Wassup 2008
“Wassup 2008” was directed by Charles Stone III, It features Stone and several of his childhood friends – Fred Thomas, Paul Williams, Terry Williams, and Kevin Lofton.
From Facebook.com:
http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn#/group.php?gid=32436522444
“Wassup 2008†commercial spent around around $6500 according to Stone. All of the people that participated where volunteers and all sets where obscure public areas or private sets they used free of cost.
http://www.businessweek.com/
http://wassup08.com
This commercial sparked a conversation online concerning the election and the policies of both candidates.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/24/wassup-2008.html
The feedback from the community at boing boing was unusually positive. No racial comments or talk of not being qualified to hold presidency. there is a chance this may be censored. The worst comment was someone calling the movie propaganda.
http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=Qq8Uc5BFogE&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3DQq8Uc5BFogE
The first 16 comments where marked as spam.
these are the comments:
Leedster618 (6 days ago) Marked as spam ” *sigh* Funny but ultimately pointless…”
246forsale (6 days ago) Marked as spam “change fo-sho foo! cept that iss gonna be change fo da worse!”
gregarious24 (6 days ago) Marked as spam “Funny commercial, but what a crock.
Barack Obama will not fix the housing crisis, or the credit crisis, or the Iraq War, or natural disasters.”
fallinsk8er (6 days ago) Marked as spam “Vote for communism…er…Obama!”
ImTheDarkcyde (6 days ago)
Marked as spam
“1) It’s closer to socialism, 2) would you care to explain why that’s a bad thing, or would you rather just insist it’s bad because the mccaniac said so?”
BrianElstad (6 days ago) Marked as spam
“lol it’s more like
Outoftouch/religiousidiot ’08”
More of the words used in the comments section include: WHORES 4 THE BANKERS , Assassination , race war, muslim/terrorist/space alien, Rome, IMMIGRANTS, Hitler, satan.
Positive comments included the words:
Speechless, 6 stars, FUCKING EPIC, FTW, High Art, Internet 100 , mcCain 0, Obama is Hope, Funny, Awesome, Amazing, well done, just to name a few.
after the 40th comment, the comments stopped being labeled ad spam.
ohsnazbot (6 days ago)
“people posting anti-obama comments for an obama video. YOU’RE SO EDGY!”
Eventually negative comments concerning race and advertising methods/ propaganda came up, along with Socialism, Communism and making references to Hitler.
priorzola (6 days ago)
“CONGRATULATIONS tool you are the 1 billionth neo-con use of the HITLER analogy to date”
The question now is; can everybody do what Obama did the week before the elections of 2008 (buy 30 min time slots on most of the major the networks except ABC?) in 2012 election?
Obama’s Half Hour Campaign Ad
“More than 33.5 million people watched Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s half-hour prime-time political ad Wednesday night, according to Nielsen Media Research.” – Rebecca Dana from the Wall Street Journal
“According to papers available at CBS’s headquarters in New York, the campaign agreed Monday to pay $961,000 for the entire 8-8:30 pm time period. It wasn’t clear whether that was in pattern, meaning it would run across all time zones at that period.
NBC will sell Obama the half-hour time buy for $891,250 gross and $775,000 net, according to documents from NBC available at its 30 Rock headquarters.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
production cost range is estimated around $4 to 5 million range.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/29/campaign.muscle/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
Around 400 bookmarks on the delicious web site when this was written.
http://delicious.com/search?p=wassup+2008&u=&chk=&context=main&fr=del_icio_us&lc=0
The “Wassap 2008” video received a substantial number of views in the first five days of its life on Youtube. According to Viral Video Chart over 3 million viewed it.
* Discovered 24 Oct 2008
* 3,282,186 views
* 14 duplicate videos
* 1,141 blog posts
* 9,086 comments
These numbers show a big shift in media consumption and viewership that will definitely re-shape the way the politicians communicate their message in the future.
“I Got a Crush…On Obama” By Obama Girl
this video came out in June 13, 2007.
According to Viral Video Chart these are the number of views:
Discovered 14 Jun 2007
10,354,031 views
1 duplicate videos
1,748 blog posts
55,942 comments
cost: $2,000.
http://www.adrants.com/2008/06/obama-girl-could-take-the-white-house.php
The bottom line is that video content being created and distributed by means of email1311, social web sites and mobile web browsing, shows that the landscape is changing for media distribution.
Barack Obama’s campaign spent around 10 million dollars in air time purchases and production costs to air his 30 min. television Ad.
The ad ended up reaching 33.5 million viewers.
This is roughly around $0.30 average spent per person to see the Ad.
Ben Relles spent around $2000 on the original Obama girl video and to date, the video has been viewed by around 10 million people, that’s around $0.002 average spent per person.
Charles Stone III spent around $6500 for his “Wassup” video and reached 3 million people in a week. That is an average of $0.0019 spent per person to view the video.
The numbers are clear indicating that traditional media has a new competitor. Presidential candidates, organizations and individuals have a new medium of broadcasting a message with out the need to spend large amount of money. The effect of the conversations that occur in the “comment sections” of the social web sites where the videos are hosted is unclear. But we are gaining ground on the effect of these social interactions on the web.
So far McCain has spent $10,855,000 and Obama has spent $17,445,000 on Advertising. One thing that the candidates have not done, is to call upon the power of the people to create content to support them. It will be interesting when user generated content begins to out-power content generated by presidential campaign funding. This phenomenon is already taking place but it is hard to quantify due to the lack of data available to analyze.