Today marks the end of what might well be the e-campaign of the decade: Barack Obama's race to the White House. In part I we took a look at fundraising, the Barack Obama website and data mining. Part II focused on the use of social networks and mobile. In this third and final part we will take a look at how the Obama campaign handled email and advertising.
You've got mail
Where the Obama campaign cleverly knew that the social web is no broadcasting tool, they also know that email is. The team collected email addresses throughout the course of their campaign (more than 5 million!) and used them to bring specific tailored messages across, be it looking for volunteers, asking for donations or informing.
In part I, we already talked about the use of data mining tools. And these tools also powered the Obama email marketing program. The Catalist voter database and tools were used to locate sympathetic voters and target them with individually tailored messages on issues that are predicted to be most important to them. It allowed them to market Obama in different ways for different kinds of voters: I'm green, like you. I'm outraged about Guantánamo, like you etc. From email analytics they learned when people opened the Obama emails to look for the best possible timings to deliver the messages.
The last days before the election, the amount of emails sent notably went up, with the Obama team mainly looking for volunteers and the McCain team ... for money.
Advertising
In the field of online advertising, the McCain team mostly focused on (cheaper) search advertising whereas the Obama team bought more banner impressions. Obama did however use search engine advertising to fight Internet rumors about his religion. A Google search for "Barack Obama Muslim" returned an ad asserting "Barack Obama is a Christian. Get the facts at his official site".
A number of ad facts:
- In 2007, Yahoo! got the lion's share of presidential campaign ads that year (32%)
- Google has created an "elections and issue advocacy" team that is helping the candidates pioneer ways to target voters more specifically
- In one February week alone, Obama invested $1 million into AdWords. That is as much as George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry combined spent on Adwords during the entire 2004 presidential election.
- For the entire day on October 1, Obama's election machine placed ads nationwide on every Facebook homepage
As far as TV ads go, they don't seemed to matter as much as they used to. Voters are discounting advertising. Nevertheless, on October 29, Obama aired a 30 minute TV ad in prime time. The campaign "infomercial" forced a 15-minute delay in the FOX network's broadcast of Game 5 of the World Series, and was estimated to cost nearly $4 million.
Furthermore, the Obama team tested with in-game advertising on X-box Live, making it even possible to start the registration process right from the game console.
The day after tomorrow
Whether Obama will be elected or not, his campaign has left him with an invaluable wealth on information. According to McIntyre, a Republican and former chief national spokesman of the NRA, the data entered by 800.000 names on MyBO alone may be worth as much as $200 million. They'll give hime an independent power base, a permanent tool to use to promote his agenda, pressure Congress and assure reelection.
And if he's not elected? According to Obama's Campaign online privacy statement, it reserves the right to "make personal information available to organizations with similar political viewpoints and objectives, in furtherance of our own political objectives." So they'll be caching in on the information one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the way electoral campaigns are rolled out has been changed forever. Obama's team proved that you don't need to be dependent from a small number of large funders any more. It proved that you can run a successful 'bottom-up' campaign by plugging in to existing networks and making clever use of the available tools and channels. It proved that you can largely (but not completely) bypass traditional media. And it also proved that the people have been given a voice and that sometimes that voice can be pretty unpredictable.
Of course, Obama had the advantage of the current climate: more than 50% of the Americans are getting their political news online, +60% have a broadband connection at home, the rise of online community websites, ... But in any case, if you asked me, this definitely was 'the e-campaign of the decade'.
