Transcript

Digital Conversations: Using Online Video to Grow Your Campaign

February 10, 2010

0:00:00

MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum, welcome to another of our on-going series of PDF Network conference calls with movers, shakers and innovators in the political technology arena.

As always, we are most appreciative to our sponsors at AT&T and the (inaudible) group whose ongoing support makes these calls possible.

Today I’m very excited to be welcoming KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA, who was the Director of Online Video for the Obama campaign in 2008 and is going to be joining us for the hour to talk about how you can use online video to grow your campaign.

And let me just say that I think it’s a real treat to have Kate, I really appreciate her taking the time to talk with us. She’s no longer directly working in politics and she comes to us with a background in journalism and had gone back into journalism and into the documentary journalism, though I think as you’ll hear a lot of what Kate has learned and continues to practice as a documentarian is part of the “secret sauce” in what the Obama campaign learned to do with video.

And this latest call is going to go as always fir the first half hour, we’ll ask you to just mute your phones and listen in and not interrupt, but if you have a question use the chat. We’re also using the Twitter hash tag of PDFNetwork, so feel free to Twitter away about the conversation there.

And the first half hour I will sort of walk Kate through some of the history and practice of the campaign and lessons learned and then in the second half we’ll open up to your questions.

So, Kate why don’t you take the first couple of minutes and just sort of give -- you know, we know the big picture. We know that the Obama campaign did an extraordinary amount with video online, well over 1,000 individual YouTube videos made. I think it was about 120 million individual views of those videos which once calculated was at least worth $40 or $50 million if you tried to convert that into 30 second TV ad viewership.

And some of those videos enormously viral online, Obama’s speech on race still going but it’s well over
6 million individual views of a 37-minute-long video. Not exactly the sort of thing most people think millions of people will take time to watch.

But there was a lot going on under the surface and what I’m wondering is whether you can take us through a bit of the history, how you got involved in the campaign from the beginning and also you know, what you confronted thinking about how to use video, take us back to early 2007 where up to that point, I guess the major -- if you Googled the terms “YouTube” and “Politics,” the major thing that would come up would be George Allen’s (macaca) moment. Most people thought of online videos (inaudible) to campaign as opposed to something that could help propel a candidate’s message and help with movement.

So, with that as an introduction I’d like to let you give us the story as you saw it unfold and I’ll try not to interrupt until maybe half way through the half hour.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Okay, I’d actually like to go all the way back to 2003. I was at CNN and I was doing a documentary on the Dean campaign, and there was something that was happening in that campaign that was different from all the other campaigns, and I wanted to document that.

And I thought one thing that was really important was that the campaign manager, Joe Trippi, would always say, you know, the other candidates, they look at me, aren’t I special? We say, look at you, aren’t you special? And I think that’s the narrative of that campaign about people power, about putting the focus back on the voters, about reinvigorating democracy, about a grassroots movement, and the technology allowing that message to have some real effect was what was inspiring about that campaign and interesting to me as a journalist.

In 2007, I wanted to continue to follow that story. So, one of the bloggers from the Dean campaign, Joe (inaudible) had become the Director of New Media for the Obama campaign and I approached him and I asked him if I could do a documentary about the Obama campaign, and you know, at the same time I was also feeling a little frustrated about mainstream media, the way we were covering politics. You know, peoples’ stories seemed to be boring, it was all about the horse race and the focus was on the candidates of course.

But it wasn’t about what was really happening out in the country, so I told him you know, that’s what I wanted to focus on. And he said, well, you can’t do a documentary, you can’t imbed yourself into documentary about the campaign but you can actually join our campaign and tell people stories.

So, that’s what I did. I joined the campaign and there was a lot of conventional wisdom around video at the time, especially campaign video. But again I was so influenced by Joe Trippi’s idea from the Dean campaign that we’re not selling a candidate like a product. We’re engaging people in a dialogue and that’s the motivation.

So, it was really important for me not to drag an intern out in front of our building and say, you know, say something about how people deserve equal rights. Instead, we would send out an email asking for peoples’ stories, people would tell us their stories. Just as an example, there was one guy in Mississippi who had lived on this plantation that his family had owned for centuries and had owned slaves. And I went out to visit him there and he planted his Obama sign in his yard and talked about the significance of that for him and for the generations of the families that had lived on that plantation.

