Event

Major political candidates spend more on television advertising than on any other facet of their campaigns. And currently, the world of television is undergoing a sea change. More people watch cable today than broadcast and by the end of the year about a third of all homes will have a DVR, with 60 percent of those skipping all television commercials. Meanwhile, more and more people are watching commercial TV on the web. These are amongst the many changes which compel us to Reimagine Video and signal The End of Broadcast.

To discuss all this, the New Politics Institute and NDN are bringing together leading private sector practitioners to discuss the profound and historic ways the ruling media of politics - television - is changing and how new technologies must be mastered to reach new audiences.

Joining us will be:

Todd Juenger, leader of TiVo's Audience Research and Measurement business, which provides detailed insight into how TiVo viewers consume and interact with television programming and advertisements.

Tara Walpert, President of Visible World, Inc., a company that uses new tools to customize and target advertisements so that the right message reaches the right audience at the right time.

Evan Tracey, the founder and chief operating officer of Campaign Media Analysis Group, the leading custom media research company for politics and public affairs advertising expenditure data.

Simon Rosenberg, President and Founder of NDN and the New Politics Institute.

We believe this event will provide you with a practical understanding of how to navigate the changing world of television and how to make the most effective use of new technologies. So please join us on Thursday, April 24, at 12 p.m., in the ballroom at the Phoenix Park Hotel, 520 N. Capitol St., NW, Washington, DC.

Please make sure to RSVP here. If you have questions, please contact Courtney Markey at 202-544-9200 or cmarkey@ndn.org.

Finally, be sure to hold the date, May 9, for The New Tools and New Audiences of Campaign 2008, a day-long event on how to best harness the potential power of new technologies and demographic shifts.

The emergence of a whole new set of rapidly changing media and technology tools and several important new audiences is helping create a new politics of the 21st century, one very different from the century just past. To help progressives adapt to these new developments, NDN and NPI have developed a set of powerful resources, including papers that will help you:

Go Mobile, Reimagine Video, Target Your Marketing, Leverage Social Networks, Advertise Online, Buy Cable Smart, Engage the Blogs, and Speak in Spanish.

Additionally, we've done a great deal of research on some of the most important new audiences of today's politics, including millennials, Hispanics, those who live in the exurbs, influentials; and have taken a good hard look at how America itself is going through perhaps its most dramatic demographic transformation in its history. As we recently wrote in a major magazine article, interacting with these communities in new ways has created a new politics that progressives can emerge from stronger than ever. In fact, progressives are already making great strides by starting out with an advantage in what we call the virtuous cycle of participation - the ability to build a community, raise money from it, then engage and grow it - which is further enabled through the use of technology.

To learn more about all of this, we've put together two great outreach events that will help you better understand both the new tools and the new audiences. First, our Reimagine Video: The End of Broadcast event will be on Thursday, April 24th. We'll hear top experts analyze the profound changes in the dominant media of politics to date, television, as well as the impact of cable and DVRs. Second, our New Tools, New Audiences event is on Friday, May 9th. At this day-long gathering, we're going to discuss the critical role the new tools and new constituencies played in the presidential nomination process and that they can be expected to play in the general election in the fall. We will then conduct practical breakout sessions that will focus closely on how each new tool might be used by advocacy efforts of campaigns and organizations, big and small.

As always, you can keep in touch with all of this on NDN's website, www.ndn.org, and blog, www.ndnblog.org.