(Credit:
David Reece)
A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with meaning,” that is, marketing which (simply put) consistently creates added social value – not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.
A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements: a web-empowered volunteer network, a presence on Facebook, a team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns, and YouTube viral videos. Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).
Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”
Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.
On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).
“Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted” (Seth Godin)
Now that we have a President-elect Obama, it’s time to reflect on how this was possible. The Web is full of thoughtful analyses that examine Obama’s victory as one made possible through state-of-the-art marketing--from Tomi T. Ahonen’s “For a We species, a We president: Yes we can,” to John Quech’s “How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama” in Harvard Business Online, to Seth Godin’s "Marketing Lessons from the US Election," to The New York Times and, of course, the all-inclusive, behind-the-scenes "How He Did It" account in Newsweek.
Yet Obama’s victory is not only a victory through marketing, it is also a victory for marketing, for the profession as a whole. It restored America’s political capital but also America’s reputation as the spiritual home of marketing. It proved all those wrong who asserted the end of American brands and branding in general, and it has given more ammunition to marketers who passionately believe that smart marketing can indeed change the world. And so it goes that I am not only a happy American this week but also a happy marketer.
Every history of marketing must also be a history of America--see the TV series Mad Men--and one might even posit that America’s history is a history of marketing. Seth Godin describes it this way: “The lesson that society should take away about all marketing is a simple one. When you buy a product, you're also buying the marketing. Buy something from a phone telemarketer, you get more phone telemarketers, guaranteed. Buy a gas guzzler and they'll build more. Marketers are simple people...they make what sells. Our culture has purchased (and voted) itself into the place we are today.” Arthur Miller put this more optimistically when he said: “America’s biggest asset is its promise.” The same can be said about marketing.
“Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers
The Obama campaign leveraged its promise with maximum effect: “Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers. Buying or buying in always implies the expectation of a positive change--a change in someone’s well being, household, and financial situation or at any other levels of Maslow’s pyramid. But with “Change” as the ultimate promise and “Hope” as the ultimate motivation, the Obama campaign didn’t just generate leads, it created believers. The 7 million names on its lists (e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the president-elect received. The loyalty of these supporters is of long-term value. Tomi T. Ahonen writes: “The Obama presidency can continue to engage with this active part of his core supporters, return to them at the re-election bid, and even use this support base to help in the elections of his successor in 2016 (assuming Obama is re-elected in 2012).” And in fact, Obama and team are not wasting any time and launched a new site, change.gov, right after the election to keep in touch with existing and new supporters during the transition.
All of this illustrates the power of community and provides further evidence that identity trumps utility. A great brand is one that diverts attention away from itself and toward an even greater purpose. That’s exactly what Obama did for the Generation O, which was in it to make history and be part of a movement, a new "we species” with Obama as its first we president.” Combine this political tribalism with an unprecedented level of open-sourced participation, and you have a powerful collaborative platform that outperforms that of any opponent. Obama won because his supporters were more passionate, more dedicated, and more engaged. And it didn’t hurt that he was a candidate they loved.
But what makes the Obama campaign truly unique is how it complemented its open community nature with remarkable on-message rigor. While large components of the action were decentralized, the campaign headquarters provided the central discipline needed to align them when necessary. For the most part it was not, and it felt as if an unwritten code, an impressive self-discipline had ensured notable collective focus and the absence of any drama on the trail.
Disciplined Decentralism
This “Disciplined Decentralism,” as you might call it, is the major takeaway for marketers from the election. It was the foundation of a nationwide (and even global, if you consider the “moral” vote from non-U.S. citizens around the world) campaign that became the first in an age of audience fragmentation to succeed in not only raising maximum awareness for a hitherto unknown brand, but also bringing about radical behavioral change. It has restored the American soft power overnight, as Joseph Nye noted, and it has also rebuilt marketer confidence. Can we marketers orchestrate social media, amateur content, and crowd-sourced platforms with utmost message discipline on a large scale? Yes, we can. Can we reconcile authenticity and consistency? Yes, we can. Can we combine traditional broadcasting ads with low-fi video clips without diluting the message? Yes we can. Can we be our own media channel and bypass media without alienating them? Yes we can. Can we design campaigns that cultivate the small in the big and the big in the small, in other words, campaigns that use direct marketing (phone banking, fundraising) but use them bottom-up and not top-down? Yes we can. Can we be hyper-targeted and still be inclusive and reach out to everyone? Yes we can.
Obama has radically altered the marketing playbook, and the astonishing rise of the brand Obama is a template for all marketers from this point on: Weaving together data and human intelligence, collective wisdom and individual charisma, strategic calculus and enthusiasm, the Obama campaign has re-established marketing as marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people. When charismatic leadership meets organizational prowess meets community, the result is marketing that is truly presidential.
