ought to hire independent ombudsmen and start blogging more transparently about their decision-making processes and algorithms, and why MoveOn is right to be raising this issue.. I'd like to trust them to be fair to all sides but like every business run by humans I'm sure favoritism and market pressures will play a role too.

What do you think?