A Conversation with former Digital Politics Guru Nicco Mele- Has the Internet Really Changed the Game?

In our next interview we talked to the former Webmaster of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, Nicco Mele. While working for the Dean campaign, Nicco helped pioneer the use of social media in political campaigns to fundraise. After the campaign, Nicco co-founded a digital strategy consulting firm called, EchoDitto, that offered service to non-profit and corporate clients like Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Sierra Club. Nicco is currently a professor at Harvard where he teaches graduate classes on the Internet and politics. His book, The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath explores the consequences of living in a socially connected society. In our interview, Nicco questioned whether the Internet had transformed political campaigns and the film industry for the better. He referenced three books that he teaches in his Internet and Politics class to outline how the Internet has impacted political campaigns: The Move On Effect by David Karpf, Taking Our Country Back by Daniel Kreiss, and Victory Lab by Shasha Issenberg.

The first book Nicco discussed in our interview was The Move On Effect, which proposes a three-pillar theory for running an effective digital political campaign. Nicco recalled,

“One is build a big email list. You need a big email list because people live overwhelmingly in their inbox. The average American spends more than 30% of their time in their inbox… The other thing about email is that it’s measurable and repeatable and you can build behavior models to increase interaction. You can’t do that on Twitter or Facebook. If I tweet something I have no idea if you saw that tweet or not and so I can’t go back to you in a contextual way to tell you a greater story. Whereas with email I know if you opened the email, I know if you clicked on it and I can build a model to deal with you.”

“The second core pillar is online community. Karpf talks about this pretty exclusively in terms of blogs but I think it is a much broader decision besides just blogs. Online community is some sense about feeding the most rabid people in your community. The care and feeding of evangelist is essential in online success.”

“The third pillar is online/offline. Politics is really a face to face business and you really have to be able to use the Internet to drive people to meet face to face.”

Nicco also mentioned that to be successful at these three things, you need a nimble operation that contains a willingness to take risk, has strong analytic skills and aggressive in measurement. “Part of being successful on the internet is taking advantage of when things go viral. But who knows what makes things go viral? That’s obscure and impossible to measure. So you have to try a lot of things hoping some of them go viral and you have to measure them so when something starts to go viral you can poor gasoline on the fire and then you have to be able to measure that.”

Nicco then contrasted Karpf’s three-pillars theory for running a digital campaign with a list of 5 key elements that go into running any campaign (regardless of its digital component)

   1) Raise money    2) Have a message    3) Communicate the message through media    4) Deal with press    5) Field or turnout operation

Examining the list, Nicco posited that perhaps the internet has only had a significant impact on one of those elements: Raise money.

“It’s fundraising and that’s where both Dean and Obama broke through. They used the Internet to build an alternative vehicle for fundraising. And the message is still crafted with polling. The message is still delivered by television… And I bet if we made a list of the 5 essential elements of pulling off a film we could figure out how the Internet or digital changes those things. Pretty clear Kickstarter and Indiegogo, etc., are having some impact on the funding of films. Although exactly how much impact and whether it’s good is a big question for me.”

This causes us to wonder if the only thing filmmakers can really learn from the Dean and Obama campaigns, as far as digital goes, is that the internet makes it extremely easy to raise money. However, the Obama campaign was known for recruiting a historic number of volunteers to knock on doors and make calls for the campaign, and many of these volunteers were recruited through offline phone calls and one-on-one meetings with organizers on the ground -- not email. However, translating money into action is usually harder. Nicco pointed out that out of the approximately 6 million people who donated to Obama’s campaign in 2008, only approximately [400,000] people or around 10% made phone calls to their members of Congress to support Obama’s signature healthcare bill 8 months later. Nicco noted,

“There is this bizarre paradox which has probably never been true in American or maybe human history which is [that right now] giving 100 dollars is easier than doing anything else. Which is kind of lunacy and probably bad for democracy. It is definitely not healthy.”

Nicco is suggesting that although the internet has made it easier to contribute to political and film campaigns than before, it has not had a significant impact in motivating people to take action in politics or in film. For example, an astonishing 80% of Kickstarter films that get funded are social issue films, but how many Kickstarter donors volunteer to bring about meaningful change for the social issue film they donate towards?

This led Nicco to draw a contrast between the internet, which he views as an intentional medium and TV, which he defines as a persuasive medium.

“From a political tactical perspective, TV is persuasive in a way that the internet isn’t. I think the reasons are: 1) the internet is intentional and requires focus and television is not and the second thing is just scale and repetition. Television’s reach and scale still dwarfs the internet and everyday it’s shrinking. But I could buy commercials on 300 television channels and effectively reach two thirds of America. And to reach two thirds of America the online ad buy is essentially inconceivable [as far as] what would be required, and probably practically impossible. At that equation of scale and repetition is where TV trumps the internet. And the gap is so giant that TV could decline for 10 years and still be a more effective way in reaching people in a mass media kind of way than the internet because the internet simply isn’t mass media at all.”