(Credit: Somebody Else's Phone)
If you found somebody else's phone, would you look through it? That's a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you're under 25, and there's nothing more interesting than the "lives of others."
The advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of "cellular oversharing" into a much gushed-about ad campaign for Nokia. "Somebody Else's Phone" depicts the lives of three twentysomethings through their text messages, multimedia messaging service, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: the phone novel.
Fusing scripted content with real-life audience interaction, the campaign runs in 10 different languages, following the characters' evolving storylines through a 24-7 feed of content, across three time zones, over 6 weeks.
Nice idea, though the blog of marketing firm Luon comments, "Sometimes it feels a bit like trying too hard. The advertising-tries-to-be-socially-smart thing, where it's not clear what is real and what is fake."
But that's exactly the point. Fake authenticity--I've already written about "Mad Men" on Twitter in this context--is a burgeoning trend. Fake is fine, as long as it feels real. We'll see more of it in 2009.
On the occasion of Barack Obama’s nationwide TV prime time infomercials last night, Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt reviewed the campaign’s media strategy and in particular its innovative use of amateur (or “professional” amateur a.k.a. "promateur") video. While the Obama camp has heaped millions of dollars on traditional TV broadcasters, setting a new record for ad spending ($250 million), McGirt believes that the true winners in this campaign are amateurs and democracy
To get an insider’s perspective, McGirt interviewed Obama’s director of field video, Arun Chaudhary, at an event in July in New York. Some of the insights Arun shared were pretty amazing. You thought we’d live in an age of snack-size media? Think again!
One thing is clear: the Obama campaign - just awarded "marketer of the year" by AdAge -- has raised the bar for political communications and has created new ways of citizen engagement. During the last presidential election I was working towards a masters' degree in communications at the Annenberg School, and I remember that I wrote a lofty paper about “super-democracy,” in which I drafted a radically idealistic vision of a media-driven democracy in real-time. It’s amazing to see that four years later this has become a reality beyond my boldest imagination. Leveraging the power of new web technologies, the Obama campaign has transformed political media from something to watch to something to do.
This means of course that we citizens expect this form of participatory democracy, transparency, and authenticity to extend to the White House. Interactive visualizations of federal budgets and tax dollar spending, open platforms for public deliberation and collaborative decision-making, instant polling via mobile apps, RSS feeds with policy updates, and fireside video chats with the President are just some of the possible formats that come to mind for the New Governance Media Platform – McGirt is right: Obama and team are on the hook (if they win).
Although Chaudhary is a NYU film school graduate, the venue didn't provide a home court advantage. The audience -- a cross-section of New York's media community -- was attentive but critical. As became clear in the ensuing Q&A session, the openness that has become such hallmark of the Obama campaign doesn't go far enough for some of the attendees. A representative from RemixAmerica.org -- a project that invites users to mash up the whole content library of America's history of politics (speeches, debates, campaign ads, etc.) -- argued that while masterfully utilizing the "engagement" potential of social media the campaign would ultimately fall short of walking the walk, shying away from including users in (co-)creating content and losing message control. In Obama's media universe, the "clickocracy" (The Washington Post) remains a meritocracy: Not "everybody is a media outlet" (Clay Shirky). But then again, why would the campaign open the flood gates for mash-ups when YouTube is already over-populated with them? Just search for Obama's recent Berlin speech and you'll see what I mean.
The fact that Chaudhary admitted that it's still a long way towards a campaign created "by the people for the people" ("we are just scratching the surface of this") supported the notion of openness more than revealing the lack thereof as a weakness (I wrote a while ago that one of the Obama brand's magic formulas is that it can turn weaknesses into strengths). Chaudhary was as genuine, smart, and eloquent as the candidate himself and not overly prepped with talking points for this speaking gig. The campaign didn't seem too concerned and controlling. If this implicit trust in their staff members as spokespeople was "by design," then Obama's spin doctors must really be exceptionally smart.
The other key takeaways of the evening were on demographics and viewing behavior. According to Chaudhary, the average viewer of videos on BarackObama.com and YouTube/BarackObama.com is 45-55 years old (not the pups you would expect in the heydays of the YouTube generation). Furthermore, and maybe even more surprising, those viewers prefer long-form content over the snippets everyone nowadays hails as the future of media. June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED.com, confirmed Chaudhary's stats by referring to her own TED Talks series -- a big online hit despite (or because of!) the typical running time of 20 min.
So, substance over style? Well, style matters, too. It is remarkable how Chaudhary's Obama videos are embracing a Jon Stewart-esque irony (as in "sovereign distance to subject"), using the instruments of satire and spoof (without ever drifting into caricature) to validate and enhance the intended message. Chaudhary not only deconstructs the opponent's videos (as he did with a fast response to Clinton's fear-mongering "3:00 AM" ad, starring the exact same girl that Clinton had used for her clip -- revealing her as an all-grown-up and fearless Obama supporter) but also his own. By doing so, he preempts any scrutiny of the medium's propagandistic intentions -- almost like clearing the air before you breathe.
