CASE STUDY OF EFFECTIVENESS

THE BARACK OBAMA CAMPAIGN

BRAND CAMPAIGN LAUNCH CATEGORY RESEARCH STORY CREDITS DATE

Barack Obama US Presidential 2008 January 2007 Politics Paul van Veenendaal, SMM Wizard & Author ViralBlog.com Igor Beuker, Founder Grupo LaComunidad & Author ViralBlog.com All credits go to Barack Obama and his campaign team 29 January 2009

TODAYS PROGRAM
ITS A NEW DAY

OBAMA ARCHITECTURE LACOMUNIDAD CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISING UGC Q&A

New School Marketer Brand Interaction Why We Love Obama Insights & Details Show me the money Examples Peer Learnings

Barack Obama The New School Marketer

advertising never started a movement

How can I become one of them?

Interact and Listen? Yes I can!

Marketer

The Trialogue

Consumers

powered by the web, not advertised on it.

Obamas Campaign Team

The Brand Engagement Architect

Chris Hughes (24) a co-founder of Facebook, left the company to develop Senator Barack Obamas online & social media marketing architecture

Obamas Stairway To Brand Heaven

Identity Brands

Brand Interaction

Brand Interaction

Brand Interaction

Branding

Brand Interaction

Brand Interaction

Brand Interaction

Why Do We Feel Connected To Obama

The Decision Makers

The Target Audience

Grupo LaComunidad On A Mission

About Grupo LaComunidad

Brand Interaction
Triple Play Proposition

LaComunidad creative brand interaction agency ViralTracker SocialMedia8 video tracking power technology social media marketing agency

Grupo LaComunidad is part of WPPs global network per March 2008

Brand Interaction Strategies

Social Communities

Rating Video Seeding Feeding

Contest

Sign up

Micro Site / iHub

Post

Tune-in Opt-in

View Video

Webi Sodes

Custom Video Legend

Free viral dynamics

Niche Community connected to campaign liking

Weblog

Forum

Quiz

Post registration viral dinamics

Participation, engagement and advocacy:

peers and friends will spread the brands message

new future brand offerings

Viral Video Tracking

Social Media Marketing Programs

Conversational & Buzz Tracking

Influencer Identification Research & Outreach

Brand Teams & Fan Programs

Community Building & Product Peer Groups

Strategic Social Media Planning & Buying

Natural Seeding & Social Media Optimization

Paid Seeding & Social Media Advertising

Social Channels & Viral Widgets

Triple Play Proposition

YES

VIRAL VIDEO

SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING

NATURAL SEEDING

REALLY VIRAL?

REPORT

NO

PAID SEEDING

Road To Democratic Nomination

The Republican Candidates

Duncan Hunter , Mike Huckabee, Jim Gilmore, Mitt Romney, Sam Brownback, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain

Not in picture: Alan Keyes, Fred Thompson

The Democratic Candidates

Mike Gravel, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton

Road to Democratic Nomination (1)

To become the Democratic nominee for president, a candidate needs to capture 2,026 delegate votes.
In the fall of 2007, the DNC said it would not count Florida and Michigans pledged delegates because the states violated party rules by scheduling their primaries prior to February 5 The Democrats had 26 debates, nearly all more than one hour long, and all but one of them with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. December 2007, Oprah endorses Barack Obama January 3, 2008: Iowa caucus Obama wins Biden & Dodd drops out on January 3, 2008: get less than 1% January 8: New Hampshire Primary Clinton cries & wins Richardson drops out on January 10, 2008 after lackluster showings in the first primary and caucus contests January 15 & 19: Clinton wins Michigan Primary & Nevada Caucus Kucinich drops out on Thursday, January 24, 2008 January 26: South Carolina Obama wins January 30: John Edwards drops out

Road to Democratic Nomination (2)