So, I think even if we only used one sound bite from that interview, we had had an actual dialogue and I think that authenticity came through in our videos, that we were actually spending time with people.

So, another kind of hang up that people had at the time was that videos needed to be viral. They needed to be short and funny and you needed to get peoples’ attention. But I would say like well if we filmed Barack falling down the stairs that would instantly go viral and what does that do for us? And what does that do for the process?

So, again, we didn’t measure our success by how many hits we were getting and I think that allowed us to stay true to our mission, which was to engage people in this dialogue. And there was that (inaudible) video where it showed that there could be “gotcha” moments that could be used in the campaign, that YouTube could be a force for evil but we were determined to make it a force for good, which meant really having more in-depth conversations with people.

So, again, we didn’t measure our (inaudible) by numbers, but we measured it by the quality of the conversation that was happening in reaction to our videos. And we would read those comments and we would be inspired or we took direction from the often and it would influence our whole new media operation as well.

So, for example although most of our videos were focused on people stories, we did do a sort of behind the scenes documentary of the Obamas at the convention in Denver where we followed them around and really got sort of authentic moments with them, where they finally forgot that the cameras were around and they could just be themselves, and we called it Four Days in Denver.

And one of the comments in comments’ section was that when people ask me who the real Barack Obama is, because at that time the other side was spreading a lot of, “who is the real Barack Obama” nonsense. You know, he said, when I get one of those emails forwarded to me from a relative or a friend about Barack Obama, I say, this is the real Barack Obama.

So, we turned that comment, decided to send out an email to our 13 million person list saying, “Who is the Real Barack Obama?” and linked to that video and people got insight into that.

So, I think that people felt that, that we were listening to them and we were. And I would say that that was the main innovation of how we used video in the campaign

MICAH SIFRY: Can you take us back to the beginning? What you’re describing is a strategic approach that evolved, right as opposed you knew right away this was the way to go. I mean, how did the campaign learn to trust that this approach worked?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, I mean in the beginning there was pressure -- there’s a sort of a conventional thing to do in video, especially in political video which is to ask people to make an ad for the campaign. A way to get user-generated stuff.

And we could have done that early in the campaign but we though, you know, the whole point is that we’re not asking -- we’re not trying to sell the candidate like a product, we are trying to engage a dialogue and so if we asked people to become marketers then that would confirm the message. So, you know, even doing that actually inspired a lot of creative content, but we ruled it out because it wasn’t on our message.

So, I think that we had to make a lot of calls every step of the way, but we -- having sort of a value system in place allowed us to choose what we were going to do and what we weren’t going to do and how we were going to approach certain things.

So, yeah, we would say that the campaign was like building an airplane in mid air and it definitely felt that way. And you know, we did enough videos that some of them weren’t as successful. I mean, I guess a good example would be in the beginning, we did the YouTube spotlight video and you know, I had this din of I would be walking around with Barack Obama and he would be in the car and saying things off the cuff, and it would be all on digital -- you know, hand-held camera. But I realized that I was going up against a sort of campaign system where they’re used to just normal, sit-down interviews. So, I’m embarrassed by the production quality of that particular thing because I was prepared to shoot it (inaudible) case file and it just looks bad, so I guess that would be an early mistake.

Understanding that we needed to put videos in different categories; if we’re going to do a direct to camera video with a candidate you need to make it look good and you need to set it up with proper lighting. But if you’re doing something that is more in the moment like we did in the convention, then that’s more appropriate.

So, I would say that there were certain style of fixings that we had to work out and you know, all of our stuff does not look pretty. But again, we had a value system that was beating us along the way and I don’t think that changed much over the course of the campaign.

MICAH SIFRY: Talk a bit about how you evolved the use of video as a tool to assist field organizing because one of the things I think that people may not realize and these videos don’t get the millions or hundreds of thousands of views that you’ll see if you sort of scroll the campaign, but there were dozens and dozens of videos that had a very local flavor and focus ranging from people from North Carolina in an African American barbershop talking about their feelings about the campaign in the North Carolina primary, to videos with Michelle Obama aimed at -- I think this was Hawaii if I’m not mistake, in eight different Pacific Islander languages.

