Essay On Political Campaigns

Political campaigns in the 21st Century have changed over the past years, especially because of the growing presence that social media platforms have received in the everyday life of society.

But what are political campaigns? - Political campaigns are organized efforts that seek to influence the decision making process inside a country. Political campaigns in democracies mostly refer to the electoral process where representatives are chosen by the society (Unknown).

How political campaigns have been changed through the years will be clarified in the following. In the past, political candidates were focusing mainly on TV ads to get their political message out. But TV ads are an expensive medium because not only did the candidates have to pay for the crew, the producing and the editing of the ad, they also had to spend a lot on money on broadcasting this ad on TV.

In addition politicians have previously focused almost exclusively on election posters and campaign events, political parties had to rethink their campaign strategy in recent years and integrate additional media platforms due to the innovation of social media. But the old fashioned way of political campaigning has not disappeared completely. Political candidates are still including television ads that broadcast on TV and political posters in their campaign strategy, but they are also increased the number of ads published on their own Facebook pages or YouTube channels. This is because this way of advertising is less expensive and online ads are also less expensive in the production. Posting their messages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other social media platforms is for free, and a wider range of people have access to it. Before social media became this huge influ...

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...channel with related campaign videos (Aaker).

The Obama team used several media platforms to support his campaign. These are discussed in more detail below.

Firstly: barackobama.com

This is Barack Obama’s official website and it is run by Chris Hughes (he is one of the co-founders of Facebook) (McGirt, 2009). On the website, members and visitors were able to create blogs and form groups and post photos. But the members are asked to publish a profile with just one picture. During the 2008 campaign, more than 2 million accounts were created on the website, which shows the strong Internet presence of potential voters from the Obama camp. The groups formed on the website also organized events and get-togethers with other supporters of the Obama campaign (Brandon, 2008). Furthermore, millions of Dollars have been raised to support the Obama campaign through the website