When Steve Jobs held up the Video i, everyone I know thought it was pretty cool. $1.99 for the latest episode of "Desperate Housewives?" 75 hours of video to go? Gotta love it.
But what if you made your millions selling candidates on the theory that the only way to get elected was to spend millions, minus a small media fee of course, checks payable to Washington DC Consultant Inc, on television commercials, what do you do when three years from now, a lot fewer people are watching tv?
And all those newspaper ads campaigns use to run -- those aren't looking too profitable right now either?
Radio -- Sirius and XM are gaining listeners every day -- national radio advertisers have for the first time when asking customers what three radio stations they prefer, satellite radio now appears in the top fifteen -- meaning no radio commercials either.
Think, Consultant Boy, Think. Well, one can always hope.
But at least the question is valid. As the technology world continues to change, almost overnight, how will campaigns be run? How can a candidate communicate with voters? What does our future bring? Will candidates travel as much as technologies become better and faster?
Will candidates offer free content to anyone who has a device like a Video iPod? Will free downloads of speeches be offered to anyone with a regular iPod? How can we harness the growing power of instant messaging to drive communications?
Can we use the email capacity of new cell phones? Can we text message in our campaigns as they do overseas? How will our blogs develop and communicate? Should we have a real Democratic Convention in 2008 or a virtual one? If we have a real one, can we make the date 30 days before the election and spend our public finance money in weeks not months and have a virtual one earlier in the summer for organizing purposes?
Conference call technology is better -- video conferencing technology is better -- these incredible opportunities are spinning -- we need to harness them.
Ken Mehlman, a man I both intensely dislike and admire greatly, said that the campaign that controlled the Internet in 2004 would win -- he was right. The campaign that controls the next wave of communication developments in 2008 will win again, the only question is: what are they?