So, I mean clearly there was an integration here that was very important to the strategy of building the base so you could get as big a vote as possible.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Right, that was actually Mia, Barack’s sister who (inaudible) Islander one. That’s a natural constituency and she and her husband Conrad were amazing in reaching out to that community. So, yeah, we had lots of different clients on the campaign, you know? We would have the veteran for Obama guy coming over and asking for something specific. We had First Americans for Obama where we actually flew somebody out to the reservation in New Mexico and spent time with them interviewing them and did a whole video that went into their issues and their specific needs.

So, there was a lot of targeting going on specifically for different groups as well as for issues. We also did a series called (inaudible) for America that went issue by issue in terms of health care and foreign policy and got into the details of that.

So, there was also just purely motivational videos for people who weren’t specific so we did a video for Iowa, which even if it’s for the Iowa steak fry, that really captured the experience of the people on the ground and the volunteers who prepared for the steak fry and then participated in the parade and everything that happened around that event.

And even though it doesn’t have as many views as some of the other videos, it was probably one of the most important because it really cheered people up who were there in Iowa and motivated people on the ground, and they were able to see what they were building. So something that was targeted as specific group of people especially volunteers and super volunteers might have more of an impact for the campaign than something that had mass appeal for people all over America.

0:16:02

MICAH SIFRY: To what extent were you tracking the metrics on who was watching what videos? Like everybody knows the Obama campaign was very data oriented so I’m curious to what degree the video team was also expected to justify the impact of the particular videos or studied their spread to a particular demographic or geographic. It’s a lot of data you can get your hands on, so to what degree were you listening to what that told you?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I mean honestly, we really were more concerned with the reaction of people in the common section than what people were saying than we were with the numbers. You know, kind of part of our philosophy of not being ratings driven. So, it is interesting that another offset of the new media department, you know, we had analytics guys from Google who were crunching numbers and they -- I should say that they would test different videos in different emails to see what was more effective in an email and they found that sometimes a video wasn’t totally effective in an email for raising money, and sometimes it was actually a distraction. That somebody would start watching a video and they would forget to donate.

So, that was an interesting finding that it wasn’t always best even if everybody’s opening up the email and clicking on the video, if that’s not what we needed at that moment then they would learn from that and not do it again. But sometimes we did need people to watch our videos if there was a message that we needed to get out there or if there was you know just a moment in time where people needed to be all on the same page about where the campaign was headed and what they needed to do to make the campaign successful, then they would include the video.

So, I would say that that’s where all of our analytics focus went into, which was when to put it into an email and when not to.

MICAH SIFRY: Talk a little bit about sort of platforms. Everybody talks about YouTube. Were there other video platforms that you guys used that didn’t get as much attention but turned out to be valuable and what do you think a campaign should do? Should it put all of its eggs on the YouTube basket or spread them around?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Well in the beginning we had Barack TV, which was a bright cove player that was on our website, and we later figured out that was really stupid, that we should have been using YouTube from the beginning, that that was the way that videos got watched and spread around a lot faster and more efficiently than bringing somebody to our site and getting them to watch the video on the site.

In the end we used Barack TV as sort of a curated gallery of favorite videos so that people could have that experience and they came to the website and wanted to know more about the campaign.

But yeah, again this was 2007 to 2008, I’m sure that other services already rising up and are going to be as important as YouTube but at the time, that was the major player.

So, unlike a company we didn’t need people to come and visit our website specifically, we needed people to vote for Barack Obama. So, getting our message out was more important than having people visit our website.

So yeah, definitely putting it on as many other platforms as possible was great. We would also put things on the Black Planet and different constituency groups that had -- where people gathered. We would also reach out to those but I would say YouTube was the most important for us.

MICAH SIFRY: Do you know offhand what the metrics were? I don’t know what a typical video would be, but how what percentage of the views came from people watching it on the campaign website on Barack.Obama.com somewhere or from people watching it elsewhere where it was embedded on someone else’s site.

Any sense of -- how much was site-centric? How much was dispersed?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I don’t remember the numbers, but I know we looked at that and we decided that our site was ridiculously insignificant compared to people posting them outside and sharing them. I mean the most powerful tool we had was email, that’s the way you delivered it straight to people.

