Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

New Media and Labour’s Win

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the extensive use new Australian PM Kevin Rudd and the Labour Party made of new media in the just past election season:

Labor deployed blogs, used behavioural targeting on the internet, ads on mobile phones and a raft of ambient (or alternative) media such as stickers and T-shirts to get its message across to voters in marginal seats.

Over the campaign, the Kevin07 website attracted 418,000 unique visitors, while the Liberal party managed to get perhaps 40 per cent of that figure, according to figures from Simon White, partner of media buying agency, Ikon Communications. Mr White, Neil Lawrence of the STW Group and Camilla Cooke of New Dialogue, were the most senior advertising executives in a team of 20 people drawn from the three companies. Official figures from Nielsen Net Ratings are not due out for another week.

More than 2 million pages were viewed during that period and 1.5 million videos downloaded from websites such as YouTube, Kevin07, MySpace and Ninemsn. Nearly 90,000 flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers and badges were sold or given away.

The Herald suggests that the Liberals failure to adapt to the new media world was a contributing factor in their defeat:

“I am surprised the Liberals relied so much on traditional media and that they were running conventional advertising online,” [White] said, adding about a third of his team’s time was spent on putting together ambient and digital media ideas, among them ads about housing affordability on websites such as Realestate.com.au as homebuyers searched for properties in marginal seats. It also used Retravision’s instore network of TVs to broadcast Labor ads during the media blackout.

Mr White said the Liberals overspent the media budget in Victoria. But underspent in Queensland and did not secure enough crucial first spots in the ad breaks, he said. Half of Labor’s TV spots took that position compared with the Liberal’s 40 per cent, he said.

The Liberals’ media agency Starcom was unavailable to comment but party sources have indicated the campaign team was out of touch with new media and thought they could reprise the strategy from previous campaigns. The source said most digital initiatives came from the prime minister’s office and not the campaign office. Mr White said Labor’s activity had a cumulative effect.

One suspects that Labour would have won this year even if they had completely ignored new media. The electorate seems to have simply tired of the Howard government. But perhaps new media expertise gave them an advantage at the margins.

So which US campaign is making the best use of new media? I suppose it depends on who you ask, as illustrated by the Beltway Blogroll’s report on the Bowers versus Ruffini kerfuffle last week:

Democratic bloggers love to claim superiority over their Republican counterparts when it comes to online expertise, and Republican bloggers generally agree that their rivals have the edge in the politics and technology sphere. But GOP e-politics expert Patrick Ruffini apparently wasn’t in the mood for a condescending lecture from netroots expert Chris Bowers yesterday.

In a post headlined ”More Massive Bellyflops From The Republican Netroots,” Bowers mocked Republicans for their “truly and utterly pathetic” lack of online creativity. His evidence: They submitted only a handful of videos for a contest run by the National Republican Congressional Committee to call attention to the perceived failures of a Democratic-led Congress....

Ruffini’s retort noted that another video contest run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney resulted in more than 100 entries, and the winning video was aired on television. He said it “was far better than anything the Romney media team had produced to date.”

Ruffini also blasted the Democratic netroots for their “failure to evolve since 2003” or to change views about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom many liberal bloggers oppose. “When Barack Obama, your best hope for defeating Hillary Clinton, feels free to flagrantly blow you off, what does that say for the vaunted influence of the netroots?” Ruffini wondered.

I doubt whether new media will decide the 2008 US Presidential election. But as Hugh Hewitt likes to say, they can’t cheat if it isn’t close. It strikes me as entirely plausible that new media could have a sufficiently large effect at the margins to ensure that it isn’t close enough to cheat.

Update: Ed Morrissey’s comments on the relationship and the conservative blogosphere highlight this issue:

… the record pretty clearly shows the conservative blogosphere as a whole complaining for the last several years about the lousy job Bartlett and the White House did on communications overall, including but not especially focusing on the blogosphere.

Whoever gets the 2008 GOP nomination is going to have to do a lot better.