Slate: The FCC and Satellite Radio

This is an interesting article on Slate about local content rules as they pertain to satellite radio. I find this National Association of Broadcasters description of satellite radio's model interesting...

[T]he National Association of Broadcasters charged that the new service threatened "traditional American values of community cohesion and local identity."

How interesting. If this is how they describe satellite radio, then how does the NAB describe consolidation of stations under conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcast?

The Subconscious Is A Funny Thing

Tuesday morning at about 5:15 AM, my clock radio went off per usual. This time, though, the usual traffic, news and weather reports on 880 AM were replaced by something else - a Yankee game broadcast. Obviously, my subconscious had a bit of difficulty in reconciling the notion of a Yankee game at 5:15 in the morning.

We've been spending quite a few evenings working past midnight at Underscore recently, so the first thought to go through my head was, "That's it. I've finally flipped out. My body has simply shut down and I've slept through the day and it's probably about 7 in the evening. What the hell am I going to tell my clients and my partners? They're probably going to want to know why I didn't show up for work."

So I rolled over in bed, opened one eye, and looked at the clock. Turns out I hadnt slept in and I wasn't crazy. I had just been listening to the Yankee season opener at the Tokyo Dome, which was broadcast at this ungodly hour due to the time difference. Cue major sigh of relief.

Rock the Vote Through Online Voting

I can't help but wonder if the folks who put together efforts to encourage younger people to vote might be better served by lobbying for online voting. I know a lot's been written about the security of online voting, but if we could get security issues taken care of, online voting could revolutionize our political system.

Low voter turnout has become such an issue over the years that politicians often write off entire demographic groups within their own constituencies, opting to concentrate on groups of people that actually turn out at the polls. Senior citizens are an important group, while the 18-24 age group is not.

Just for giggles a few weeks back, Jimmy, Eric and I were looking at some MRI runs that crosstabbed people who voted in any election against political persuasion, age and a few other breakouts. Folks who don't vote tend to be younger and most of them have access to the Internet. They also tend to lean to the left from a political standpoint. Just based on the raw numbers, it's easy to see that implementation of online voting would give liberal candidates a distinct boost.

Especially on the local level, I'd like to see online voting become a reality. Where I'm from, senior citizens enjoy political influence that far outweighs their numbers. There are several retirement communities not far from my place on Long Island and it's very difficult to make investments in education because any significant increase in the schools budget tends to get voted down due to the high percentage of senior citizens who don't want to see an increase in their taxes. Local politicians spend a disproportionate amount of time catering to these senior citizen groups and little if any time on issues of importance to younger people, quite simply because they know the retirement communities will bus senior citizens to the polls on election day, and the younger people seem to want to spend Election Day playing Madden Football on their PlayStations.

I'll probably get some comments about how people who don't vote forfeit their rights to complain if their politicians don't adequately represent them. But I can't help but think that making voting easier would help level the playing field a bit. We'd certainly get more participation.

So maybe efforts should concentrate more on lobbying for online voting rather than trying to get more youngsters to turn out.

Torn

I ran into someone I haven't seen in a long time at the IPDI conference - Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup. I was doing the schmooze thing when Scott walked by and said hello. While we were getting caught up, he mentioned that he started up "a little trouble" in one of the morning panels. I missed the opening panel he was referring to because I was getting set up at our booth. When I asked Scott what happened, he kind of blew off the query, but I was curious, so I asked some of the other conference attendees what transpired.

Evidently, Scott made some anti-online advertising comments in the opening plenary panel. According to someone who was there, Scott picked up a sponsor's sign and said "This is not what it's about." The sponsor happened to be a company that was selling online commercials. This caused something of a stir.

I heard mixed comments about Scott's actions at that panel. Quite a few people praised him, saying that the grassroots approach - blogs, Meetup and other non-commercial messaging and discourse - represents the killer app for online political marketing. Others condemned Scott as a hypocrite, saying that the guy who made his living in the online agency business (i-traffic) shouldn't be condemning online advertising.

Lemme say this...Scott is a somewhat unorthodox guy, but he gets it. The guy is bringing a terrific application to the political marketing space. It's things like Meetup that give me hope for the future of democracy. (And no, I'm not being overly dramatic here. I'm serious.) Although I'm an online advertising guy, I do agree with Scott to some extent.

Shoveling TV commercials online is an overly simplistic approach and it doesn't leverage the most compelling capabilities of the medium. I would advise clients against this approach in most cases. Some make the argument that political advertisers need to base their understanding of the medium on something they already understand - like TV. Personally, I think this argument is somewhat of a cop-out.

But this isn't to say that online advertising isn't an important component of an online political marketing campaign. There's a lot more that can be done that doesn't involve shoehorning TV commercials into interactive :30 spots. I think that online advertising is a terrific way to deliver a focused message to the appropriate constituencies. Indeed, the panel I spoke on focused on how to get the right message to the right people.

At the panels I attended, there was tremendous focus on blogs and how to navigate the blogosphere such that political marketers can leverage that channel to get their message out. But one of the unanswered questions was, "How do we get the message out there in the first place?" I suggested that something like Google AdSense, which many bloggers incorporate into their sites to earn ad revenue, could help kill two birds with one stone. Not only can it help disseminate a message, but it can also support bloggers by giving them ad revenue in exchange for driving interested parties to campaigns and causes with a targeted message.

At our panel, we talked about quite a few other online advertising opportunities within the political space, including behavioral and contextual targeting plays, sites that can target geographically, paid search and others. These represent a terrific way for candidates and causes to disseminate a message in a targeted fashion.

So I disagree with Scott with regard to his notion of the usefulness (or lack thereof) of online advertising. But I do agree with him that cutting and pasting TV commercials into the online medium is not what it's all about. It's about an integrated, multi-channel approach in which each component supports the effort to the best abilities of the media utilized.