First in a series, based on Ten Lessons from Mitt TV.

In this, the first presidential campaign cycle in which internet video has taken center stage, the candidates seem to have developed a love-hate relationship with YouTube, and both emotions come with good reason.  To be sure, YouTube has brought a great deal to each and every campaign, but those benefits have come at a cost — not all of which is readily apparent — and have left YouTube (and its parent, Google) with something nobody else has.

A Free Lunch?

Early in the 2008 cycle, after the Romney campaign had launched Mitt TV and when other campaigns were scrambling to figure out how they could catch up, the folks at YouTube stepped in with a remarkable offer.  YouTube offered each campaign a free “channel,” and promised to protect those channels as an advertising-free zone.

Romney for President YouTube ChannelEvery single campaign accepted the offer by late spring of 2007, and the online video primary battle was joined.  From Obama to Paul, everyone had a free channel on YouTube, which gave the campaign a semi-controlled environment in which all the “official” video clips of the campaign could be posted, and one of those clips could be “featured” at the top of the channel.

Free of charge?  No ads?  Control of what clips are displayed in the channel?  So far, this sounded like a pretty good deal.  And it’s no surprise that the campaigns jumped on board with both feet.  After all, a successful campaign might expect as many as 100 million video clip viewings during the entire campaign cycle, and if they can save a penny a clip by using free hosting on YouTube, then they could spend a million bucks on other things like charter jets and lawn signs.  And more importantly, the campaigns can get exposure to the large and enthusiastic audience of YouTubers and become part of the conversation among a new generation of web participants.

A no-brainer?  On one level, yes,  But YouTube is also a venue that needs to be approached with caution.  To see why, look at what YouTube is getting out of the deal.

Behavioral Targeting: A Key Motive for YouTube/Google

To be sure, a big motive for YouTube was to find a place for itself as a more serious venue for political dialog than as a merely a showplace for Mentos-and-Diet-Coke hackers — especially after its acquisition by Google.  But a more important motivation came from YouTube’s interest in behavioral targeting, and the desire to identify and tag every possible visitor to the site with their political interests, based on what clips they viewed.

Here’s how behavioral targeting works in this context.  Every time a campaign directed traffic to a YouTube clip, it was allowing that viewer to be identified as, for example, an “Obama-interested” or “McCain-interested” viewer.  And while they were exposed to no advertising while actually viewing the candidates’ channels, the viewers are now being served up — by YouTube and, presumably, by its parent Google — into premium advertising packages marketed to political parties, 527 special-interest interest groups and PAC’s, rival campaigns, and others interested in targeting fans of one candidate or another while they’re going other things in YouTube, Google, or its affiliates.

Google has been working on behavioral targeting for quite some time, and politics seems to be a great place to test the concepts — large national audiences, well-defined choices, and huge advertising budgets.  So we weren’t surprised when soon after the channels were launched, advertising reps started offering us packages targeting behaviorally-defined audiences interested in our candidate — or our competitors.

So the upshot of all this is that every time the Romney campaign would link from the www.mittromney.com to YouTube to watch a campaign video, it would be, in essence, allowing YouTube to tag that follower as a “Romney-interested” viewer so that the YouTube/Google advertising machine could then market them to other campaigns, PACs, and the like.  In effect, we would be acting as a list-acquisition engine for Google, who was free to remarket that “list” to others.

BOTH YouTube AND a Proprietary Internet TV Channel

For that reason, and many others that I’ll detail in a later posting, the Romney campaign decided to publish its own internet TV channel as part of www.mittromney.com, and to avoid wherever possible sending Romney enthusiasts into the YouTube/Google behavioral targeting machine, where viewers were just as likely to be offered oppo clips from rival campaigns as “related” videos as they were to see other material from the campaign..

The bottom line is this: free political campaign channels on YouTube certainly had their place — and an important one — in this campaign cycle.  They were a way of reaching out to a broad population of interested voters and drawing them back into the www.mittromney.com website for more information.  But as a way of crafting a deep, interactive video experience to visitors to the Romney site that didn’t get them tagged by behavioral targeting engines, we opted to create Mitt TV on the PermissionTV video publishing platform, and to weave video throughout the www.mittromney.com site.  I’ll cover how we chose a platform — and how we architected the channel — in a future post here on the Web Video Expert blog.