The Ultimate Marketing Challenge
Running a Presidential campaign must surely be the ultimate marketing challenge. First of all you have to run against your colleagues in a nationwide campaign, then you have to run against your opponent in another nationwide campaign. This will take around two years and to be successful you’ll have to spend 100s of millions of dollars, made up of all of your own money but mostly made up of other people’s. Oh, and they’ll want some kind of payback for their efforts. In the process every aspect of your life will be dragged up and exposed, small errors you make will be magnified and after all of that effort you’ll probably lose.
Previously the campaigns concentrated on combining the candidate’s constant touring (generating free media) alongside a large pay-for TV spend on ads. Two shifts in the 2004 campaign however, have started to changed this, the first is Karl Rove’s pyramid approach to getting the vote out and the second was Howard Dean’s grassroot’s campaign.
Karl Rove was convinced that Bush would have a won a larger majority (hey, or even an actual majority) in 2000 if more Republicans had come out and voted. He spent the intervening years creating a pyramid of 300,000 supporters, based around an MLM-style strategy. The interesting thing he accomplished was that he developed a leadership structure that combined individuals with strong organisational skills alongside those who had a faithful belief in Bush. This strong connection was encouraged by them receiving notes and little gifts from the President making them feel a true part of the campaign. This meant that when they were called on months later they were already primed to do the work. In other words he worked to create a true social network that could be used when required.
Howard Dean accomplished something similar, albeit with a different methodology, though unfortunately he was less successful. Dean started off as an outsider but caught the imagination of voters, many of which were young, by talking about healthcare and fighting special interests and the Iraq war. He also took his fight online, being one of the first candidates to start a blog and openly chronicle the campaign. This created a true connection with supporters and let him generate $50m, but most impressively the average donation was just $80 showing him to be a truly different candidate and not bank-rolled by big corporate interests. Had he gone on he would have been able to solicit further donations from these supporters (the limit is $2,000) powering the campaign to the next stage. With an internet campaign his customer-acquisition costs were also much lower than traditional campaign’s expensive mail-outs.
The power of these voter-networks have not been lost on 2008’s candidates - Tom Vilsack, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden have all got blogs and links to themselves on MySpace, Facebook and even party social networks like PartyBuilder. Taking their candidacy to where their voters exist is a good idea and will help them cut through to new voters. Using sites like YouTube to host videos, rather than publishing them on their own sites (as Hillary has done) potentially lets those video messages break out of the tight political circles and once again bring new people to their campaigns. However, even with the best will in the world, the danger is that these efforts will end up being just bandwagon jumping rather than truly leveraging the power of social networks.
Someone that’s doing something very different is Barack Obama. Already tipped as one of the leading presidential hopefuls, Barack has only just opened his Presidential Exploratory Committee. However, compared to other candidates, his number of public engagements is small and his web activity is quiet.
The Democratic National Congress have just held their winter jamboree where all the potential candidates jockeyed for position. Placards, merchandise and loud music played a large part. However Barack eschewed all of that and just did a good speech - he still got five standing ovations and was regarded as one of the best performers.
As anyone who’s been at the receving end of numerous band requests on MySpace, you know you’re in a powerful position when people reach out for you to follow them, however it also instantly reduces the amount of interest you have in them.
Through being authentic, Barack has the opportunity to ensure that come the right time he’ll be able to create a strong Rove-esque passion-led network rather than one that’s just merely supportive. I’m sure the eyes of all the other campaigns will be on him.