Richard Kosinski, Yahoo's VP for political advertising
with
Don Schechter
Richard Kosinski says political advertisers are good at generating community, and he discusses how the Internet has restored the basic dialog that the United States was founded upon.
Transcript: Richard Kosinski, Yahoo's VP for political advertising
I think the challenges that we face in the political advertising arena is that more than 90% of our customers are not going to be our customers come the election for the primaries February 5th. So what we have to do is we have to help presidential candidates get as much traction in the marketplace as possible, so they can ultimately go on to win the nomination, and hopefully, go on to win the White House.
I think the role of the advertising agency is evolving to provide more full services. There is a lot of discussion about the content that advertising agencies are creating. In the case of political advertising what we re finding is that some of the advertising agencies that have worked with candidates whether they be presidential candidates all the way down to dog-catcher have not really utilized the internet other than maybe doing some fundraising. So the real opportunity for advertising agencies as it relates to political advertising, is to really understand the power of the internet and how to use it to raise money, to build a base of supporters, and then to activate people to go out and vote.
The challenges that political advertisers have are not too dissimilar from the challenges that corporate advertisers have, the only difference I will say is that political advertisers are very good at building communities. That s what politicians are great at doing. Ideally, if you build enough people in your community, they re going to take you on to win your elected position that you ve been working so hard for. The challenge that corporations face -- having worked in the business to business arena for the last 18 years -- is the notion of how do you use the internet to activate communities. Corporations generally are not very good at building communities, certainly not as good as politicians. But, what we are starting to see on the private sector, on the corporate side, is corporations looking to identify users or identify consumers that will fall into a specific type of community and then have the opportunity to message to those consumers again and again. So it s not just a one-time conversation but an ongoing conversation back and forth between the consumer and the corporation.
Innovation in political advertising is actually something very simple. The innovation in political advertising today, or I should say the innovation with the internet is that the internet is actually bringing politics back to the people where people are communicating whether it s across town or across the nation or in some cases across the world. So it s bringing our communities together, it s allowing them to give and take, to discourse and debate, which is what the United State of America was founded on. So sometimes the innovation actually is something that happened a long time ago.
I think the biggest thing that keeps me up at night is are we evangelizing and educating political consultants and candidates as to the power of the internet media? That is something that doesn t matter what company you come from if you are in the internet space it s the same type of thing that kept many of us up seven years ago in the online channel. So the biggest thing that keeps me up at night is do people understand and believe with all of their power how the internet can work for them and will they actually put their budgets there.
