Subject: Poll: More voters watch video online
From: "Molly Magarik" <[email-masked]>
To: "Jim Smith" <[email-masked]>, "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Mike Donilon" <[email-masked]>, "Kaufman Ted" <[email-masked]>, "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>, "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>, "Josh Alcorn" <[email-masked]>, "Alan Hoffman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 07:56:02 -0400

<http://www.politico.com>

*Poll: More voters watch video
online*<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/poll-more-voters-viewing-video-online-103826.html>
 By: Emily Schultheis

Voters increasingly are ditching live television in favor of streaming
shows and movies on their smartphones or tablets, according to new research
commissioned by digital firms and shared with POLITICO -- findings that
suggest campaigns need to embrace new types of advertising to reach them.

The survey, conducted for Google, the GOP digital outfit Targeted Victory
and the Democratic digital group Well & Lighthouse by the Republican firm
Public Opinion Strategies and the Democratic consultancy Global Strategy
Group, indicate that reaching key voters -- especially young people,
independents and minorities -- will require campaigns to think beyond the
typical 30-second live TV ad.

"This is the point where you can no longer say people aren't watching video
online," said Targeted Victory co-founder Zac Moffatt, who ran Mitt
Romney's digital operation in 2012. "Campaigns have to write budgets that
reflect how people are watching video."

Other than watching live sports, almost a third of voters -- 29 percent --
said they had not watched any live TV in the past week. That figure is even
higher among younger voters: Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 43 percent didn't
watch any live TV over the past seven days, and 40 percent of 25- to
34-year-olds said the same.

It's also higher among key demographic and ideological groups: Thirty-eight
percent of self-identified independents said they hadn't watched live TV in
the last week, as did 32 percent of moderates and 36 percent of Hispanic
voters.

Asked how they watched video content in the past week, 70 percent said they
watched live TV; 46 percent watched on the Internet from a computer; 45
percent watched a DVD; and 44 percent watched recorded programs on a DVR.

The poll is further evidence of a shift in the way voters get their
political information -- and suggests that campaigns that advertise only on
broadcast TV will miss important and growing swaths of voters.

Most campaigns now include some digital component in their advertising --
running ads on Google or other social media sites, and buying video ads on
places like YouTube -- but change has been slow. Consultants who work on
digital strategy have long been working to persuade campaigns, which are
reluctant to stray from the TV-ads-only strategy that's been the norm for
so long, to shift more of their budget to digital advertising.

"I don't think it's about replacing television, but it's really about
expanding the channels that campaigns use to reach voters," said Julie
Hootkin of Global Strategy Group. "Many voters continue to be reached
through television, but there is a growing slice of the electorate who
campaigns ultimately need to communicate with -- and those people are
reachable through other channels."

As fewer voters watch live TV, the poll found, more of them are looking to
nontraditional video delivery systems. Twenty-seven percent said they
streamed video content in through their TV, 26 percent said they watched on
a smartphone and 26 percent said they watched on a tablet. Those
percentages are all at least 10 percentage points higher than they were in
June 2012.

The trend toward less traditional video viewing platforms is in large part
due to the rapidly increasing number of voters who own smartphones and
tablets. Two-thirds of those surveyed own smartphones, an increase from 48
percent in 2012. Fifty-four percent said they own tablets, up from 32
percent in 2012.

A quarter of those surveyed said they'd watched some sort of video
programming on a tablet in the past week -- almost double the percentage of
those who did so in 2012. Also, just over half of likely voters said they'd
visited YouTube within the past week.

The poll surveyed 800 likely voters Jan. 25-28 and has a margin of error of
plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.

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