If the 2004 election marked the birth of blogging power, 2008 has seen the dawn of viral video as a major component of the election. A number of Get Out the Vote organizations are aggressively using the medium to reach the youth demographic with edgy clips featuring reverse psychology, apocalyptic futures, sardonic BBQ talk, and starlets with muzzles -- as you can see for yourself below, we're not making this up!
While working hard to get young people to vote isn’t a new effort, being able to see which campaigns have attracted the most attention is new. None of us will know the full impact of these outreach efforts until after election day, but we think it's interesting to investigate the viral video viewing trends associated with each of these public service announcements.
First up is Don’t Vote, a celebrity mash-up that starts with some unexpected sarcasm. At the clip's outset, many recognizable stars beg, plead, and berate us to not vote... though after almost 90 seconds, things change and those same stars work to make the case for everyone to vote after all. Heads ups: this particular video contains some NSFW language, so you might want to don your headphones before pressing play.
The second campaign, called Citizen’s Cry, is a slickly produced dystopian look at the future through the eyes of an elderly woman who ages in reverse, ultimately transforming into an young voter today. The woman laments the fact that she and others neglected to vote inthe 2008 election, resulting in a very bleak future. It’s sort of like The Terminator, but without the rise of machines... or perhaps Memento, minus the memory loss.
Next up is The Muzzler, starring Hollywood babes-of-the-moment Jessica Alba and Hayden Panettiere enthusiastically throwing down some Hannibal Lector analogies. This one is an, er, unusual combination of over-the-top Home Shopping Network earnestness and mocking irony.
Our fourth and final campaign is a set of Get Out the Video videos sponsored by the Gap. The campaign is predicated on voting for something, anything, they really don’t care... just as long as you vote. For example, Bill Maher cuttingly tells us to vote for barbeque while Kristen Bell says to vote for pigs and cows.
Seems like the consensus among these clips is that apathetic young voters can best be reached via irony. Interesing. Well, how did these ideas play with the viral video voting public?
“Don’t Vote” grabbed the top spot, bringing in 4 million views across 70 different clips.“Citizen’s Cry” has reached 2.5 million views from just a few clips, while “The Muzzler,”despite its stars' well-publicized hotness, cooled off to around 400,000 views from over a dozen clips. And theGap videos, which somehow manages to be simulataneously definitive andabsurdist, have collectively attracted just over 50,000 viral video views across 15 or so clips.
Overall, it looks like the star-power of "Don't Vote" has attracted the most audience interest, not only racking up over 6,500 comments but also inspiring a number of community-driven spoofs and video responses. Talk about the importance of activating your base!
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.