Presidential Candidates Tap the Keg of Youth

-- Rachel Wright

MySpace and MTV announced their collaboration on a never-been-done series of Presidential Candidate Dialogues in Los Angeles and New York, today. The popular culture, youth branding giants will host 11 real-time dialogues with the Democratic and Republican front runners for the 2008 Presidential election across the country, mainly taking place on college campuses participating in the MTVU program.

Democrats Senator John Edwards, Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and Governor Bill Richardson as well as Republicans Senator Sam Brownback, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Representative Duncan Hunter, Senator John McCain, Representative Ron Paul and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney have confirmed they will participate in the hour-long dialogues taking place throughout September and December of this year.

Ian Rowe, MTV spokesman said, “Each one of these dialogues is an opportunity for young people both on a college campus – as well as millions watching via a live stream on MySpace and MTV.com – to have a one-on-one, direct, unfiltered conversation with each candidate.”

While announcing the series, spokespeople for MySpace and MTV publicized the first dialogue to be held Thursday, September 27th at noon ET on the University of New Hampshire campus. Democratic Senator John Edwards (who has his own MySpace profile for those of us who are just itching to join his Top 8) will be the first candidate to take questions from young voters and politicos who can instant message, email or text the senator during the events which will be available live on MTV.com and MySpaceTV.

An interesting aspect of these dialogues is the Flektor instant polling tool that makes its debut on the series.

“We’re providing America’s youth with unprecedented access to the top presidential candidates by empowering them to ask live questions and respond with real time polling tools,” said co-founder of MySpace, Chris Dewolfe. “The integration of Flektor will add a new dimension of rapid response and at-home engagement – we can’t wait to see it all happen live and unfiltered.”

Read more about the dialogues here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/news/myspace.php
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/usa/news/article_1347013.php/Presidential_candidates_to_face_MTV_MySpace_grilling
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-19-2007/0004666054&EDATE=

Learn more about Flektor here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/15/myspace-to-acquire-flektor/