Viral Marketing and Viral Politics are a very interesting when they are mix together. Viral marketing is a form of advertising
that unconsciously people spread to other persons and with out knowing that in the mail that they have just sent to their friends,
girlfriend or brothers, is hidden a powerful message that not even you can detect, viral marketing is a form of advertising a
product or a person, you can even say something about a person that nobody knows but if you start sending messages to your
friends and tell them to send the message to their friends and to the friends of their friends it will be like a virus (viral
marketing). Politicians use viral marketing to change voter’s reactions or change their point of view in a particular
action.
Today, political advertising has been playing a very important role in the United States. There are a lot of advantages
and disadvantages for politicians. Through the pass of the year’s politicians have been changing the way to communicate with
their voters, politicians used to greet voters at the entrance of the stores or at the intersections of a busy town, giving
speeches in a hall or a parking lot. Campaigns have become more expensive through the pass of the years because now
what the politicians are using are the so called “advertising agencies” and “consultants” that are introducing more market
research and market strategies. These agencies invest a lot of money on research on each city, state and country. These
agencies are almost 100 percent sure who is voting for the republican candidate and who is voting for the republican
candidate.
Now there are different ways to communicate with the voters, one of these ways is via Internet. Many internet
users spend a lot of time surfing the web because either is their tool of work, they are students and need the internet or
because they just like to have fun playing video games on the internet, watching videos on youtube.com or downloading music
on the web. Today almost every person in the United States has a computer and an E-mail account, therefore one of the
strategies that the advertising agencies are using to spread messages through the internet is via E-mails. E-mails is one of
the best ideas that the advertising companies have ever came up with because that thing have had happened to me before.
When I open my e-mail account and start checking the people that have sent me E-mails I obviously recognize the people that
I don’t know and I check the subject of the message.
If I see something important or something interesting like politics, discounts something funny I would open them, but
whenever I open the messages I see advertisements from different stores like Macys, Sears, Dillard’s, Prada, DKNY, and
many more of these that supposedly they can give you a Prada purse or a pair of DKNY sunglasses for free, but to get this
product it is required to type your E-mail address in a little box. That is how
the advertising agencies get your E-mail and they start sending you all the information that the politicians want you to read.
Sometimes they need to send you the information because otherwise you will not read it elsewhere.
There are different reasons why viral marketing is used in politics; one of them is to send a message to people with
out
spending any campaign
money, because they have more expenses to make for example viral videos, or in the investigations that they do to get
information about the politicians that they are competing with. Politicians can appear on television and speak to the audience
telling them to send and E-mail to his or her E-mail account just to vote for something insignificant and then they will have your
E-mail.
Researcher examine campaign advertising and their effects on the public, scholars say that political advertising can
provide good benefits revealing important issues and information not available in the normal sources. One of the first studies
has shown that the assertion has not been consistent, but other studies have shown that citizens learn a lot of information
about their candidates and their positions just by viewing the TV commercials (Ridout 202).According to Travis Ridout there
are two broad categories for the past attempts to measure exposure to televised political advertising, and these are those
who rely upon people’s recall and those that attempt to measure the volume of messages sent. There is one company in the
United States called “CMAG” that takes in and code the advertisement data collected by using satellite tracking system and
collects the larger set of broadcast data. This company has the largest amount of political advertisement ever compiled.
CMAG has “ad detectors” in all of the 100 media markets in the U.S. with this software CMAG can identify each of the
advertisements and recognize if it is a political advertisement or not (Ridout 203).
In their research Travis N. Ridout, Dhavan V.
Shah, Kenneth M. Goldstein,and Michael M. Franzhas came up with six types of measurements of advertising exposure. The first
one is how many hours a day the respondents watch tv, the second one is the total of presidential spots aired in the
respondents media market sponsored by the candidates, other parties and interest groups, the third one is the hours of
television viewing times the total of political ads, the forth one is the measure of the different types of programs that the
respondents watch like local news programs, game shows, morning new programs, and day times talk shows, the fifth one is
the measure of the time that the respondents watch television for example (6-8 a.m.), (8-9 a.m.), (9-noon), (12-1 p.m.) (1-3
p.m.), (3-5 p.m.), (5- 6 p.m.), (6-7 p.m.), and from (7-10 p.m.), the sixth one is the Genre-based Measure that is depending on
how often the respondent watched television. These results led the researchers to the conclusion that the political
advertisements have a favorable effect on the viewers and that the advertisements give relevant information about campaign
issues.
According to Patrick Devlin the prices of the political campaigns have inflated with time, in his research Patrick
Devlin stated that Ronald Reagan spent more than 60 percent of federal funds on television advertisements, approximately
Regan spent 13 million dollars on television advertisements.Devlin says that one of the advantages of political advertising is
that they can be controlled by them; Patrick Devlin states that “Candidates may not be able to control what the opposition says
or does, or control what the media televises or print. But candidates, if they are properly financed, can control the message
and the image conveyed through paid television advertising” (45). Other advantage of political advertising is that the
advertisements can bring a relatively unknown candidate into the mainstream spotlight. Devlin says that it is less common that
candidates use that strategy in presidential campaigns than in gubernatorial or senatorial campaigns (45). As mentioned
before, advertisements can also be used to attack the opponent, Devlin stated in his research that in Regan’s 1980’s pollster
Vincent Breglio, maintained, “It has become vital in campaigns today that you not only present all of the reasons why people
ought to vote for you but you also have an obligation to present the reasons why they should not vote for the opponent” (46).
In the video “we are the ones song by will.i.am – Obama, advertisement agencies tried to make the video so relaxing that it
really make you feel and think about the message that they are trying to send you. The first time that I listened to the video, I
was thinking in what the actors were saying and I really felt compelled to vote, I felt that we had to support him for the greater
good of the country and our children or future children. On the video “hot4hill” that was supposed to be in response to the “I
have a crush on Obama” video, but I think both of the videos was a waste of money because I think that political campaigns
have to be serious and not like those videos that I really disapprove. I think that the Obama’s video “we are the ones” is the
video that really drew my attention and really made me think about the problems all around the world and the “I have a crush on
Obama” that one in the middle of the song she is singing the proposals that the president is trying to impose.
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