To become the Democratic nominee for president, a candidate needs to capture 2,026 delegate votes.
Obama receives endorsement of Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy Wil.i.am releases Yes We Can Song on February 2, 2008; viewed 50+ million times to date! Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. Obama wins 13 of 22 states: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, and Utah. Obama wins 11 states in a row! Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington State, Virgin Islands, Maine, District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, Hawaii & Vermont. Clintons 3 AM commercial backfires girl in ad is Obama supporter March 2008, Mike Gravel drops out Clintons wins Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island; Obama wins Wyoming and Mississippi Obama disavows Reverend Wright A More Perfect Union in Philadelphia (viewed 7M on YouTube) CBS Broadcasting caught Hillary lying about her trip to Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1996. Obama wins Guam, North Carolina, Oregon & Montana & Edwards delegates & Superdelegates June 5, 2008, Obama wins Democratic nomination 2229.5 vs 1896.5 delegates

Democratic Polls: Obama vs Clinton

Democratic & Republican Candidates & Web 2.0

Blogs on Candidate Web sites Presidential Candidates on MySpace
June 2007

Grassroots activity by Candidate Comparing Candidates: Engagement and Participation

Number of Opportunities to Engage and Participate on Web sites

THE OBAMA STRATEGY

Presidential Marketing Campaigns

Barack Obama Marketing messages
Hope, Change we can believe in

John McCain
Country first, The original maverick

Offline marketing channels

TV, radio, print (including candidates books), direct mail

TV, radio, print (including candidates books), direct mail

Online marketing channels

E-mail, display, organic and paid search, in-game advertising, mobile, social media

E-mail, display, organic and paid search, social media

Budget

$150 million in Sept 2008 alone

$ 84 million (public funds)

Marketing strategies

Energize young voters; spread optimism and hope; emphasize McCains similarities to Bush

Energize the right wing; attack Obamas weaknesses; emphasize experience and military service

The Presidential Election 08

The most expensive in US history!

More voters than ever before Largest age gap between Democratic and Republican candidate ever Strewn with controversy Internet and video become major factors

Obamas 50 State Strategy (1)

A fifty state strategy is a political strategy which aims for progress in all states of the United States of America, rather than conceding certain states as "unwinnable".
Obtain 270 Electoral votes Soldify wins in Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Florida Keep every state won by Kerry in the 2004 election Top priorities in battleground states Voter Registration Helping elect Democrats down the ballot Build grassroots organization in every state

Going up in television early in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia
Stick with issue spots vs McCains attack spots Install confidence within the people Use attack spots only in states with very small margins Focus on small donations

Obamas 50 State Strategy (2)

Campaign Expenditures

Expenditures in Target States (in millions)

Swing States Leaning States 10% 10% 50%

40 35 30 25 20 15

Other States
Other Campaigning

10 5
0

30%

BarackObama.com

Main body of text is like a blog

My.BarackObama.com = Do-It-Yourself Citizenship

My.BarackObama.com deconstructed

My. BarackObama.com Dashboard

My.barackobama.com allows users to join groups, connect with other users, plan events, raise money, write own blogs and volunteer. Basic tools for grassroots organizing at your fingertips!

My. BarackObama.com Activity index

My. BarackObama.com Personal Fundraising

My. BarackObama.com Event finder

My. BarackObama.com Neighbor to Neighbor

My. BarackObama.com Voter Script

My. BarackObama.com Phone Banking tool

Innovations Widgets

Geared toward getting out the vote

Innovations Fight The Smears

Innovations In-game advertising

For weeks Obama ran in-game ads in 18 games such as Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360 across 10 battleground states. The Obama campaign paid Massive Incorporated $44,465.78 for online advertising in early October.

Obama Everywhere

Obama has gained 5 million supporters in other social networks.

Obama maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers. On Facebook, where about 3.2 million (during the campaign) signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007. It was so effective at energizing college-age voters that senior aides made it an official part of the campaign the following spring. And Facebook users did vote: On Facebook's Election 2008 page, which listed an 800 number to call for voting problems, more than 5.4 million users clicked on an "I Voted" button to let their Facebook friends know that they made it to the polls.

