From Barack Obama to the marketers, with love!

Barrack Obama has inarguably created history by bringing about his hands-down win in the US president ship elections through his much proverbial fund raising and risk strategy. Leaving behind the likes of Nike and Apple to be voted as the "Advertising Age Marketer" of the year, Obama has perhaps completely transformed the nature of the American electoral campaigning for the future.

So what was the big deal about Barrack's Campaigning? Here are the revealings-

1. A brilliant combination of Digital, Direct and TV ad strategy.

2. The game of MILLIONS- Over $640m of funds, $188m TV ad Blitz, 3.1m contributors,5m volunteers,100m page views of Youtube videos, 2.2m "fans" on Facebook page, over 1m on his official campaign website.

3. 1 in every 10 Obama voters literally transformed into his "Brand Advocates".

Unprecedented, isn't it?

Obama's win, or rather his journey towards it, is not less than a case-study per se. Here are some defining rules straight out of Obama's digital marketing playbook that are reputed to take marketing to an altogether new level.

• Define Goal, Build Strategy

For Obama's campaigning team the goal was clear to get-the-votes-out and the strategy was to be integrated digital marketing with the help of supporters who will lend money but also effectively campaign to help register voters.

The Hub-and-spoke model was followed where the hub,My.BarackObama.com, popularly called MyBo, saw traffic pouring in from various spokes including referral email marketing, You Tube videos,online search and display ads,official pages on dozens of social networking sites along with tactical campaign sites including Fightthesmears.com.

MyBo also had an online Spanish phone banking tool due to which registered volunteers could make calls in Spanish. Barack was targeting Hispanic vote bank with this measure.

Email marketing was the backbone of the campaign. The team built an extensive database where cards carrying name,email id,address and phone number were handed out and collected in all the rallies.

• Bond with the Best

The first step what Obama did after deciding onto contest for the election was to assemble a passionate team of marketing minds which included the Co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes.

The best minds brought about the best strategy, which more importantly clicked with the voters' passion. My.BarackObama.com, popularly called MyBo, was formed where supporters could create profiles, blogs, join local groups, set up personal fund raising pages based on their personal target.

The language of the online campaigning was informal, friendly and personalised. Creative campaigns like Viral marketing drew tremendous response; the Obama girl video series is touted to have had 60m views on YouTube. "Yes we can" video caught 11m eyeballs.

• Change the Rules where need be

Dumping the hitherto prevalent and conventional methods of campaigning, Obama chose to embrace the Web 2.0 by investing in digital tools, designed messages that instilled a feeling of empowerment of every voter(Yes we can, not Yes I Can).

Where Hillary Clinton thought she had acquired enough margin from her rivals after garnering support of her party's fund raisers, Obama tapped on the power of the small size donors by unleashing his digital campaigns.

• Decentralise to Empower others

The entire Obama campaign was a de-centralised campaign by nature. It followed Obama's credo that "change comes bottom-top rather top-down". Voters list(traditionally guarded by the campaign headquarters) was made accessible to volunteers. With this they could download local phone numbers and addresses in order to make calls or distribute promotional materials.

With this acquired freedom volunteers became more creative as a result of which AnObamaMinute.com was put together in New York,challenging others to harbour donors to donate $1m in 1 minute.

• Meet and foresee Customer Expectation

Obama's digital team released a new widget for the iPhone. There were ads placed in online games(for the first time ever).Obama has acquired over 33000 followers on Twitter apart from the other staggering social networking figures stated at the beginning of the write up.

• Translate "online networking" into "Action"

Remember Howard Dean's fateful loss where he couldn't translate his online networking and popularity into votes; Obama's campaign made sure he won't suffer the same.

The volunteers were encouraged to use a clear online user path-

Register on the site

Volunteer your time

Contribute

Tele-call,organise local events

Basically, get out the votes.

It proved to be quite successful. There were 20000 groups comprising of tango dancers, air traffic controllers and what not,which could be used to win support for legislation post-election.

• Checkmate the game

The reason for Obama's success lies in the fact that his campaign never strayed away from its fundamental purpose-"get the votes out". Obama supporters signing up for with the candidate,received text messages and emails(containing phone number to find their polling station) during the elections,reminding them to cast their vote.

The iPhone widget was capable of sorting the contact lists according to the state each person on it lived in.

Obama's marketing lessons coax all us marketers to behold the digital medium by overhauling our marketing tool kit. The cybergenic era awaits us.

Will the Financial Crisis affect Internet Marketing ?

It's been quite some time now that I wrote out. Nobody has been untouched by the ongoing global recession and precisely this is why I am compelled to pen about it in my blog.

Of late we've seen a crashing stock market, sky rocketing fuel prices, unemployment epidemic, horrendous real estate market. But they say the financial crisis has just started and the globe is beginning to realize the potential consequences of what has been happening to the stock market, which means there are more far-reaching, disturbing fall-outs in-store.

So amidst all the global instability, the question we are analyzing here is that will the credit crisis affect the online marketing ?Or will we see demise of the PPC advertising?

The good news is that the PPC economy is going stable. The search is being practiced healthily which is giving an expanding marketplace for advertisers. Infact the US online advertising is slated to grow 22.7% for the year 2008. It is also speculated that the economic descent might even create some unique PPC advertising opportunities. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, the UK Internet advertising spend recorded an increase of 21% in the six months to reach June 2008. Here, search marketing was the biggest contributer followed by display and other forms.


There's Henry Blodget's, the man behind the Silicon Alley Insider, views coming in that the new interactive media formats exhibit less recessionary effects when compared to the traditional media forms. And that the advertising spending on these new media does not decline during or after any recession, it simply grows less quickly than usual days( this trend was observed in context of television and cable advertising during the recessions of the 1950s and 1990s respectively).
Per Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, the last thing that an advertiser would do in times of downturn is cut spending on search-backed marketing as accountability in these times, matters.

Let's face the facts and examine how good or bad things really are. Here's a lowdown on Google's last quarterly earnings release. Google has reported revenues of $5.37 billion for the last quarter for its AdWords search marketing program (an increase of 39% when compared to the same quarter a year earlier). This clearly suggests that advertisers are still willing to disburse money on Google.

It wouldn't hence be unsafe to state that the search marketing industry is recognizably stable owing to its very nature. Infact the measurability factor is so high in the Internet-based marketing that not only it beats the traditional forms but in times of crisis it also emphasizes on proving the RoI, thus making it the safest mode of advertising for businesses looking to go stable during any economic downturn.