Changing Media World Yet Unchanging Politics

Even Tom Shales at the Washington Post, one of the more respected TV critics, gets that the old TV-dominated media world is dead. How long do we think it's going to take the political consulting class in DC to get it? From today's Washington Post, Shales writes about the death of the Fall TV season and the rapid change of consumer's TV viewing behavior:

Television is not the medium it was even a mere year ago, and we are not the audience we were, either. We are all evolving, television and us together.

We don't watch television; instead, we access program material through content providers. Viewers accustomed to the cellphone and iPod and DVR and OnDemand don't watch TV the way earlier generations did. We don't even receive it the way our foreviewers did, via the old cathode-ray tube-in-a-box. TV now seeps into our lives through hand-held gadgets and laptops, on "webisodes" and YouTube snippets and fragmented downloads.
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But no matter what path TV takes to our eyeballs, one requirement remains: There must be programs, even if some are only 2 1/2 minutes long.

Even there lies changes, though. The old, tidy arrangement of a TV season lasting from fall through spring -- with reruns filling up the viewer-scarce summer -- is long gone. Even as new shows are making their debuts, such basic-cable series as "The Closer" (appropriately enough) will be serving up their season finales. Old rules are broken so often that they are no longer rules at all; so-called seasons blur together into one big stream of semiconsciousness.

The old days of television are truly past us - though you wouldn't know it looking at how basic television ads still dominate campaign communications.

There really is no excuse. Within the industry, there has been an acknowledgment of the new media landscape. NBC Universal has completely shifted their thinking about shows - as Shales noted now called content - and changed how they approach advertisers. Gone is the dominance of the Fall and Spring season TV cycle. Instead NBC Universal is looking at media much more holistically - more time and location independent. From Variety:

NBC will also try to one-up other nets by announcing what it promised would be "a full, 52-week primetime programming schedule" in early April.
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"The traditional primetime presentation shines a light on only one piece of what our company has to offer,"

It's a different world, yet our political advertising always seems to look like more of the same. It's kind of pathetic actually. At one of the most creative times in advertising, most political work remains relegated to mediocre 30 second voice-over television ads that make you want to get a DVR if you don't have one yet.

To be fair we have seen some creativity. Lots of "web ads" that traditional media are treating as if they were TV ads. But let's be honest, those ads aren't designed to talk to the public, they talk to the media and the politically active. Most online advertising is even pretty mediocre - almost always about raising money or joining a campaign, rarely about persuasion.

What little creativity we've seen in this years campaign has really been around ad format. Though the 30 second format still dominates, we've seen the use of 1 and 2 minute ads a few times throughout the campaign. Most recently Obama has put out a 2 minute ad that Morning Joe really didn't like last week. Here's the ad:



The Morning Joe analysis was that it was too boring, no one pays attention, that every campaign falls for this "if you just talk to the camera" trick. I think that they were right in part (what a bland set), but missed the point overall. With the economy, war on multiple fronts, and corruption as far as the eye can see, one would expect Obama to be up 15-20. Polls suggest that the public doesn't yet trust Barack Obama to lead, hence the close race with McCain.

In a media landscape of noisy and foreboding 30 second voice-over ads, an ad like this breaks through the clutter and counter-intuitively demands more attention. Instead of trying to cram too many ideas into a 30 second spot, the ads purpose is really simply to give voters an opportunity to cleanly and clearly hear from Barack Obama on what he thinks and where he wants to take the country. Not just a soundbite or a snippet, but a more thorough telling of his plans and a call to action to learn more. It's an opportunity to build trust, hard to do in 2 minutes, but probably impossible to do in 30 seconds.

Will many people turn the channel? Sure, but for those that are undecided, those that are leaning one way or the other but aren't quite sure yet, it gives the candidate an opportunity to bypass the media commentary and speak directly to the voter. It's a creative use of the TV ad buy to get a shot at talking to voters who are still willing to listen.

But even for Obama this ad is the exception, not the rule. And therein lies the issue. Even though television has so fundamentally changed and we've watched the meteoric rise of the Internet, Washington political consultants still promote politicians like they did in 1988 - unaware of the shift or unable to know how to respond. When Tom Shales gets it, you know change isn't coming, it's already happened and mainstream. Whether politicians get that and demand more from their advertising remains to be seen.