Monitoring Television in Hillary Clinton's
Race to the White House

October, 2008

Part of the Hillary Clinton Campaign's strategy in her race for the Democratic nomination for President was to monitor television media to stay informed of campaign news and the media's reaction to her campaign's platform. To make their media awareness practices efficient, The Clinton Campaign needed a centralized system that would allow multiple staff members to easily search, edit, and share relevant media coverage.

The Old Way
To monitor media coverage on issues surrounding her campaign, The Clinton Campaign:

Used a combination of VCRs, captures from streaming video, a DVR and a clipping service
Had 4 full-time researchers, as well as senior staff, who all needed a quick and easy way to access and search for TV media coverage; the de-centralized system was time consuming and disorganized
With limited storage capacity, they couldn’t record as much television as they needed to be effective in their TV media monitoring efforts
TV clips sourced from clipping services were delayed ~8-12 hours after their airing, which prevented The Clinton Campaign from being able to respond quickly and appropriately

As Bryan Pagliano, IT Director, explains, "We used a combination of VCR, captures from streaming video, DIRECTV DVR and a service where we could purchase clips. The big downside to the service was that clip delivery was delayed about 8-12 hours after its airing." The Clinton Campaign needed a faster, easier and more centralized system for their staff to be able to monitor media effectively.

The SnapStream Way

The Clinton Campaign found their solution with a 10-tuner SnapStream Enterprise TV server. Their switch to SnapStream Enterprise streamlined their media awareness practices. Improvements included:

Centralization: SnapStream’s Enterprise solution gave the Clinton Campaign a “one-stop shop” for their media awareness efforts.
More Storage: Previously, The Clinton Campaign would have to juggle multiple recordings on VHS recorders. The 10-tuner Enterprise server gave them the ability to record 4 channels 24 hours per day, seven days per week, leaving the other 6 channels available for one-off recordings - making it much easier to manage recordings and avoid conflict and missed recordings.
Quicker response: Previously, searching for specific topics required listening to hours of recordings; but with SnapStream’s search technology, The Clinton Campaign was able to quickly and accurately pinpoint media mentions with a quicker turn-around time – allowing them to react appropriately to media coverage.
Less Physical Space Needed: Recording and archiving recordings digitally eliminated banks of VHS tapes and recorders.

The Clinton Campaign's switch from a combination of VCRs, DVRs and clipping services to the SnapStream Enterprise server greatly improved their effectiveness and timeliness in reacting to issues in the fast-moving and complex world of political campaigns. According to Bryan Pagliano, "If one of our senior staff heard of a clip or something someone said on TV, our research team could deliver a reference within hours of receiving the request. We did not have to depend on interpretation or hearsay or wait for the reference, thus allowing us to react appropriately."

Figures

Figure 1: The Hillary Campaign on the trail.