I’m very happy to debut a new element to the YKC Screening Series. In the next several weeks we will be looking at the increasing influence of the internet by examining the inner workings of political shorts. Our guide through this world will be the creators themselves. We are starting with a video you may know as it was created by Balcony Films for the 2004 Presidential Campaign. But I don’t want to waste time talking about it, I will leave that up to the creator, Julie Bergman-Sender. Julie is on the Advisory Board for the YKC Screening Series. Check out her bio and the video discussed in the diary on the Screening Series page and visit her website www.balconyfilms.com. Here is the first installment of our series with a diary written by Julie. Enjoy!
Julie's Diary:
The camera can bare witness, capture truth, and tell a story in ways that a written version of the story just can’t. Today it’s not just the written word of a journalist or a blogger that can get these everyday stories out, but powerful visual documentation. Video on the internet is a new and increasingly powerful tool, still young and evolving.
While a great deal has been written about the explosion of viral video on the web, very little has been written about how to create great content that gets virally distributed. The tools for creating the content are potentially available to all progressives, and include iMovie packaged standard on all Macs, software for creating your own flash animation, downloadable effects packages, etc. Yet knowing how to harness these tools still calls for an understanding of storytelling and how to create narrative in a visual medium. Fluency in the technology does not always translate into mastery of the medium.
Even less has been written about how progressive organizations and campaigns can create and use video content to expand the reach of their political messages. There are screens everywhere – in our homes, in our hands, even at the car wash. And figuring out how to capture the audience on all of these should be a big part of future political communications strategies. No matter what size the screen, no matter how vast the outreach capabilities through the internet, the content is still the engine that drives viral hits. And just because everyone has access to the tools doesn’t mean that there isn’t some technique, and often professional execution behind the stuff that really works.
Good viral video begins with a good story. There are many points of entry when trying to gain people’s attention so that you have the opportunity to engage them, keep an ongoing relationship, and move them to action. You need to find a compelling way to hook them and “brand” the effort – much the same way that large corporations think about how to engage consumers and create a lasting relationship with them.
Trying to get something to “go viral” rests on one’s ability to be both authentic to the mission while being inventive enough to capture people’s imaginations in such a way that they feel compelled to share the video with others – immediately – and that they are also suitably impressed with the humor or the pathos of the piece that they want to dig deeper and learn about the organization or campaign that has created it.
This is why viral content is a visceral experience, not an intellectual one. People often mistake viral video for a purely informational tool, when it is more accurate to describe it as a more complex cultural tool, with informational aspects. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for important ideas to be part of the story; it means that you are tactical about wanting this to capture people and be the introduction to a longer and more meaningful dialogue and not the whole conversation
Before there was YouTube, MySpace, and whatever the next bottom-up video phenomenon will be, we saw a first generation of online politics pave the way for the current one. It may seem like ancient history, but the 2004 presidential election was a launching pad for internet video and social networking. Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time working in this new media space, producing films, commercials and political ads for the web, and distributing them online and figuring out how to engage the larger popular culture. The bulk of my work has been in finding ways to take progressive ideas and strive to engage constituencies or “the audience” in all the places and through all the mediums where they can be found. Despite the problems with America’s current “infotainment” model, we must work to find effective ways to communicate our values and ideas to a broader audience using the existing and evolving media landscape, the good and the bad.
Some have said that one of the first “viral” video pieces that expresses the model I have talked about above was the moc-commercial starring Will Ferrell that I made with the writer Director Adam McKay and Will during the 2004 election. I don’t know about that.But what may be true is that it was among the first to take advantage of the expanding distribution tools online and cross-over into mainstream media without losing it’s soul. Below is a brief outline about how the piece was created and what it was intended to accomplish.
“WHITE HOUSE WEST”
Starring Will Ferrell as George W. Bush
By America Coming Together
Video Available Here and via YouTube below.America Coming Together was a massive voter mobilization project launched in 2003 as a 527 partisan organization to mobilize voters in the 17 battleground states. Steve Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO political director and expert organizer was charged with delivering Democratic voters to the polls and he had a plan to put thousands of paid staff on the ground to knock on doors and collect data. Though Rosenthal was not connected to the media arm of ACT, which was controlled by longtime Clinton operative Harold Ickes, Rosenthal and his longtime colleague Will Robinson, of McWilliams/Robinson, understood the potential value in creating a piece of viral media that could begin to brand ACT outside traditional political advertising and perhaps even reach a different circle of activists who were living online. The hope was to drive new activists to the ACT website so they could learn about ACT’s work and become a part of ACT’s volunteer efforts on the ground. This strategy had not really been tried before.
I was asked to conceive and produce this piece of viral content for ACT. Because this was brand new territory, and because this was intended to be the beginning of a conversation, using humor seemed to be the best approach. I went to former Saturday Night Live head writer Adam Mckay who, together with Will Ferrell, had written Will’s President Bush material on SNL. Will’s imitation of the President was very familiar to people and because ACT’s objective was to turn out huge numbers of Democratic voters across the battleground states, Will seemed like a perfect fit. In addition, using a star like Ferrell was a smart way to encourage earned media attention.
The result was a 4 minute short film featuring Ferrell doing his well-known imitation of President Bush in a mock commercial slamming special interest groups like ACT for trying to get people out to vote against him. We made sure that there were references to Bush policies that ACT wanted voters to be reminded of – his failures on the environment, on the war and the economy – all of which were of importance to them based on polling and focus groups. We did not conduct focus groups with the film itself, and yet we used the prior research to infuse the comedy of the piece with some value beyond the humor. We shot the short in one day at a ranch in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley meant to suggest Bush’s ranch in Texas.
Remember that the joke at the time was that Bush was perpetually on vacation – another important point to reinforce.
When “White House West” was released virally on the Internet, it generated millions of hits and a lot of earned media coverage. The Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section put a picture of Will Ferrell on the cover with the headline “The Democrats Have Gotten Their Funny Bone Back.” It made Good Morning America’s water-cooler segment and did the cable news circuit in addition to the entertainment news. This kind of national exposure is very expensive if you have to buy it. One appearance on “Good Morning America” delivers over 6 million impressions and would cost over $300,000 to buy. But if you can come up with a story, and—in this case—harness the perfect messenger to marry with your message, then you can often prompt earned media attention and get results. ACT conservatively received millions of dollars worth of free media coverage based on the earned media that “White House West” was able to attract. On top of that, ACT gained approximately 33,000 people wanting to volunteer across the battleground states as a consequence of seeing the viral short and learning about ACT by going to their website.
For under $200,000, ACT got a very good return on their investment from this one piece of media. And it is important to remember that the release of “White House West” was in the prehistoric times before YouTube, Google Video, mobile media and video podcasts. A recent check of websites that archive video, such as Ifilm, YouTube, and other smaller political humor websites, indicate that this Will Ferrell video still receives regular hits in the hundreds of thousands.
