Your Brand and a New President
Change is definitely in the air, but don’t get overzealous about transferring the mobile marketing success of Obama’s campaign on to your brand. Here’s what I mean by that. Did the campaign strategists for the 44th President of the United States do a great job with their mobile marketing strategy? Absolutely! Who is going to argue with nearly 3 million text messages sent to an opted in audience announcing Obama’s choice for vice president? But they also were working with a strong and growing brand – and they utilized many different channels of communication.
They just happened to do an exceptional job of linking everything together – from TV advertising to You Tube to a mobile Internet site to print advertising to out-of-home advertising to mobile banner ads. From my POV, they did exactly what smart marketers do – they took a 360 degree approach to communicating the story of their brand AND they gave the audience every opportunity to interact and stay up to date from the beginning of the campaign to “post purchase/vote” and through the inauguration. They also happened to collect a lot of valuable data and insight along the way. So before leaping onto the mobile bandwagon, you might take some lessons from the holistic approach of the Obama campaign and then hopefully, your audience will vote as enthusiastically for your brand as they did for our newest President.
January 28th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
[For the purpose of full disclosure, I want to note that I work for Distributive Networks, a DC-based mobile technology company that powered the Obama campaign's mobile marketing efforts.]
Scott, I think you make a very good point — brands should not expect to easily emulate Obama’s success. Further, stand-alone or add-on mobile marketing campaigns are not nearly as effective as integrated campaigns that strategically and opportunistically weave mobile into the marketing mix.
Obama’s campaign understood this from the beginning, invested in mobile early, and incorporated learnings from successes (and failures) with great agility. Ultimately, with the run-up to the VP announcement, the Obama’s mobile marketing efforts reached a tipping point and truly went mainstream. I think the Obama campaign demonstrated the potential of mobile better than any brand or organization had until that point.
Now it’s up to marketers, agencies, and creative thinkers to embrace the mobile channel in the same way that we have embraced other mediums, and to explore opportunities for using it as a means to help brands engage their audiences.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
The good news is that the success of a presidential campaign’s use of mobile should be the definitive signal to CMO’s everywhere that the channel has gone mainstream — and therefore it must be considered an essential part of the marketing mix. My only point was that more often than not, it isn’t as effective as a stand-alone effort but rather an integral part of a broader communications strategy. That’s not to say it can’t be the most significant part of it — but that all depends on your brand, your goals and who you’re trying to reach.