Nikolas Sarkozy, the more internet- and video-savvy of the French candidates, has won his election and marked it with a tribute in sight and sound suitable for a religious experience. See the video on his home page now. Here’s some ambiance from Rue Hauteville in Paris:
In France, socialist candidate Ségolène Royal just debated third-placed finisher and possible kingmaker Francois Bayrou on TV. Go to the networks’ sites and they not only put up the video of the debate but they do so on a blog via a video sharing site — the YouTube of France, DailyMotion — so blogs like this can embed it, making it one of the top viral videos on the internet.
The participants themselves use this to embed the debate on their official sites — Royal’s blog here, Bayrou’s blog here, where, at latest count, there were 1,350 comments, putting the debate — and the network — in the thick of the democratic discussion.
Here’s my latest Guardian column, a buffed-up version of posts I wrote for Prezvid about Webcameron, 18 Doughty Street, and Nicolas Sarkozy and the conservative movement in small TV in the UK. (Nonregistration version here.)
In a video response to Webcameron, David Cameron’s new-age network of tiny TV, pioneering parliamentary blogger Tom Watson wondered why his fellow liberals don’t have an internet channel of their own. Why, indeed? While in the US, it’s the Democratic presidential candidates who are invading YouTube, in Europe, conservatives are leading with their lenses: Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in France show their candid sides and answer voters’ questions via video. Even German chancellor Angela Merkel, hardly a LonelyGirl15, is podcasting and vlogging. And at 18 Doughty Street, UK conservatives have their own internet talk-show network. Is the internet providing the European right with its Fox News?
While in London, I visited the eponymously addressed 18 Doughty Street, a Georgian townhouse where founder Iain Dale and a staff of 20 produce five hours of live talk TV a night from a studio equipped with seven cameras and an expansive couch. Their programming day starts at 7pm with news summaries, interviews with politicians, and talk shows about politics, the arts and blogs. Because it is live, it is interactive; viewers can send in messages and join the chat. Next viewers will send in videos; Dale gave 100 cameras to contributors who’ll make a show of shows, a bit like a multimedia Comment is Free. And soon, they’ll expand to America with a rented studio and satellite time.
The audience is not yet huge - one to 2,000 viewers at any moment (more than 2,500, Dale says, and their technology would teeter). But he’s getting the audience he wants, including big media. And he drew a quite large crowd, more than 250,000, watching a commercial message they distributed on YouTube that asked us to “imagine a world without America”.
All this comes at an astoundingly low price. Factual programming on US and UK networks costs about £150,000 per hour. A US network executive recently bragged that his digital studio had reduced his cost to £500 a minute. Dale runs the network with a one-year, £1m investment from YouGov founder Stephan Shakespeare and I asked him to estimate his production cost. Subtracting bandwidth and internet, he calculated £70 per hour. So expect more talk online, much more.
Next, I visited Sam Roake, head of Cameron’s web strategy, to learn about Webcameron. Roake sees this as an opportunity to interact. Each week, the team follows Cameron out and about, and get him to answer five citizens’ questions, three of them voted on, Idol-like, by the audience. “To be genuinely candid,” Roake says, “you have to talk about yourself as a person.” Politicians, he advises, must switch “out of politician mode”. I ask whether Cameron would take his web camera to No 10 with him. “If it suddenly stopped,” Roake answers, “that would be seen as a very cynical move . . . You can’t stop communicating.”
This, he argues, is “a new stage of politics” that is about “sustained dialogue with the public.” Note that this is similar to the rhetoric about blogging I heard from Gordon Brown at Davos: “You cannot make political decisions now without people being included in the decision,” he said. “The age of the smoke-filled room is over.”
I asked Roake to give advice to the American presidential candidates now making small TV and he said they must not see this as broadcast TV. They should respond to voters by name: “See them as people who want to engage with you.” He recommends being “personal, open, spontaneous”. But most of all, he said, don’t script and spin your videos.
When I wrote this on PrezVid, my video blog that follows the US 2008 campaign through web video, Watson’s web producer Tim Ireland chimed in, saying that “Cameron’s early broadcasts were very much scripted affairs” and calling his family setting “window dressing”. It was that setting that Labour MP Sion Simon spoofed in a YouTube video that fell flat, forcing Simon to apologise and giving Webcameron more publicity. All politics is spin. Saying you don’t spin is, after all, spin.
I emailed Ireland to ask him the question I posed above: why are conservatives leading in small TV in the UK? He responded with four words: “Blair, money, timing and spin.” And then he added a fifth: Iraq. Yes, that might explain why Labour pols in the UK and Republicans in the US are rather camera-shy these days. But this, too, will change.
The YouTube election is by no means a strictly American phenomenon, though we tend to assume everything is. In fact, other political scenes are ahead of ours and our candidates have a lot to learn from them about how to run YouTube campaigns. I did an interview for Japanese TV yesterday about PrezVid and pointed to what’s happening in France (an interview about that here) with candidates showing their more candid moments and creating a platform for the voters to speak as well. And then I made my hourly visit to the invaluable TechPresident, where Micah Sifry pointed to the amazing video effort of British Tory leader David Cameron.