My.BarackObama.com Statistics

On MyBarackObama.com, Obama's own social network, 2 million profiles were created

In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned About 400,000 blog posts were written And more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created - at least 1,000 of them on Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy

McCain vs Obama on the web (1)

Engagement and Participation

During the primary-election examination, the Obama Web site focused heavilymore than that of any other candidate from either partyon engaging supporters and motivating them to turn their enthusiasm into on-the-ground, grassroots activities Both campaign websites offer two ways of facilitating user engagementallowing people to communicate with the campaign, personalize their own pages, and sign up to receive information updates For most of the summer, however, many of these features on the McCain site were not yet operational. They are now up and running. The McCain website offers customization tools through McCainSpace, a feature advertised as early as 2007 but not fully functioning until August of 2008. As late as August 1, the only option was to create a personal pageand even that was still not really working. That page displayed only a generic note that the page was under construction and they would notify us when it went live. As that page went live, McCainSpace also launched additional customization features. Users can now post McCain videos, pictures and blogs to their home pages, and with a few clicks send any of that material out to users of 25 different social networking sites.

McCain vs Obama on the web (2)

Engagement and Participation Both candidate websites offer targeted information to people of different demographic groups. Both websites offer RSS feeds and let users sign up to e-mail updates. Since the primary season, Obama has added mobile phone text updates to his list of delivery options. Neither candidate offers podcasts of campaign information, something only a few candidates offered during the primary season.

McCains missteps: astroturfing

Asking supporters to cut and paste talking points into blog comment threads in exchange for prizes? Its bribing, not authentic and undermines what social media are all about. See www.womma.org for Word Of Mouth Marketing Code of Conduct!

Hope. Change. Action

Obama YouTube Channel

McCain YouTube Channel

YouTube

Obama
Videos Views Subscribers Special features of YouTube page 1,827 120,479,084 149,258 Contribute to campaign via Google Checkout; link to YouTube page on barackobama.com

McCain
330 25,995,773 28,343 Find events; host events

Politicians on YouTube

YouTube Views
Barack Obama John McCain Ron Paul Mike Huckabee Mitt Romney John Edwards

# of Videos
Rudy Giuliani Dennis Kucinich Mitt Romney Ron Paul Barack Obama 0 500 1000 1500 2000 # of Videos

YouTube Politicians Top 10: 4,496 videos generate 189,011,052 clip views!

Presidential Race Online Video Summary

Barack Obama attracted more female viewers than John McCain Barack Obama is pulling in more younger viewers while McCain is pulling in a slightly older bunch which is to be expected. Barack Obama has over 300 Millions more clip views than McCain

Facebook

Facebook Statistics

Official Members/Supporters in largest group

Obama 5,066,446*

McCain 583.518*

Number of Wall posts

Special features of profile page**

572,383

none

Videos, find out where to none vote, register to vote

* Unofficial group One Million for McCain/Palin has 200,251 members Unofficial group One Million Strong for Barack has 986,470 members

** Beyond basics like Posted Items, Events, Discussion, Wall posts

Data from February 4, 2009

LinkedIn

Flickr

MySpace

Obama has more MySpace friends: nearly 6-to-1

Twitter <3 Obama

With 109,892 followers, Obama is the #1 Twitterholic McCain with 4,402 followers doesnt break the top 100

Online Advertising Obama

Search The Obama campaign spent $3.5 million on Google search in October 2008 alone. Yahoo collected $673,000 during the same month.
Social Networks The campaign spent $467,000 on Facebook in 2008, including $370,000 in September 2008. $61,000 went to Black Planet. Only $11,000 went to MySpace spending in 2008. Media $138,000 went to BET.com Time Warner spending totaled $337,000 before October. Politico, $145,000 WashingtonPost, $100,0000. NBA.com, $21,000 in September 2008 Weather Channel, $108,000 all year. Through ad network Centro, the campaign spent $630,000 on local TV and newspaper Web sites before October. Another $100,000 went through Cox. Ad networks: The campaign spent $600,000 in 2008 on Advertising.com, Collective Media, Undertone Networks, Burst Media, Quigo, DrivePM, Pulse360, Specific Media, and online video networks Broadband Enterprises and Tremor Media.

30 minute TV Commercial

Text Messaging & Mobile

A million people signed up for Obama's text-messaging program On the night Obama accepted the Democratic nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, more than 30,000 phones among the crowd of 75,000 were used to text in to join the program Supporters on average received 5 to 20 text messages per month, depending on where they lived -- the program was divided by states, regions, zip codes and colleges and what kind of messages they had opted to receive. On Election Day, every voter who'd signed up for alerts in battleground states got at least 3 text messages

E-mail

Obama's opt-in e-mail database contains upwards of 13 million addresses

Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels (people who gave less than $200, for example, or those who gave more than $1,000). In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes. Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont governor Howard Dean had 600,000.)

iPhone Application

Brand Obama - Segmentation

Brand Obama - Segmentation

DEBATES OBAMA vs McCAIN

Obama vs McCain 1st debate

Obama vs McCain 2nd debate

Obama vs McCain 3rd debate

DID OBAMAS STRATEGY WORK?

