When we launched Personal Democracy Forum back in 2004, we posted a modest manifesto. It starts:
Democracy in America is changing.
A new force, rooted in new tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics.
Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader.
If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread.
Well, one more piece of that vision has come to fruition. Now, thanks to a new nonpartisan service called VoterVoter, you can not only be an ad-maker who spreads your ideas on the net. You can get your ad on television, without having to learn how to navigate the complicated world of TV ad-buying, targeting and placement.
“Historically this was too difficult for an individual to do,” says Eric Mathewson, the founder and CEO of VoterVoter, who spoke with techPresident yesterday. He’s right. But that’s changing. VoterVoter will take a user-generated ad, or work with the maker to get it into high-resolution video required for TV. It is also going to post all the ads that people are making, and enable anyone to sponsor an ad, choose where they want to place it, and help sponsors target by geography or viewer demographics. Any assertions made in an ad has to be documented, but other than that VoterVoter will impose no restrictions on what users can upload or sponsor.
The minimum required to sponsor an ad is $1,000, and the price increments rise rapidly from there, with VoterVoter taking a standard 15% fee. The company is a subsidiary of WideOrbit, an advertising firm that manages $10 billion in advertising., and this new service is built on top of its existing relationships with about 1,000 TV stations in the U.S. Mathewson clearly has his eye on a wealthier clientele, noting that “individuals in California alone spent $40 million on political ads in the last cycle.” Observing that such people are limited in what they directly give to campaigns, he expects that many users of VoterVoter will be independent players or institutions looking for a new efficient way to get their messages on TV.
That may well be, but I suspect VoterVoter’s real potential for growth will be in supporting the myriad of self-organizing political groups populating the blogosphere and videosphere. With a few tweaks to its platform, VoterVoter could become the ActBlue of political advertising. It would have to make it easier for individuals to visibly pool their money thru the site (rather than requiring one entity to pay upfront), and it would have to make visible usage statistics, so everyone could see which ads were popular and where they were being placed. But with those functionalities, it could help foster a lot more participation in one of the last preserves of the professional political consulting class. Imagine a group of bloggers who were trying to make a difference in a Congressional race, frustrated with their candidate’s official advertising, or wanting to hit her opponent with an independent attack ad. VoterVoter will make it a lot easier for online political activists to play the old media game, or perhaps introduce a whole new vernacular to political advertising on TV.
In our conversation yesterday, Mathewson admitted that he had not even heard of ActBlue, but quickly understood its significance. “We’ve talked about making this service accessibly to groups, in the future. And over time we will show more data about the ads themselves,” he told me.
This could get very interesting.
March 27, 2008