The Yes We Can Video and How It Changed Campaign Media

Ask people who followed the 2008 race to name one piece of online campaign video and most will say the same thing: the black and white "Yes We Can" clip with celebrities singing along to a speech. Far fewer can explain why it worked, who actually made it, or what campaigns took from it afterwards.

The Yes We Can video was not produced by the Obama campaign at all. It was a supporter project, released on YouTube on February 2, 2008, three days before Super Tuesday, and it showed how a piece of fan-made content could carry a campaign message further than any ad the campaign paid for. Here is how it came together, what it got right, and where its legend gets overstated.

How the Yes We Can video was made

The source material was Barack Obama's concession speech after the New Hampshire primary on January 8, 2008. He had lost to Hillary Clinton by about two and a half points after polls showed him ahead. Instead of a short thank-you, he gave a rhythmic speech built around a repeated line, "Yes we can," drawing on the history of abolitionists, immigrants and civil rights marchers.

The musician will.i.am, of the Black Eyed Peas, said the speech stuck with him for weeks. He wrote a melody to sit underneath the words and recruited director Jesse Dylan to shoot it. The production moved quickly. Over a couple of days in Los Angeles, a group of musicians and actors, including John Legend, Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, Common and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, were filmed against a plain white background, mouthing and singing the speech alongside footage of Obama himself.

The finished piece ran about four and a half minutes. It was posted to YouTube and to will.i.am's own site, and from there it spread by email, blogs and the still young social networks of the time.

Why the format worked in 2008

Several design choices made the clip unusually shareable for its era.

It used the candidate's own words

Nothing in the video was invented. Every line came from a real speech, so viewers were not being sold an ad slogan. That made it feel closer to a tribute than a commercial, and it lowered the guard of people who would have skipped a paid spot.

It looked nothing like a political ad

Campaign TV in 2008 still meant flags, swelling strings and a narrator. The Yes We Can video used black and white footage, split screens and a quiet acoustic guitar. It looked like a music video, which is exactly where its audience was spending their time on YouTube.

Famous faces, but not in charge

The celebrities did not explain why you should vote. They simply repeated Obama's sentences. That kept the focus on the speech and let viewers who did not know half the cast still follow along.

Perfect timing

Releasing it on the Saturday before Super Tuesday, when 24 states held contests, meant the clip peaked during the most crowded news week of the primary. Supporters had a reason to send it to friends that weekend.

The numbers behind the clip

Exact view counts are hard to pin down because the video was copied across many accounts and sites. By most reports, the main YouTube upload passed several million views within its first week, and combined views across platforms were reported in the tens of millions within a few months. In 2008 terms, that put it among the most watched political videos ever posted online.

It also won a Daytime Emmy for New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment, an unusual honour for something that started as a volunteer project.

What campaign video teams learned from it

The clip changed how campaigns thought about speeches. A strong speech was no longer a one-night event for cable news; it was raw material that could be cut, scored and remixed for weeks. That idea now drives the way staff cut one speech into fifty campaign clips for different platforms.

It also proved that supporters could produce better persuasion content than staff, at least for certain audiences. Campaigns started building toolkits for volunteers: approved footage, logos, speech transcripts and music they had the rights to use. The idea was simple. If fans are going to make videos anyway, give them clean material and let them run.

Finally, it showed the value of YouTube as a primary channel rather than an archive. The same year, the CNN YouTube debates let voters ask questions through uploaded clips, and both moments pushed campaigns to treat online video as a front-line medium.

The counter-take: it did not win anything on its own

You will often read that the Yes We Can video "helped win" Super Tuesday or even the election. I do not think the evidence supports that.

On Super Tuesday itself, results were close to a draw. Clinton won California, New York and Massachusetts; Obama won more states but the delegate count was nearly even. If a single video had swung voters at scale, February 5 would look different.

What the clip did was more modest and more useful. It energised people who already leaned toward Obama and gave them something easy to forward to friends. That matters, but it is a turnout and enthusiasm tool, not a persuasion machine. The campaign's real advantage came from its field organisation and its small-donor fundraising, which ran for months before and after the video.

The lesson for anyone studying campaign media today is to separate reach from impact. A clip that gets 20 million views mostly among existing fans can be less valuable than a 30-second spot that reaches 200,000 undecided voters in one swing district.

How to watch it today with a critical eye

If you revisit the Yes We Can video now, a few questions help you see it as a media artefact rather than a nostalgia trip:

• Who is the intended audience? Notice the young, music-oriented cast and the absence of policy detail.
• What is left out? There are no issues, no opponent and no call to register or donate.
• Would it work on today's feeds? It relies on sound, runs over four minutes and has no captions burned in, all things modern short form editors avoid.

That last point is a useful comparison with current practice. More of our writing on campaign online video traces how those habits developed.

Frequently asked questions

Who made the Yes We Can video?

It was created by will.i.am and directed by Jesse Dylan, with a cast of volunteers from music and film. The Obama campaign did not produce or pay for it. It was an independent supporter project.

What speech is the Yes We Can video based on?

It uses Barack Obama's concession speech from the New Hampshire primary on January 8, 2008. He lost that primary narrowly to Hillary Clinton, and the speech was his response to the result.

Did the Yes We Can video win an award?

Yes. It won a Daytime Emmy in 2008 in the category for new approaches in daytime entertainment. That was a rare honour for an online political video at the time.