So, if we put a video in an email then we know it was going to be huge. So, that was our -- the biggest weapon in our arsenal, I would say. And video on site was one of the smaller tools.

MICAH SIFRY: Talk to me about how the campaign decided to relate to user-generated videos. I mean there were a couple of episodes over the course that obviously stand out; there’s the (inaudible) feel different video which was controversial, (early long), there was the yes, we can song, right? From Will-I-Am.

What was the thinking inside the campaign about how to relate to all of this voter-generated content and who was the smart person who said, just let it be, we’re not going to sue people for using our logo, our likeness, our film without our permission?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Well I think the first question -- the first thing anybody who came into our campaign and wanted to work on video would ask is, how are we going to use user-generated video? And I asked the same question, you know? That’s the frontier, how are we going to do that?

But I think it’s one of the tensions of the top-down, bottom-up dynamic of how do you engage user-generated content in a campaign where if you make a big mistake or offend somebody then you could put the entire campaign in danger.

So, we decided that we needed to -- we treated people who wanted to volunteer in video as just that. We needed to get the volunteer into our system, they needed to understand what our bigger message was, they became part of the team. If somebody wanted to submit a video then they became a volunteer. If somebody did a video outside of the campaign, first of all there are campaign finance rules that you can’t send a certain amount of money and donate it to the campaign, so in the case of high production value or music, a lot of that time we even weren’t allowed to touch it because it would be a violation of campaign finance law.

So, we definitely did have a firewall between what was happening out there and what was kind of officially within our world of official campaign video and contribution. So, we would try and to user generated activities like a video we did, (inaudible) hope and change. We emailed our list of people and broke it down by people who had creative background, especially photographers and asked for people to hold signs that said HOPE and CHANGE and gave them very specific instructions about what size it should be and how they should hold the sign. So, we would give people very specific assignments and have them submit it and it became part of a larger video.

But we were to just say, hey, just send in your video and we’ll put it up, well you have to be able to vet the music and a lot of other things. So, we just didn’t have the resources to do all the vetting unless the person was really part of our team.

So, if that answers your question, yeah definitely a lot of crazy things happening outside of the official campaign and we enjoyed the creativity that people had for the most part outside of the campaign and we hope that we set a tone with our own videos that inspired artists to do their own thing as well. We hope that we set a tone of authenticity, of a respect for creativity that would allow other people to feel like they could create art and it didn’t feel like propaganda; it felt like something that was coming from the heart.

So, I think that we found that balance. I’m really impressed by all the stuff that happened.

MICAH SIFRY: Sure. But again, in the case of the YES WE CAN video by Will.I.Am, the campaign embraced that one big time, right? There was clearly -- you said at least around one if not many emails telling people to watch it.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, definitely. And I believe they even played it at some Obama events as well. But we were not involved in the production in any way of that video.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, that’s clear. We’re coming up on the half-hour mark so I’m going to throw the lines open as they say. If people who are listening want to unmute and ask a question that usually works fine so just unmute your phone, say your name and hopefully your brief question. And if no one has a question, of course I can keep going.

PARTICIPANT 1: (Inaudible) great presentation thus far. If you could (inaudible) bootstrap the technology that you -- hardware and software you’d use. What kind of -- (inaudible) you can doing a good online video view. I have a ton of questions (inaudible).

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Like what’s the minimum amount of equipment that you need to do online video?

PARTICIPANT 1: Yeah, I mean, not a lot of money, not a lot of ability to get hardware and software organized but want to do a good job kind of thing.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Well I think the most important thing is sound, and it’s kind of unappreciated for people who are just getting into video. So, I think the minimum requirement is to have a camera that has a microphone that is onboard and for it to be able to plug into a remote box, so if you need to record a speech or an official event that’s helpful if you have a campaign or a non-profit.

So, I think that camera plus microphone plus computer with Final Cut software on it comes out to approximately $8,000 I would say, off the top of my head, for kind of the basic package of getting pretty good sound and good video.

Of course it’s possible to just go out with a little Flip cam for $400 and (inaudible) iMac and put it up and it’s $200. So, it just depends on what your goals are and what your level of what your standards are, I guess.

