'Why Does OFA Waste Money on All Those Web Ads?'

Below is an incredible re-enactment of what occurs in the comment thread whenever an Organizing for America web ad gets diaried at Daily Kos:

Headline: New Ad COMPLETELY BEAKS, FLAYS AND PUREES THE INNARDS of Mitt Romney!

Commenter:It would have been nice if the diarist had mentioned that it's a WEB ad. The people that need to see it are not going to see it. By the way, while I thought the ad was good overall, not a Game Changer, I would have used entirely different music and employed a font with more gravitas.

Diarist: Sorry! I'll change the headline! I just thought the ad did such a good job of DE-INTESTINING Mitt that everybody should see it!

This scene has occurred fairly often throughout the election cycle, so I thought somebody brilliant and remarkably good-looking (in very dim light) with an okay singing voice (if you're flexible about what on-key means), ought to do a diary about the purpose of these OFA web ads.

Let's go back in time, to the launching of the OFA Truth Team and read about why it was launched.

FOX News by way of the New York Post reports:

CHICAGO -- The Obama reelection campaign on Monday announced a new "Truth Team," whose goal is to drum up support from online supporters and grassroots activists to help promote President Barack Obama and challenge Republican attacks.

This is the second move the campaign has taken in recent weeks to try to balance the influence of so-called super PACs. Last week, Obama reversed a prior decision and told supporters to back an Obama-aligned super PAC run by former White House staffers. Previously, the president had decried the influence of the PACs.

Obama For America announced the move, which includes four new separate websites: BarackObama.com/TruthTeam, KeepingHisWord.com, KeepingGOPHonest.com and AttackWatch.com.

The re-election team is calling it a "new national effort by President Obama supporters online and on the ground to promote the president's achievements, respond to attacks on his record and hold the eventual Republican nominee accountable."

The sites will include fact checks, online tools for social networking and videos and resources for activists.

http://www.nypost.com/...

So there we have it.

These ads are primarily for supporters. They are intentionally preaching to the choir. They want the choir to share, diary, Facebook and tweet them. They also want to engage the media and awaken them from their nap long enough to talk about a few key points in the ad.

So these ads are not likely to be cut down to 30 seconds and they certainly won't air on television. They are not intended to.

Rob Salmond at the Brookings Institute's Center for Technology Innovation did a white paper on this Youtube campaign tool entitled, "MeTube: Political Advertising, Election
Campaigns, and YouTube."

This study relies on detailed analysis of 3,118 YouTube videos uploaded during election campaigns by 72 parties across 12 countries.

All told, these videos were viewed almost 44 million times.

http://www.brookings.edu/...

Here are the observations that emerged from this study:

Specifically, the audience for YouTube advertisements is younger, richer, more educated, more politically interested, and more partisan than the population at large.

This tendency has been confirmed in studies about online video specifically and
online political engagement more generally. Writing in 2003 about political websites
as a whole, Bruce Bimber and Richard Davis found:

“...the audience of any particular campaign Web site is likely to be overwhelmingly composed of knowledgeable, interested, partisan supporters of the candidate.”

http://www.brookings.edu/...

So here's the bottom line on web ads.

Web ads are for supporters and the media. And according to the Brookings Institute's own analysis, if you want to be younger, richer and smarter keep watching and sharing them!