The recent 2006 and coming 2008 US elections has been heralded as the moment when blogs and social media make their play on election campaigns. Indeed for the 2008 US presidential elections, much has been made regarding John Edward’s involvement with dozens of social networking site, plus web 2.0 sites like Twitter. Additionally, Barack Obama’s website includes its own social networking website.

But the real factor has been on the grassroots level, which the new video on Hillary Clinton is an example of (link of video above). San Francisco Chronical describes the video :

Groundbreaking 74-second pitch for Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, which remixes the classic “1984″ ad that introduced Apple computers to the world, is not on cable or network TV, but on the Internet.

This video, at the time of this writing, has been viewed over 200,000 times since it was posted on March 5th. This is powerful for a video that was apparently created on a grassroots level by a Barack Obama supporter.

Blogs have been a large political factor for some time, especially with the Little Green Footballs, a conservative news/blog website, which revealed the “Killian documents” forgeries that was in a Dan Rather’s segment in CBS’s “60 Minutes” and helped call attention to the photoshopped forgeries by an Reuters Photographer that exaggerated damage from the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon Conflict. Maybe this time online videos will raise to be the major influencer?

With the 2008 Presidential Elections just getting a start, the “Vote Different”/1984 Hillary video is just one example of how social media will impact the cultural landscape – beyond a marketer’s viral video, college kids on Facebook and Mentos viral videos. The Lesson: While avoiding the whole kool-aid, marketers should could watch to understand social media is more than just viral videos.

PS: Of course with politics being as it is, this video could of been an inside job by the Obama camp, but for the sake of avoiding political speculation we’ll avoid that discussion.

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Making Video Ads Viral. But how about Direct to YouTube Viral?
I’ve been noticing that LinkedIn has been very aggressive in displaying video ads for Cadillac, a film called “Reign Over Me” and Google’s Gmail video. Yet, while being all videos advertisements, they share three very different paths when looking at what the ads link to:

• “Reign Over Me” goes to a horrible Moviefone page with no call to action. What exactly am I supposed to learn or do when I get to this page?
• Cadillac goes to a very slick looking “My Cadillac Story” minisite, with video profiles of famous people that have been changed by Cadillac, and includes the usual “Send to a Friend” links. This is very similar to the Blackberry Pearl minisite.
• The Gmail Google Video is a quirky lo-fi video that links straight to the YouTube webpage for that video.

Cadillac and Gmail both wins points for execution, but the Gmail Team has a very interesting link back to YouTube. And here’s why:

• Familiarity for the Users: This YouTube tie-in brings the user to a website that she/he is very familiar with and most likely has probably played around in, forward clips to friends from, copied and pasted YouTube videos to MySpace, etc.
• Increased Exposure: Instead of having the video siloed on a standalone minisite – say GmailMuppetTheatre.com – the Gmail Team has positioned the video within YouTube itself, where it maybe found by a search on YouTube or because it made it to one of the top viewed videos this month (yep, it did).

This method is not for every client or advertiser. But for those who feel their video has strong “viralbility” and probably has strong attraction for a young adult audience, a YouTube-based Video Ad like Gmail’s should be considered.

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