Web Videos Take Risks and TV Ads Are For Congressmen

Patrick is right, web ads have frequently been a lot more memorable than presidential TV ads this cycle and there are a couple of good reasons for it.  The campaigns have been much more willing to take risks in web videos and fundamentally, television ads as a tactic are better suited to races further down the ballot.

TV ads also have to accomplish different tasks than a web ad.  A web ad’s two key goals are to draw eyeballs (“go viral”) and influence the press, while TV ads are primarily about defining a candidate in the absence of other information.  A voter who has met a candidate in person, heard about them from a trusted friend or read about them frequently in the news isn’t going to be nearly as influenced by a TV spot unless it includes radically new information.

This cycle we’ve seen great web videos and atrocious ones – but the successful ones have all been irreverent, “too long,” hokey or generally different from traditional spots.  In other words, they take risks.  It’s relatively easy to justify a risky web video because if no one watches you’re only out the cost of production.  Screw up a TV ad though and you’ve flushed the entire cost of the ad buy.  Even worse, if the ad really flops you’ve just paid money to drive your own numbers down.  

The Huckabee and Richardson spots Patrick points to as examples of successful web video-like TV ads both came from long shot candidates.  Neither campaign had much money or a realistic hope of winning so strategically taking a big risk made perfect sense.  (Incidentally, Richardson’s ads weren’t that original, they look suspiciously similar to this very sucessful ’06 spot.)

Presidential races are also fundamentally different from all other races.  They're the subject of a massive, overwhelming, stage-stealing deluge of information.  In a Congressional race, it takes hundreds of impressions to build up anything more than a vague impression of the candidates. In a Presidential race, Paris Hilton cuts a fake ad spoofing the latest TV spot.

The presidential ads this cycle aren’t bad as congressional ads – Obama’s especially are quite strong – but they all use traditional TV spot “fill the information gap” tactics.  That doesn’t mean their spots can’t be somewhat effective at pushing messages the press won’t cover (e.g. Tony Rezko, I’m going to keep beating on that until someone puts an ad buy behind it), but it does mean that there’s a much higher bar than a typical congressional race.  

In the heavily saturated presidential general election environment, TV ads begin to fill the role of “super web ads” and the campaigns would be smart to start taking more risks with them (heavily focus grouped of course).  Lately, the McCain campaign has been showing signs lately of doing exactly that.  Here’s hoping they stick with it.