Yes! Obama makes History!

AFTER THE ELECTION

Change.gov

YouTube Weekly Address by President-Elect

Also available on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN.

Whitehouse.gov

Obama Mania: IKEA

Obama Mania: Quaker

FUNDRAISING

How Obama Reinvented Campaign Finance

3.0 million contributors 6.5 million online donations 93% less than $100 $80 Average online donation $500 million raised online

Fundraising over Time: Obama vs McCain

Fundraising Barack Obama

(source: OpenSecrets.org)

Average Spent per Vote Raised $532,946,511 Spent $513,557,218 69,447,084 = $7.39 per vote
(source: Wikipedia)

Fundraising John McCain

(source: OpenSecrets.org)

Average Spent per Vote Raised $379,006,485 Spent $346,666,422 59,925,610 = $5.78 per vote
(source: Wikipedia)

Media Breakdown Obama vs McCain

VOTER GENERATED CONTENT

Hillary 1984

Vote Different http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

Obama Girl

"I Got a Crush...On Obama" By Obama Girl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

Tina Fey

Sarah Palin aka Tina Fey on SNL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jukzu_dMuPk

Paris Hilton For President

Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad http://tinyurl.com/parishiltonadvert

Will.i.am - Yes We Can

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

Wassup 2008

Wassup 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE

Obama vs McCain Dance Off

Obama and McCain - Dance Off! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzyT9-9lUyE

YouBama.com

1,542 Obama Flickr Groups!

Hope Poster by Shepard Fairey

Obamacon Me

What can Brands learn from Obama?

Have a clear goal, organise and plan ahead

Be positive and optimistic Project success before youve made it Be proud of where youve come from Embrace new technology, go to where people are and on their terms Be inclusive & unifying and create a sense of shared involvement Create advocates & empower them to spread the word

Dont be afraid to ask for commitment

Obsess about the detail & use it to have an honest dialogue Be relevant and local Speak your mind and assert what you believe and keep it simple (Yes We Can vs Just Do It)

10 Reasons Obama is The Man!

He looks cool on T-shirts

He inhaled and we quote That was the point Opposed invading Iraq before it became fashionable He can BALL Whats the alternative? McCain? I love my Grandpa too, but seriously, President Grandpa? Michelle Obama is smarter than the last President & VP combined (and cuter)
Princeton University, Harvard Law School, Assistant to the Mayor in Chicago, VP of U of Chicago Hospitals

He can spell D-I-P-L-O-M-A-C-Y (thats a start) His campaign is financed by THE PEOPLE 3,000,000 individuals contributed and that aint bad (most ever) He can remember the difference between Shiites and Sunnis CHANGE its been a long time coming

Brands That Have Embraced The Obama Way

Starbucks

A Social Media Marketing Program

0. Brand Assessment within the Social Space (track conversations about brand, products, services, competitor)

1. Identification of Social Influencers (identify right people on the right topics)

2. Outreach to Social Influencers (invite them to participate in online community)

3. Turn Influencers into Brand Advocates (build online community and engage influencers)

4. Full Year Conversational Tracking Program (track conversations, sentiment, insights on brands, products, services in target markets)
Grey = one off activity Green = community building and ongoing eCRM (optional) Orange= ongoing activity (i.e. 4 to 6 reports per year)

Campaigns And Program

Product launch 1

Product launch 2

Product launch 3

Product launch 4

smm campaign supports: smm campaign supports: social media marketing campaign supports: social media marketing campaign supports: social media marketing program supports: Time

product launch 4 product launch 3 product launch 2 product launch 1 brand revitalization process

The Impact Of SMM Programs

Change? If Obama Can

You Can!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

LETS DRINK, LISTEN AND SHARE

CONNECT CONNECT

Paul van Veenendaal Igor Beuker

paul@socialmedia8.com igor@lacomunidad.nl