Mayoral candidates: Bring on the campaign videos

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/05/2014 (4151 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg lawyer-turned-wannabe-politician Brian Bowman jumped out of the gate Friday with a slick looking campaign video promoting his vision for Winnipeg and his campaign kickoff May 14.

The video, produced with the help of Winnipeg’s Coelement, features Bowman standing in what appears to be the top of the parkade at The Forks with the city’s skyline in the background (TV news reporters have long used that spot for their on-screen standups, it’s very pretty). The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is featured prominently behind Bowman. The video also makes use of a professional video producer’s go-to (and some would say overused these days) trick — the time-lapse.

Bowman is one of five candidates to register a bid for the mayor’s chair so far, but the first to launch a campaign related video. Former councillor Gord Steeves registered last week. He’s got a website set up, along with Facebook and Twitter pages, but so far no video elements that I could find.

Three other candidates are also registered, Michel Fillion, Mike Vogiatzakis and Gordon Warren. I haven’t found any video from their campaigns.

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be tracking how Winnipeg’s mayoral candidates are using video to help promote their campaigns. We can argue how much the use of video can actually contribute to the success of a campaign (comment on that topic below if you desire), but you can’t argue with the fact that using video to get your message out at least shows you’re engaged with the demographics that watch online video. According to YouTube, we watch over 6 billion hours of video every month. Albeit most of them are cat videos.

I’ve contacted the campaign teams for Brian Bowman and Gord Steeves about the use of video in their campaigns and will update this post when I hear back.

Update: I spoke with Brian Bowman who says he thinks it’s important that his campaign uses every communication outlet possible to get its message to the public and that includes video. Bowman tells me he plans to have lots of video in his campaign, but not at the same production value as this kick-off video, which his campaign paid Coelement to produce. He also says his team will be using infographics to further his message which is something he says has never been done before in a Winnipeg mayoral campaign. I’m a big fan of infographics.

Update 2: Bowman’s campaign sent me his first infographic. It’s a how-to on donating to the campaign – simple but effective. I’ll be more interested to see some cool stuff around his platform when it’s released, dollars and cents type stuff.