Google Sponsors the Obama Presidency
Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.
Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.
President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.
Is YouTube the new presidential Seal? You can’t see the whole american flag on the screen, but the YouTube logo is in tact and on the screen 100% of the time during the first video.
What the average american, and perhaps reporter, doesn’t realize is that uploading a video to the internet is fairly simple. You don’t need Google, you don’t need YouTube, you simply need something to convert it into flash format and a rudimentary flash application to play it. You can even let people embed it — it’s embarrassingly simple for even the most mediocre of webmasters.
What’s next? Will he be flying on the “Virgin America One”, calling Putin on a “Verizon Hotline”, or maybe his motorcade will look like a NASCAR with a Valvoline and Penzoil paint job? Is the internet a series of Tubes again? I *thought* Obama would be the internet savvy president, but I was wrong.
In an embarrassingly small disclaimer, the Obama adminstration notes that they are making the video available on Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Nice. What about the hundreds of other video networks and video services? This is an outrage. Obama should have posted the video in it’s raw form and let whoever pick it up who wishes.
Keep the brands out of my government.
Don’t make me regret my vote.
Tags: Google, Sponsorships
7 Comments
November 17th, 2008 at 8:26 am
You’d prefer multiple platforms? So he throws video on collegehumor, homestarrunner and the Onion: people around the world (including millions of Big-A americans [sic] ) still watch it on YouTube. Pick a broader-reaching, existing channel. Now Obama won’t need a webmaster at all, mediocre or otherwise.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:30 am
No, I’d prefer the raw video, or video in a non-branded player.
And while we’re add it we can have the next election on PollDaddy — we won’t need all those pesky ballots.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:00 am
You’re forgetting average Joe-Six Pack, who has no idea how to play a 17GB .vob file. You don’t HAVE to get your news from YouTube, just like you don’t really need Opie & Anthony to hear a fart joke.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:06 am
If Obama’s team is savvy enough to have a twitter bot, they are certainly capable of uploading a mp4 to their website. Leave it up to the video sites or users to put it on their site.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Does that also mean that Obama endorses Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn?
Does Obama endorse CBS because they were allowed to interview him?
In short, no. It means the Obama campaign/transition team use the tools and methods at their disposal for promotion.
By suggesting Obama simply offer out a video file, surely he should therefore use his own press release distribution service, his own servers to host his web site, his own version of twitter to engage tech-savvy voters.
I see you’re using WordPress. Does that automatically mean you endorse WP? No, it doesn’t.
November 18th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Wasn’t “change” a big part of the platform he ran on? Change from getting away from being purchased by the corporations out there? Doens’t he have enough clout to create and post his messages on an unbranded site?
This is the president of the US and his videos certainly should not carry a brand on them. At a minimum, the embedded versions on sites outside of YouTube should not carry the YouTube logo.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
They didn’t have to use youtube here:
http://www.barackobama.com/tv/