Candidates running with new media
A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes … the phone rings. Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.
“Ghostbusters,” says actress Annie Potts.
That’s one of the many alternate endings to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), “Sesame Street’s” Martian Yip Yip puppets and Alfred, Batman’s butler.
You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mash-ups online, too. Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red-phone ad (“In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters”). And last week, Sen. John McCain gave the genre a go, same ringing phone, but “this time, it’s an economic crisis.” Instead of explaining what your sleeping children have to do with the economy, the McCain ad semi-dementedly concludes: “It’s 3 a.m.: Time for a president who’s ready.”
It’s the hottest presidential election in recent memory, and the first of the YouTube era, so no wonder political video is whizzing around faster than you can tape your cat mouthing “superdelegate.”
Although videos like actor Jack Nicholson’s popular pro-Hillary video, “Jack and Hill,” made with help from filmmaker and Clinton supporter Rob Reiner, can score big on YouTube, you don’t need to be a celeb or a “Saturday Night Live” writer to get noticed.
Ben Relles put himself on the map when he and two partners brought the world “Obama Girl,” the candidate’s sultry, singing follower who rings in millions of page views every time she bobs onto the computer screen. (Her first video, “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama,” was nominated Tuesday for a Webby Award.) Relles’ fledgling BarelyPolitical.com was bought by the Web TV company Next New Networks last October and now has four full-time employees.
Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, said videos in that category had seen a “lurch forward” in popularity in the last year, and the last month has been no exception. A March 24 CBS News segment showing that Clinton had misremembered the details of her 1996 trip to Bosnia became YouTube’s most-viewed video that week, no small feat considering the site gets hundreds of thousands of new uploads every day. The week before that, those Fox News videos of Obama’s fiery longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, accounted for five of the top 12 political videos on the site, and the Obama speech that controversy engendered has been watched on YouTube more than 4 million times, the most ever for a video from a presidential campaign.