Short spoof of the party sweeps the internet
By Heidi Dawley Jul 1, 2008
Years ago, the big problem in American politics was that candidates, their parties and the political bosses tightly controlled the electoral process, down to tightly scripted dialogues with voters. The public knew what the candidates wanted them to know, and little beyond.
How things have changed.
Increasingly the internet determines the dialogue, leaving the candidates to respond. Often its vicious, wilful slander, and candidates have little choice but to react, as has Barack Obama has to a slur campaign alleging he's a Muslim by setting up FightTheSmears.com.
“Whispering campaigns have always been around, but it is far easier now,” says Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, the internet tracking company.
But often it's some clever spoof that seems to come from nowhere to race around the internet for days and weeks. The latest of these is a three-and-a-half minute spoof video called “I’m Voting Republican.”
Posted three weeks ago, the video has now amassed some 2.8 million views on YouTube. “That’s definitely a significant amount,” says Dougherty.
The marketshare of visits to imvotingrepublican.com has passed that of John McCain’s official site. For the week ended June 21, that share was 1.3 times larger by Hitwise's calculations.
The video is a satirical look at the Republican Party, filmed as a series of man-on-the-street interviews.
“I’m voting Republican,” says one man in the video, “because all other countries are inferior to us.”
"The idea was to create a viral video using humor in order to encourage people between 18 - 24 to, first, register to vote and, second, vote Democrat,” says Charlie Steak, who wrote and directed the clip, which was produced by SyntheticHuman Pictures, a film production company.
He believes that it wouldn’t have been possible to get his message out as quickly and easily before the days of the internet. “The internet definitely levels the playing field,” Steak says.
In the primaries there were a number of such videos, including the one featuring Hilary Clinton in a sendup of the famous Orwellian 1984 ad for Apple and the music video-style “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama.”
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Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended June 22, according to Nielsen Online, Google was the top parent company, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online. For the fourth straight week, the top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, AOL Media Network and Microsoft.
Experian Group Limited held the top advertiser spot for the third straight week with 3.5 million impressions, with Vonage No. 2 at 3.0 million. Yahoo was once again the top advertising site with 18.0 million ads served, with MySpace a distant No. 2 at 4.9 million.
Sessions per person per week were even to the previous week at 16, as were domains visited per person at 40. PC time per person was basically flat compared with the previous week at 17 hours and 45 minutes.
