By Adrian Lacey, UK Managing Director, Tremor Media.
Pity the political parties here in the UK. Unlike brands, they’re banned from taking out paid-for broadcast ads, either on radio or TV, and instead have to rely on the restrictive, over-long and un-engaging format of the party political broadcast.
And when those dread words are spoken by the continuity announcer: “Now follows an election broadcast...”, how many of us jump for joy at the thought of the four minutes of action-packed television that awaits us?
Few enough. Unfortunately for the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems – not to mention the plethora of smaller parties and independents – until the ban is lifted, the only way to “walk and talk” on screen is through yawn-inducing party political broadcasts.
Unless the parties use online, that is.
We now enable political parties to use online video to engage the electorate with TV-style ads, in the same way that the Obama campaign did with so much success in 2008. Yet in America, there are famously no barriers to running paid-for political broadcast ads, so why did they bother ploughing money into online video?
It’s because Team Obama – and, for that matter, Team McCain – understood that online video ads aren’t a substitute for TV: they are measurably better. Online video ads enable parties to target voters through pre- or post-roll online advertising, where a short video ad is played before, during or after desirable video content.
Studies show that pre-roll is the most accepted and engaging form of advertising, making it the perfect way to target the 87 per cent of UK Internet users who watch online video.
Of course, a strategic marketing campaign needs to encompass all media: from print to ambient; from outdoors to broadcast. None of these media, however, can boast the interactivity and engagement that online video advertising brings, not to mention its ability to integrate seamlessly with other facets of a campaign.
Online ad formats, like our vChoice, enable parties to place short pre-roll ads, typically only 15 seconds long, before premium content.
At the end of these ads, the viewer is invited to click through to other content, such as a longer ad; a video blog from the party leader; the party’s YouTube channel; social media like Twitter or Facebook; or to a special campaign microsite. Keeping the initial ad short, and giving viewers a choice to click through is shown to boost engagement by 200 per cent, and is vital given viewers’ much shorter attention span online.
All of this is very clever, of course, but there’s no point in having a great creative linked to interactive options if you’re not actually reaching the electorate. And again, that’s where online video comes up trumps.
By next year, people in the UK will spend more time on the Internet than they do watching TV. As people increasingly watch TV programming and other desirable content on the Web, it makes online video an even more important medium for political parties.
Demographically, the average online video viewer is very attractive to parties – as it is to many consumer brands. Veterans of the miners’ strike and blue-rinsed Tories aren’t too likely to be changing their allegiances; it’s the younger, first-time voters that political parties need so desperately to engage. A good place to start looking for them is on websites offering online video content.
It’s not just about talking at the voters, and expecting them automatically to engage with what politicians are saying online, or elsewhere. Trust in MPs is at a record low, and part of the animosity felt toward the political class is the disconnect that many feel between themselves and their representatives.
Given the constraints of traditional media for reaching the electorate, it’s no surprise that so few people are engaged with politics, with less than one per cent of the population being members of a political party.
New means of communication can enable political parties to have a true dialogue with their supporters and the wider electorate, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or a dedicated “issue” website. To make this work, parties must employ online video ads at the heart of every digital campaign – seizing viewers’ attention, and driving them to their sites.
Obama and McCain showed how it can be done; and done well. With a general election just around the corner, it seems that 2010 will be the year when UK political parties finally crack online video ads.
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