MICAH SIFRY: When you say $8,000, can you be more specific the type of hardware you recommend somebody getting if they have that budget?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Oh, it’s hard to -- I mean new cameras are coming out all the time, so it depends if you need HD or if you are good with just digital. You know, the cameras that we used at campaign were PD150s, Sony, and I think they were about $3,000, that was in 2007. And you know, Final Cut software -- I’m trying to remember, I think it was around $1,500.

I mean, there’s just so many options out there and it really depends on what you need and what you’re shooting.

MICAH SIFRY: Another question from the peanut gallery.

PARTICIPANT 2: I have a question and -- can everyone hear me?

MICAH SIFRY: Sorry, please identify yourself.

PARTICIPANT 2: Sure. My name is Isaiah Poole, I’m the editor of OurFuture.org. We’ve done a number of videos and a lot of what we do is using video to try to explain an issue or to explain a position that was taken on an issue, which is difficult because you know, we’re doing stuff that 99 percent of the time doesn’t allow for the kind of viral kind of -- the kind of things that normally click with people watching YouTube with a video; it’s not funny, it doesn’t have a gimmick.

Two questions: Number one, what works in terms of an issue-oriented video? Number two, when you say that email’s an effective medium for pushing video, what’s the best way to do that and what works best?

0:30:31

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: In terms of issue-oriented videos, I found that if we needed to explain something complicated in a short amount of time, I went to the motion graphics guys and found a great piece of music and let the cartoon guys take it from there. Those were always -- that was just the easiest, punchiest way to do something that would get a point across.

You could have somebody sit in front of a camera and explain it, but that’s really boring. So, our motion graphics guys who believed in the cause and were working at a third of their normal rate were the source of a lot of our most amazing pieces because it was just really -- it was a way to communicate in a fun and easy way and they were just really creative about it.

In terms of how do you use email? What do you mean by that? How do you embed the video or --

PARTICIPANT 2: Well, number one, did you embed the video or link to it?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: We linked to it.

PARTICIPANT 2: Okay. And I assume you would have some sort of graphic (inaudible) to entice people to click?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I’m trying to think, I think it just said like “Click here for video,” and maybe it would unfold and it maybe it was blue, I’m trying to remember. I think when people found “video” in the subject line, I think I remember our analytics guy saying that the open rate was higher if people knew they were getting something out of it, that it wasn’t just like appeal for money.

MICAH SIFRY: But in general what you’re telling us is that a video of sort of a (inaudible) person sitting at a desk talking is not going to convey -- it’s just not going to get watched by many people because it’s too visually not interesting.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Exactly.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, it’s the visual quality of video being the key element here.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I mean the most important thing is to be able to tell a story, and so you know, we had to -- near the election, there would be danger that voters would not come out because the Republicans were warning of voter fraud and so we did a video called The Myth of Voter Fraud and you know, it had to take people through a short history and explain how they could recognize intimidation. And so there were a lot of kind of informational pieces we had to get in there and I think we were able to do it by framing the whole issue within a story.

So, we opened up on a large crowd of people at a rally and we really frame it in the context of like this is your movement, this is your government, this is your democracy, don’t let them take your right to vote away from you. So, once you hook people with the idea of like, oh, there’s something at stake here, then they’re more willing to listen.

So, a lot of it is just if you’re not going to go with the 30 second cartoon guy, you can also go with the powerful story arc, this is what’s really at stake because once people realize there’s a bad guy and a good guy and that there is sort of a climax to the story and an ending and like, okay, what do I need to do now, call to action to end it, then people will sit and watch the whole video, and they’ll get the information out of it. Especially if you are able to tell that story in an interesting way.

So, for that story we interviewed people in our campaign who were on the front lines of looking into voter intimidation and what they were seeing out there and what they were concerned about, and we broke it up into terms of chapters and we kind of gave it a style like the worst case survival guide. So, as opposed to just having a boring buy directly look at the camera and try to read a script, oh, that was the worst by the way-- before we got teleprompters, trying to get people to memorize something and say it straight to the camera was the biggest disaster. Like it was -- these aren’t professional actors usually. And even when we had professional actors, that didn’t always work out very well either.

So, it was better to interview somebody and then make it part of a story and I guess maybe that’s my prejudice coming from more of a journalism background, but I just found that that helped people to consuming their content when it’s presented to them like a story as opposed to the (inaudible) you need to sit and take in this information from somebody just talking at you.

