Decentralized Campaigns?

Fundraising and ad buy numbers have become the metrics by which many judge campaigns.  There's no disputing that a big bank account and widely seen commercials are valuable to a campaign, but perhaps we have gotten too fixated on metrics which are merely a proxy for measuring progress on actual campaign goals.  

Did Obama get so many votes because he got so much money, or did he get so much money because he was energizing voters?  Did Obama's contributors donate because they felt empowered, or did they donate in order to feel empowered?  Did Obama get more votes because the Obama campaign ran commercials, or because pro-Obama commercials ran (these are two different things)?

I bring that up for two reasons.

1. Internet Influence: Pew Research finds that the internet "has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news."  Increasingly, the line between "the media" and "the internet" will blur, both because new information channels will emerge online, and because traditional media will become internet media as they realize their distribution channels (newspaper, television, radio) are not the same thing as their business.

 

 

 

2. Long Tail Empowerment: During the 2008 campaign, Open Left's Chris Bowers experimented with what he called a "Personal Paid Media campaign".  In essence, Bowers became his own media consultant, conducting his own advertising campaign.  By using search ads, he was able to promote his own message to the target audience he wanted to reach. 

Traditionally and for various good reasons, campaigns have been very centralized, command-and-control organizations.  As campaigns learned how to exploit the communication economies of scale offered by mass media, this centralization and message control made a lot of sense.  However, this advertising arms race has led to undifferentiated playbooks and commercial saturation, so we've probably reached the end of those efficiency gains.

As the internet becomes more and more influential, we're going to have to break this path dependency on broadcast distribution.  After all, TV and Radio are not the same thing as "advertising".  Can this personal paid media model could be done on radio, television and newspaper advertising?   Google is trying to do it.   Voter Voter does it, as well.   But it hasn't really taken hold yet, perhaps because the dominant broadcast media are centralized distribution channels.

The internet is not a disruptive force for campaigns because it is a new distribution channel, but because it is a decentralized distribution channel. 

You don't need a multi-milion dollar campaign to be able to make and distribute an effective ad to a target audience.  You can do it yourself.  You don't even need the permission of the campaign or a central seller to do it.  You can run your own campaign, becoming a part of what Pete Snyder called an "army of spokespeople". 

It's been said that the 20th century was about improving supply, and the 21st century will be about improving demand.  I think this is a key insight into how internet politics will evolve.  It's less about making campaigns more efficient and more about making the public more efficient, with better tools, better information, and better channels for information activism.

The internet will certainly impact the supply side of campaigns (how they raise and spend money), but the greatest impact may be on the demand side of campaigns (how the public consumes and acts on information).   This would be a force multiplier for campaigns.

Those are tactical improvements, though; decentralized campaigning also offers a strategic benefit to the Right.   Currently, the Right does not have an effective outside whip mechanism to deliver consequences for bad behavior.  As a result, we have unresponsive politicians and a Republican Party that is not well aligned with the interests of the grassroots.

Decentralized campaigning would provide a whip mechanism against this unresponsive Republican political structure.   The Right has been sinking millions of dollars into Battleships (e.g., Freedom's Watch), when we ought to be building pirate ships and guerilla fighters to conduct information activism at the grassroots level.