In this quotation Nicco offers 2 insights about the new media vs. old media. 1) The Internet causes people to dwell overwhelmingly in the present. This leads to people not caring about traditional narrative structure -- everything from reality TV to how it influences the message. 2) Television is still the most effective way to persuade and reach a mass audience since TV networks and shows have a much larger audience than websites. Although the audience for TV is steadily decreasing, it will take a significant amount of time for websites on the Internet to pass viewership on TV.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our conversation with Nicco causes us to wonder if online organizing is perhaps not the most effective platform for driving people towards action. Although the Internet has been proven to be an effective tool for fundraising, the intentional nature of the medium results in people searching for ways to contribute through small actions like donating instead of offline action like volunteering for a cause. From our experience working on the Obama campaign, complementing online organizing with old fashion door knocking, phone calls and one-on-one meetings played a key role in motivating supporters to act beyond just simply donating online. This makes us wonder if filmmakers should consider how offline meetings or phone calls with their online supporters could motivate the audience to get involved in distribution beyond just donating or watching a film. We plan to explore what approaches are most effective for building offline relationships with audience members in order to propel them towards the action of distributing films in future posts.

A Conversation with Kate West and Jacob Perlin about Grassroots Distribution and Exhibition

We recently interviewed Kate West, who is the Managing Director of Artist Public Domain, and Jacob Perlin who is the Director of the Cinema Conservancy. The mission of Artist Public Domain is to support independent cinema through three core programs: Production, Cinema Conservancy and Education.  The Cinema Conservancy is a branch within Artist Public Domain that focuses on releasing and preserving film projects that have historical and social significance and for some reason have slipped through the cracks of traditional exhibition networks or venues.  What makes Artist Public Domain and the Cinema Conservancy unique from other production and distribution companies is that their main objective is to enrich culture through supporting independent film instead of serving their own commercial interests.  For example, if there were a hot film in Sundance, they would not try to distribute the project since it would probably have a conventional distribution run at the hands of more traditional distributor. In our conversation Kate and Jacob encouraged independent filmmakers to think of grassroots distribution as not only social media, Kickstarter, YouTube and blogging, but also as grassroots exhibition.  Jacob pointed out,

“If you can get your film on the screen in Hartford Connecticut at like Cinestudio, which is a traditional audience, yeah they are going to have a built in audience and then you can use grassroots to get people there. But another way to do it is you find a non-traditional venue that is more in tune with what your film is… I think the future will be about identifying other types of venues that aren’t necessarily only movie theaters.”

Often filmmakers spend a significant amount of their time and resources trying to get their films into a straight-up movie theater when a more unconventional venue might appeal more to their target audiences and require less effort.  For example, in our case study with Jay Craven, he attracted new audiences that normally would not go to the movie theaters by screening his film in school auditoriums and gym’s that were more accessible to people living in rural towns across New England.

Kate noted, “Maybe the issue is not finding your distributor but finding your audience.”  The advent of digital screenings has made it easier and cheaper for non-traditional venues to setup their own screenings. A good venue can save thousands of dollars on P & A and the countless hours it takes to convince a conventional distributor to screen your film.

However, with so many screening options it can be difficult to determine the best venue for your film. This may be especially true when the filmmaker is unfamiliar with a city. Jacob raised the possibility of creating a network of organizers in different regions who are familiar with the non-traditional venues available to screen films.  Jacob stated,

“You have to have someone on the ground. I think some type of affiliated network where there is someone representing different regions who have more knowledge about it. Like for instance, if you have a [certain kind of] film in New York the goal is Film Forum because it gets the biggest best audience.  But what happens if your film doesn’t get in there? Well the traditional thing was always you open your film in Manhattan because Manhattan is better than Brooklyn but that isn’t the case anymore. Also, do you open your film at BAM or Nitehawk?  Someone outside of New York is not going to know the difference…there are so many iterations that only someone here could know and advice a filmmaker.”

From our experience working on the Obama campaign, field organizers played a critical role in communicating the most effective places to have staging locations that were accessible to volunteers so they could make calls and canvass for the campaign.  Similarly, a network of organizers could help filmmakers determine the best place to screen their film at inexpensive costs and appeal to their target audience.

This led Jacob to consider the possibility of making information about movie venues more transparent so filmmakers could know ahead of time what exhibitors are worth their time to pursue. Jacob reflected,

“Think about it, you’re a filmmaker and you have one person on your team who is doing all this.  Do you want them to spend 10 hours trying to get the film to play in one place where you’re never going to get the money from? Or do you want them to spend that 10 hours trying to set up other things.  There’s certain venues, why wait?  Or just try another venue in that town.  There’s no reason it shouldn’t be public. If it would take two bookings in the amount of time it takes to do that one booking, that’s the kind of information that should be known.”

One could imagine a website similar to Yelp where filmmakers rate and review different exhibitors.  This would help filmmakers determine if screening their film at a certain venue will play to their target audience, and match the time and funding they have available for the screening.  The website would also keep exhibitors in check and more sensitive to the filmmakers needs for screening their film.

Conclusion:

Our conversation with Jacob and Kate reminded us of how important it is for independent filmmakers to consider non-traditional venues for screening their movies.  As Jacob noted,

“I think that everyone is just so wrapped up in the idea that they want to have their film in the theater where the lights go down and the trailers come on and everyone has popcorn, [but] that’s just not going to happen any more. With the screens left, the stuff that is going to be dominating the screens is going to be major stuff like Fox Searchlight.”

Many renowned filmmakers have talked about how the film industry is crumbling; most recently Spielberg talked about the industry crashing because even big budget movies that dominate the box office are tanking. What if the future of independent film isn’t in movie theaters, TV or on Netflix but in the non-traditional venues that Kate and Jacob are using to distribute independent films for Artist Public Domain and Cinema Conservancy?  This of course would require organizers who are experts in non-traditional distribution to set up screening venues. In future posts we plan to explore how the grassroots volunteer structure of the Obama campaign might be able to support a system of grassroots exhibition so independent filmmakers no longer have to rely on traditional movie theaters to screen their movies.