MICAH SIFRY: Does that answer your question?

PARTICIPANT 2: It’s very helpful and in fact I come from a journalism background as well so I totally appreciate what you’re saying.

MICAH SIFRY: Cool. Other questions from people listening in on the call. Just please unmute and tell us your name and try to keep the question fairly short if you can.

Okay Kate, I have a question which is did you guys worry about what the other campaigns were doing? Did you spend any time watching what the other campaigns were doing with video and trying to figure out if there was something you should copy or respond to? What was the relationship there.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I remember one of McCain’s viral videos, they didn’t take off as Hit My Ride, which is a show on MTV, and they gave people a tour of the Straight Talk Express and showed how hip it was and like how blinged out it was. And it was actually like high production value and really fun to watch and I was kind of concerned when I first watched it like, whoa, they’re like serious over there. They’re doing like good videos.

But then we realized is that really our message is that we’re your money is going, your $5, your whatever you are giving to the campaign is going to pay for this really expensive (inaudible)? So, I think that sometimes again that came into what is your message versus trying to get a lot of people to watch your video. And at the end of the day, what is your measure of success?

And then Hilary Clinton did a series on her website called In Hilary I Know, which again were like really well shot interviews with people talking about how they knew Hilary Clinton personally. And I think that tied into her message at the time, which was getting people to know a more personal side as Hilary, but again, that would have been off message on our side because we weren’t about a candidate, we were about the movement.

So, you know, we were interested in what the other campaigns were doing but I don’t think we were concerned about it. And if you looked at Clinton’s YouTube page, most of the videos were her campaign ads, so they weren’t doing a lot of original, more grassrootsy videos.

And we had our campaign ads up on our page as well, but they were mixed in with stuff that was coming in from Colorado and Pennsylvania and everywhere we had volunteers on the ground making videos about regular supporters.

MICAH SIFRY: Well that actually brings up another point I wanted to ask you about and this is something that in some of the books and meetings that have been held since the election ended, some of the people on the campaign communication side from both Obama and McCain have talked about the way that they deliberately built a system for generating web-only political videos that were designed to more or less distract the political press work, and just sort of give them something to chew on but not necessarily -- these things were like web only distractions and they weren’t -- they never spent money to put them before voters in any significant way. And that used some portion of your online video just like tit for tat and give the cable (inaudible) something to argue over while you’re doing what you actually want to do on the ground.

And that something that you were involved in or you saw? To what degree is this a new feature of the 24-hour news cycle of just throwing little attack ads up on the web that you never really spend money on?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: When we went into the general, we created a rapid response team. So, definitely had a guy who was just devoted to doing longer form pieces and more movement-based documentary style pieces. And then I had my -- I don’t know if I should say this -- I called him my dark star. He was this kid who would do rapid response videos which were again more directed at responding to the incoming that we had that day.

So, yeah, at the time I don’t think we thought of it as a distraction for people but we definitely had that tool in our arsenal, I keep saying that, which was you know, we had a team that was dedicated to pushing back.

And so the biggest pushback piece we did was something called Kidding Economics, which was probably the piece that we worked the closest with our communications department with. It was a 20-minute documentary where we interviewed Bill Black who talked about (inaudible) and we had to really explain it to people who had either forgotten or didn’t know much about it.

And we coordinated the launch of that on our website and shared it with the press and so I think that was probably our most successful effort in terms of being able to do something that I felt had journalistic integrity, there wasn’t anything that was over the top or untrue about it. And I think it educated people and it was able at the time to change the conversation.

I’m trying to remember what was happening. I don’t know if it was the Bill Ayers thing or the McCain campaign was coming at the Obama campaign with their own negative onslaught and we needed to talk about what had happened with (inaudible).

So, that was an example of pushing back on the news of the day using an internet launch to get into the news. So, you know, I guess the point is that department was -- had a different audience than the rest of our videos. For the rest of our videos it was really about maintaining the connection with our supporters and keeping that dialogue open because no campaign had ever really had that direct communication with reporters.

You know, traditionally campaigns would have audience of reporters and the audience is sort of the masses where you sort of put up a campaign ad and you try to convince lots of people who are undecided, nobody ever talked directly to these reporters.

So, I would say our rapid response department was continuing the -- diffusing the internet but continuing the old tradition of communicating with reporters.

