5 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From Obama’s Victory
Despite nearly 8% unemployment, a tepid economy and millions of dollars in negative advertising, President Obama managed to pull off a sizable Electoral College win on Tuesday. While Obama’s 2008 campaign is now seen as a real-world demonstration of the power of social media, his operation four years later was much more complex. The ’08 campaign is the stuff of textbooks, but the lessons of ’12 are brand new. Marketers of all types studied Obama’s ’08 campaign and they would do well to take a look at his subsequent mobilization effort. Here are some of the obvious lesson of Obama’s triumph this time around: 1. It’s the Big Data, Stupid Big Data may have its flaws, but this election shows that it’s indispensable. New York Times columnist Nate Silver showed how crunching numbers can render most pundits’ gut instincts irrelevant. The Obama campaign proved the same for the marketer’s gut. As Time chronicled, the O campaign relied on a team of dozens of number crunchers who made predictive calls on exactly the right type of pitch to right the right type of voter. After consolidating its database into one megafile, the team relentlessly tested pitches based on the targeting and learned from its testing. As the article states: A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on which combination would raise the most money, and often the pools got it wrong. 2. Facebook Advertising Works There are lots of reasons to doubt Facebook’s assertion that ad units like Sponsored Stories are effective. For instance, the recommendation you see may be from a Facebook “friend” you actually barely know. You may find it creepy to see advertising intrude upon friendships as well. But in Obama’s ’12 campaign, Facebook worked. As Time detailed, the O campaign used Facebook to “replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers” on a mass scale. During the final weeks of the campaign, Obama’s supporters received pictures of their friends in swing states. They were then urged to click a button asking the swing state voters to register to vote, vote early or get to the polls. The campaign found that the tactic worked 20% of the time “in large part because the message came from someone they knew.” 3. All the Money in the World Can’t Overcome Bad Advertising Super PACs supporting Mitt Romney poured millions into swing states to convince voters that voting for Obama and other Democrats would be against their self interest. However, as Slate points out, many of these ads were crude and insulted the intelligence of targeted voters. For instance, a Super PAC attack ad against Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown “portrayed Brown as a demented cartoon, sitting at a desk with an […]
