The movers and shakers in so-called revolutionary uses of digital media are campaigns—Jesse Ventura’s email lists, the 2000/2004 GOP fundraising and database technologies, Dean’s use of Meetup, Obama’s MyBO platform. Campaigns, so the story goes, are pushed  to innovate in order to get a leg up on the competition. But this recent Politico article takes a different perspective—rather than talking to campaigns about how they’re using the tools at their disposal, Kim Hart’s talking to execs at Twitter, Google, Youtube, etc. (Skypeoogletubeapedia is clearly the best catchall for that) about how they want to get a piece of the action. Although the article doesn’t actually speak to a whole lot of legitimately new tactics or strategies (it cites microtargeting on Facebook, the new Youtube feature “trueview” which is not campaign-specific but could be helpful to all advertising, and routine ad buy strategy), the idea that major digital media tools would be trying to pull campaigns to use their products is a pretty new one. Sure it was perhaps bound to happen once campaigns started to devote more money to digital strategy (especially when there are so many un- and under-used tools out there).

So what does it mean?   Continue reading →