MICAH SIFRY: Very interesting. Other questions from the audience listening?

PARTICIPANT 3: Yes, hi, this is Megan (Taytee) from the organization, Free Press, and we’ve been using a lot of comedy in our videos recently and I’m wondering how you all used humor with the Obama campaign and if it worked for you.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Comedy’s hard. I think that yeah, we tried to use comedy. We had one video that was directed and produced by our media director, our new media director (inaudible), the loved BeBlog(inaudible).org, so there is a sale where a guy is riding his bicycle and he’s almost about to win, he starts celebrating, he throws his hands up in the air and then the bicycle goes out of control and he falls down and everybody else crosses the finish line before he does.

And this was right when everything was looking really good for us in the last days before the election and people were feeling really confident, our supporters were; we weren’t feeling as confident inside campaign headquarters and we needed to communicate to everybody that it’s not time to celebrate yet, you’re going to drop the ball because we all need to stay worried and we need to stay focused and we need to do everything we can to cross this finish line.

So, our motion graphics guys were able to put McCain’s head and Barack’s head like little JibJabby style on top of these bicycle guys and it was like a 30 second piece and it was great. People liked it, they usually laugh.

So yeah, if you can like do comedy, it’s just that sometimes if you fail it’s embarrassing.

MICAH SIFRY: If I remember (inaudible) told me about that episode, the campaign was actually seeing -- the open rates on emails were dropping and the number of people who were signing up for phone banking and volunteering in the last few days before the election, they actually saw a real drop in those metrics.

And so the worry was that okay, we’re going to win so we can relax. And it’s very, very interesting and it’s a good reminder that what the new media teams done in the final days of an election can be extraordinarily critical and not to rest on your laurels.

Other questions from people on the call? Okay, so interrupt me if you have one. Okay, looking forward I mean what would you say are the big lessons learned and I assume you’re watching other campaigns that have played out over the last year that are also making use of video. I mean, we’ve had several gubernatorial races and we’re heading into a mid-term Congressional battle.

Do you see people copying what the Obama campaign did effectively? Do you see people innovating? Anything that really struck you in the last year?

0:46:30

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, I rode on the Tea Party Express from Mississippi to Louisiana and I was surprised by how well they’ve learned the lessons of the Obama campaign. They have an onboard video operation and you know, they were telling me that the most important thing is telling people’s stories. I said, really? Oh my gosh!

So, they’re out there and they are building a true grassroots movement by actually listening to people and reflecting back their stories through video. And I think it just goes to show that no matter what part of the partisan line you’re on, it’s really an approach that will either build the momentum and build the movement.

So, even if your message is anti-government, anti-raising taxes, shutting down healthcare, you can still build a grassroots movement by talking to normal people and putting their videos up online, telling their stories on the blog so I think it reaches across -- I don’t think that the left has this part nailed down and the right hasn’t figured it out. I think the Tea Party Movement is figuring it out.

MICAH SIFRY: Very interesting. There’s a question in the chat room which I’m going to read: How quickly could you put together response videos like the (inaudible) economics video or the bike fail animation piece that you just described?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Those days are such a blur to me, but I know that we were doing things that would be impossible in real life. We (inaudible) economics in like three days and it’s like a real documentary. The bicycle piece we did probably in five hours but it was like we were all on some kind of crazed other-worldly mindset at the time where nothing was more important than changing the world.

So, you know we had a staff of people who worked every day of the week, all day and night. There was somebody in the office 24 hours a day just working on videos. So, if it had to get done, we got it done by the time we needed to get it done and things always had to be immediate or you would lose the moment and then the cycle or in the zeitgeist or whatever was happening.

MICAH SIFRY: I’ll ask you about one of my favorites, which is the video of Obama a day or two after Hilary Clinton formally withdrew. And it’s a staff meeting and it looks like a pretty impromptu moment. I mean, clearly the video captured him from a couple of angles, but he walks onto the floor of HQ in Chicago, one of the big office settings and there are a couple hundred people and they start applauding and he talks in a very extemporaneous way about what this incredibly young and dedicated group of volunteers and staff have just accomplished.

