CCT356-Critique

President Obama’s presidential campaign was not the first to employ online advertising and marketing as a tool. However, it was the first campaign to use online marketing to such a great degree, and it made an indelible impact on future political campaigns—not only in the US, but throughout the world. As Stirland states, “Technology [the Internet] has been a partner, an enabler for the Obama campaign” (Stirland, 2008). This critique looks at some of the marketing techniques that were used, why they were good, and how they could be improved.
 * Online Marketing in Obama’s Presidential Campaign **

The backbone of Obama’s online campaign was its use of Social Media as a mode of garnering ‘would-be’ voters, and organizing existing voters. Facebook and MySpace played a great role in helping Obama build relationships with the people supporting him. Not only did Social Media allow Obama to bond with his supporters, it allowed him to generate funds online at an unprecedented rate. Even more notable was that it was all grass roots fundraising, and not corporate.
 * Social Media **

Social Media enabled Obama to exploit “crowdsourcing”—outsourcing work to crowds of people. Crowdsourcing is a popular term today, but it was not so in 2008. Obama’s campaign technologists, with the vast network of ‘friends’ on social networking sites, give each person a small campaigning task, be it advertising in a high school or telling a neighbor. Individually, these tasks would not make a difference to the campaign, but millions of small tasks would leave a pretty big dent. And apart from getting people to do tasks for free, online donations primarily from social network users generated about half of all the funds for the entire Obama campaign (Isikoff, 2008). During one particular 24-hour period, the Obama campaign raised as much as $1 million (OpenSecrets, 2008).



There were some innovative tools that the campaign could have employed, but didn’t, or did so but sparingly. One tool would have creating an interactive Facebook app, which is technically not so hard. The other tool would have been to use Twitter to its full potential. Though the campaign did use Twitter, it was only sparingly and “his campaign was pretty late jumping in on Twitter” (Mashable, 2007).



Email was also used heavily throughout Obama’s campaign. The campaign used several popular mailing lists to get Obama’s message across. These messages sent to the mailing lists were tailored to the target audience, as will be discussed in the next section. Detailed surveys that helped the campaign learn of peoples ‘tastes’ were sent as emails (Madden, 2008). In one case, there was an accusation by the National Shooting Sports Foundation that the Obama campaign had illegally obtained its media mailing list.
 * Email Campaign **

Targeted advertising is nothing new. An ad that is not sent to the ‘right’ target customer will be far less effective than an tailored to a customer that has more potential. The technologists behind Obama’s campaign realized this, and tailored updates, ads, and calls for help to a smaller, pinpointed audiences, as opposed to a single, untargeted audience (Madden, 2008). For example, they understood that the MySpace market was dominated by teenagers and high school students, and might have sent out messages that address issues that are pertinent to high school seniors. All of this targeted marketing allowed the campaign to be far more efficient, and generate “more bang per buck”. That is, if the campaign expenditure for online marketing was $20 million, that was a targeted, concerted $20 million.
 * Highly-targeting Advertising **



At least two “mini-sites” were created for the campaign, in addition to the main site. The first one was the “Fight the Smears” campaign, which, among other things, dispelled the rumors that Obama was a Muslim, or that he was not born in the U.S. Because of the inherent viral nature of online social media, the website and message reached millions of people very quickly (AFP, 2008). The other site was the “Israel for Obama” site, a site which was created by the Jewish Alliance for Change. The group heavily employed YouTube and Facebook key tools in their projects. They created videos with endorsements from Jewish officials and the general public in support for Obama, and uploaded them onto YouTube. According to Ira Forman, the executive director for the National Jewish Democratic Council, it was the most extensive campaign involving the Jewish community that she’s seen in 35 years (Eisner, 2008).
 * “Fight the Smears” and “Israel for Obama” **



Political campaigns, not-for-profits and corporations have realized online marketing potential through Obama’s campaign. Many organizations have jumped on the online marketing, and in particular the social media, boat. But it is unlikely that many political campaigns will achieve the same level of success as Obama. This is mainly because the “market” will be saturated, and everyone will be using social media. It won’t be a competitive advantage any more.
 * Summary **

//Bibliography// Stirland, S. (n.d.). Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology.//Wired//. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/obamas-secret-w/ Summary data for Barack Obama. (n.d.). //Fundraising Profile Barack Obama//. Retrieved February 8, 2011, from http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?id=N00009638 Isikoff, M. (2008, October 4). Controversy Over Obama's Small Donors. // Newsweek //. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from [] Madden, M. (2008, July 16) Barack Obama's super marketing machine. //Salon.com//. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from http://salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/16/obama_data Nicole, K. (2007, April 27). Obama Does the Twitter. //Mashable//. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from http://mashable.com/2007/04/27/obama-twitter/ Obama hits back at Internet slanders. (n.d.). //Agence France-Press//. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5juMJpMhCS5TDzEF2Ds-frHSuHQLQ Eisner, J., & Lieberman, B. (2008, November 6). Strong Outreach Contributed to Obama’s Surge Among Jews – Forward.com.//The Jewish Daily Forward//. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from http://www.forward.com/articles/14526/

 **"Get A Mac"**


 The “Get a Mac” ads, the creative brainchild of Media Arts Lab agency, were a series of online video advertisements created for Apple that helped in differentiating Mac computers from PC computers. The series comprised of over 40 ads that were broadcast on television and shown online. The ads were relatively simplistic in both visual appearance and dialogue. Most of the ads followed a similar theme. This essay will focus primarily on the first ad in the series, which appeared in 2006. The ad can be viewed by visiting this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48jlm6QSU4k. (Just so you know, I annotated this photo).  This ad (and the others in the series) can also be regarded as being a series of well-written short stories. And because of this, the ads are effective in building the brand, as good branding is just good storytelling. These video ads had achieved viral status soon after they were put on the Internet. YouTube and Social Media sites were a big factor in making the videos go 'viral'. The video itself was novel and interesting, and Apple has a lot of so-called 'fanboys' who share everything that puts Apple in a positive light. All of these factors helped to create the perfect viral storm.  The target audience for this ad are users who are frustrated with their PCs. The Mac character Justin represents a typical Mac user as envisioned by Apple. Thus, the profile for the target customer might be a college student (or a young designer/web developer) who is the early twenties and is ‘hip’.  The second negative aspect of the ad, and which has raised much criticism is that Justin is portrayed as somewhat smug and pretentious. The PC on the other hand, is portrayed as being someone who needs sympathy. He is rather polite and depicted as innocently naïve. Seth Stevenson points out that “isn't smug superiority (no matter how affable and casually dressed) a bit off-putting as a brand strategy?”