Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Dec 30, 2008, 09:45AM

The numbers are in

The Internet has surpassed newspapers for the second most relied on source for news.

What will that mean for campaigns?:

Traditionally and for various good reasons, campaigns have been very centralized, command-and-control organizations.  As campaigns learned how to exploit the communication economies of scale offered by mass media, this centralization and message control made a lot of sense.  However, this advertising arms race has led to undifferentiated playbooks and commercial saturation, so we've probably reached the end of those efficiency gains.

As the internet becomes more and more influential, we're going to have to break this path dependency on broadcast distribution.  After all, TV and Radio are not the same thing as "advertising".  Can this personal paid media model could be done on radio, television and newspaper advertising?   Google is trying to do it.   Voter Voter does it, as well.   But it hasn't really taken hold yet, perhaps because the dominant broadcast media are centralized distribution channels.

The internet is not a disruptive force for campaigns because it is a new distribution channel, but because it is a decentralized distribution channel.

Discussion

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