Says Micah, from column he and Andrew Rasiej wrote for Politico:
Picture this: Every day, a major candidate for the highest office in the land spends a few minutes talking into a video camera held by an aide. Then the recordings are posted, with very minor editing, to the his Web site. On some days, they show him on the street, talking casually about the visit he’s making to a local business or a day care center. On other days, he’s sitting in his office, giving candid responses to the top five questions that have been posted to his blog, as chosen by visitors to his site.
The videos are all generally unscripted; the settings are unencumbered by props; and the camera work is about as good as any tourist’s visiting the zoo.
If you think this is a fantasy, don’t. This, in a nutshell, is how David Cameron, the youthful leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, has been taking advantage of online video since he launched his “Webcameron” site last fall. . . .
For all the talk of this being the “YouTube Election,” however, none of the current candidates for president of the United States is doing anything close to what Cameron is doing. Yes, they know they can use their Web sites to broadcast video to potential supporters. But so far, not one presidential campaign has demonstrated that it understands the difference between video online and video on TV. That’s because they all apparently think video online is just television on a smaller screen.
In the old world of televised politicking, broadcast time is expensive and scarce. Because of that, politicians learned to speak in sound bites to get their message across quickly. On-camera “gaffes” are feared for what they might reveal. Campaign commercials are rehearsed and scripted as much as possible. The voter gets a carefully packaged view of the candidate. Spin rules, and media consultants get rich from their commissions on buying TV time.
But this approach deprives voters of a real “unscripted” view of the candidate. We pounce on gaffes, believing, as Michael Kinsley memorably said, that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — “or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.”
In the new world of online video, broadband is cheap and plentiful. Instead of sound bites, a candidate can speak in full paragraphs. He or she can do a daily video blog, or even several, because digital storage is practically unlimited and bandwidth costs are minimal. Like Cameron, he or she can talk to us in the context of their actual lives in relation to the issues at hand. . . .
Micah wonders whether we agree. We do. However, I do think that American candidates are beginning to break away from their big-TV roots. McCain didn’t, with his overproduced, overlong commercials. Obama is spending too much time showing himself in front of big crowds and too little time just talking to us (I’ll have a vlog on that a bit later). Hillary is more casual but not candid. Yet they are all reveling in their ablity to make their own soundbites instead of being subject to the clipping whims of some network TV news editor.
So Micah’s right, none of them has the casual humanity that Sarkozy in France and Cameron in the UK try to present — and our candidates would be smart to follow their lead. (And isn’t it fascinating, by the way, that in the U.S., the liberals are leading on YouTube but in Europe its’ the conservatives who are ahead?)
Micah says it comes down to the question of how much our candidates are willing to risk being human. Yes, but as I said below, that horse is over the horizon. The more these candidates get out on the stump, the more vlogging voters will be taping their every syllable and the more they’ll have to get comfortable with showing a less shrink-wrapped version of themselves. But we, the voters (and pundits) will also need to learn that every gaffe and slip of the tongue isn’t a gotcha moment and a news story. It’s just a moment of being human. If we want to see the more human side of our candidates, then we will have to accept their goofs.
So Micah and I agree that the more we are able to see of the candidates and the more candid they are, the better we will be able to judge them. In an exchange in the comments on his post, he said to me:
I would love a stream of videos from those living rooms and coffee klatches (assuming they are still happening; some of the stories out of IA and NH suggest that there’s such demand to meet the top candidates that they can’t schedule such intimate events). It used to be that only the lucky voters of those two states got a chance to meet the candidates face-to-face in a personal enough setting to take their measure and perhaps ask them a tough question and get a real answer. But someone with a video could now capture that moment and instead of giving us another “macaca” we might get a revelation about a candidate’s character or vision that is positive and affirming. Recall the photo of Bush hugging that girl whose father died on 9/11. It was taken spontaneously by an onlooker and showed up real emotion; arguably it was Bush at his best. I just wish the current candidates would allow themselves the possibility of a similar moment…
To Micah’s point, here’s a video of Hillary Clinton visiting a home in Nashua, New Hampshire, and another of Barack Obama in a house across town. But when you have boom mics and press caravan’s it’s hardly casual:
On the way to Davos, I interviewed Loic Le Meur, pioneering French blogger and now vlogging and interactive advisor to conservative French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. (Le Meur ran the Le Web conference in Paris and stirred up some dust when he invited Sarkozy and other candidates to speak.)
For all the attention American candidates are getting in our YouTube election, the video scene in France’s election is far ahead, moreso on Sarkozy’s site than on that of his liberal opponent, Segolene Royal (you supply the accents, please). On Sarkozy’s, we hear not just from the candidate but from lots of voters. In my interview, Le Meur said he is instituting the means for people to leave Sarkozy questions and vote them up so that he would answer one a day on video (since I don’t speak French, I can’t tell you what’s happening). Le Meur also said that he has two people following the candidate all day, videotaping and vlogging his activities. This, he says, will lead to a new view of the candidate one cannot see on the news because it’s hard to put forth a packaged personality that’s not real when you’re being taped constantly. He also said he’s holding weekly pizza parties for bloggers of both camps at the Sarkozy headquarters.