Was there a big -- like let’s make sure we capture this moment decision? Was it just luck you captured it? I mean there were a few times where the campaign seemed to really pull back the curtain and sort of tried to give an unvarnished view right into the center of what was going on.

So, I’m wondering if you can replay that moment and the thinking around it and -- you know, did you have to fight somebody to get permission to do that? Or what was -- because it’s so unusual.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, there were a lot of times in the beginning of the campaign where Barack would walk to our office and we wouldn’t have a camera and I would just like want to die because like something amazing would happen, he would have a conversation with somebody and I was like, oh, that would have been a great moment!

There was one time when he came into our new media area and everybody was like entering data and doing what they did and he said, hey guys! And I think people had just gotten so used to hearing his voice in the videos or whatever that nobody even looked around. And he had to say, Hey Guys! And we all -- oh, oh, hey, how’s it going?

So, yeah at a certain point I mandated that everybody on the video team have a camera on their desk with the tape loaded and batteries full so that they could pick it up and just shoot whatever was happening in the office because we would have really interesting people come through as well.

So, that day was one of those days where we heard he was in the office and I ran over and I said, can I put a wireless mic on him? And they said, hmm, okay. And you know, he looked at me and he’s like, do I really have to do this? And I’m like, yes, please.

So, then I ordered my other two video guys who were sitting on the floor there to shoot from their position on the floor, there was no thought that went into this production, so it really was as authentically thrown together as it looked.

MICAH SIFRY: And it turned out to be pretty successful as well, right?

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, people really enjoyed that, watching it online to get a little insight into what it was like in the office. And what it’s like when he is just speaking off the cuff or from his heart or talking to the people who were working for him. So, I think that’s a no brainer.

MICAH SIFRY: But you said that when you tried to get that -- I mean I don’t think I’m spilling any beans here, but you’ve told me that when you tried to get him to be off the cuff in a planned way, that it was very, very hard to do.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Yeah, I mean I think that it’s true in campaigns and non-profits as well is that there’s kind of mentality of we’ve got a message and we need to deliver our message. And even as somebody who is from the campaign, it’s a completely safe environment, there’s not going to be a “macaca” moment because I work for you, that there’s still this mentality of we need to stay on message.

So, there were a lot of times when the journalist in me would try to like knock him off script so that he would say something that was revealing, say something that he hadn’t said a million times before and was sort of saying it like robot. And I think there was a few times that we were able to do that.

There was one day when he was touring a steel factory that had closed in Chicago and I took him aside, asked him some questions about community organizing for a video we were doing, and I think I was able to ask him some questions that he hadn’t heard before and I think his answers were a lot more interesting than most of them because he wasn’t used to saying them every single day, several times a day.

So yeah, there was definitely tension within a large organization to convince people that the off-the-cuff stuff and the unguarded moment is actually what’s going to connect with people, and it’s going to go a lot further with people than saying the same message over and over again and pounding people over the head with that.

But everybody has a different role to play in the campaign and if you’re role is to keep things safe and keep risk low, then you’re not going to be as open to having a camera around capturing spontaneous moments.

MICAH SIFRY: I’m going to ask you one last question. What do you think how the White House has been using video and how they’re -- the most recent things that they’ve been doing with Obama going for the House Republicans, the Senate Democrats, today the (inaudible) doing a live chat where people text questions into him. I mean obviously they’re trying a variety of strategies.

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Right, well I am excited that they have seen what happens when you capture a spontaneous moment and the power of that when people watch that, and they know that something different happened, something that wasn’t on script and something that wasn’t coordinated and pre-planned happened.

So, I hope they’re encouraged to take a lot more risks like that and I signed the petition to demand question time and I hope there’s a lot more of that.

MICAH SIFRY: Great. Kate, thank you so much, this has been a really interesting hour.

As always, we really appreciate you making the time and we look forward to seeing you at the conference again this year.

Two weeks from now folks we will be joined by Jeff Kriegler and Clay Haynes from Catalyst and the topic is Data As Power, How to Target Supporters and Win Votes, 2010. If you want to know everything about voter lists and voter targeting, join us in two weeks.

Again, I want to thank our sponsors, AT&T and the Bivens Group for their on-going support for the PDF Network, and this call will be archived as a podcast and available online so share it with your friends.

Until then, we’ll see you online!

Thanks again Kate!

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Thank you!

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