Hillary Clinton's Use of Webcasts in 08 Campaign

When Hillary Clinton announced, she used a webcast to reach supporters and the general public. She bypassed the traditional first announcement to a rally where supporters are invited along with the media. Now her campaign is using webcasts embedded in email announcements to announce her positions to her supporters. The first one that has been issued deals with Iraq. You can view it by clicking on the link in this entry's title. A viewer can, of course, also view it by going to her presidential campaign website.

This is a very intriguing step and one that many more campaigns will be adopting, if they haven't already. It allows politicians to bypass the media and get their message directly out to their supporters and it is much cheaper than buying commercial time on television.

Tactics like this will, over time, change the relationship between the media and candidates. Right now, candidates need the media and so put up with the a lot of the media's stupidity on issues and campaigns so as not to tick off media representatives. Once they no longer need the media, candidates will become a lot less tolerant of their stupidity, their vapidness, and their biases.

Such tactics could also drastically reduce the cost of campaigns. It costs a lot less to send out email messages than to run 30 second spots on television and you can target them a lot better. This is a campaign tool that bears watching and developing, not just for national campaigns, but for local campaigns as well.