This is a major difference to the use of online video in previous campaigns and only possible since video has become such a widely accepted part of mainstream media consumption. Precisely because everyone is now used to the authenticity of amateur videos on YouTube, and professional marketers have begun to mimic it for their own purposes, Chaudhary can make fun of it. Carefully curating Obama's not-so-funny jokes and stand-offish moments, Chaudhary's videos provide evidence that this candidate is real. The very questioning of authenticity verifies the authenticity. It's early nouvelle vague applied to new media: what you see is not what you get; it is already the reflection thereof. It's film-making that is fully aware of its persuasive power and thus carefully calibrates its messages.
It will be interesting to see whether Obama (and Chaudhary) can maintain this level of meta, irony, and self-deprecation if the candidate makes it into the White House. Campaigning by video is one thing, governing by video is another. When the campaign is over, Obama will have more than 700,000 friends on his Facebook page and still millions of eyeballs to his web sites. What will he do with them? Chaudhary hinted at the possibilities of "fireside video chats" and other public video forums. We shall see.
I will post a full-length video of the event later this week. In the meantime, enjoy some highlights:
...and some media and blog coverage:
Silicon Alley Insider: Obama's Video Guru Speaks: How We Owned the YouTube Primary, re-posted on The Huffington Post
TechPresident: Obama & Politics 2.0 Documenting History in Real Time
Mediabistro FishBowlNY: Live Twitter Stream from the design mind event
Disruptology: Everything You Know About Viral Video is Wrong
The Lessnau Lounge: Twitter Tweets about Obama as of July 16, 2008
Some random thoughts on design: Politics 2.0 and the Thirst for Content
(Credit:
frog design)
In a recent blog post on the upcoming Fortune Tech summit, Fortune's senior editor David Kirckpatrick hinted at the possibility of having "a super-amazing special guest from outside the industry who we aren't yet able to announce. (Joining us at the original Brainstorms were Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres, Jordan's King Abdullah, and John McCain.) This visitor could make things really rock."
Hmm...who might that be? The magazine, in its current print issue, just examined both candidates' economic policies in a 1-to-1 comparison, and, in a not so subtle endorsement, chose to display Obama on the cover...
While we (frog design, my employer) won't be able to feature Obama himself, we will provide a look behind the scenes of his campaign. On July 16, at NYU, we'll host a very special Design Mind event with Arun Chaudhary, Obama's director of video field production.
EllenMcGirt from our co-host Fast Company, who wrote the magazine's April cover story on the "Brand Obama," is going to interview Arun -- about the impact of new media on this year's election, the new rules of political communication, and life on the campaign trail.
The National Journal writes that when Arun Chaudhary was a teenager, his father asked him why he didn't want to get into politics. "I can't, Dad," he recalled saying. "I have a funny name." Now Arun Chaudhary, the son of an immigrant Indian father and a Jewish mother, is as close to politics as one can be: He took leave from his day job -- professor at the NYU film school -- to become Barack Obama's videographer (or, so the official title, director of field production).
After 10 months on the campaign trail, Chaudhary has more than 850 videos posted (three of them below) on the BarackObama.com website and on YouTube. His short clips from Obama's town hall meetings, big rallies, and on-the-road moments draw an average of 10,000 viewers each, and they have become a main tenet of a campaign that has successfully translated the concept of web 2.0 (or however you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.
A new type of political auteur in the age of YouTube, the 32-year old filmmaker has developed a unique style that is innovative, fresh, and -- like the candidate -- challenges convention. Obama's campaign is a networked, open-sourced, and interactive effort, as Henry Jenkins observed, and in this spirit of "from me to we," Chaudhary playfully (and with distinct irony) remixes elements of amateur-style video, traditional polit-documentary, CNN b-roll, slick TV commercial, cinematic production, and behind-the-scene outtakes into a vibrant, eclectic, and authentic voice of the campaign that is bigger than the sum of its parts. As the maker of moving pictures of a movement, he achieves what every great documentary filmmaker wants to achieve: To document and write history at the same time.
Arun Chaudhary will speak about his work for Obama and his experiences traveling with the campaign in a special edition of frog's Design Mind speaker series on July 16 in New York. The event will be videotaped, of course.
More details soon. Save the date!
(Credit:
Unconfirmedsources.com)
I just read Ellen McGirt's poignant feature story on "The Brand Called Obama" in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. "The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news," she writes, "but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well." Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes beyond politics and marketing and may alter the very fabric of the American society: democratization with the means of the democratized web.
Big impact in small worlds
Many pundits have pointed out that while the Obama campaign has employed traditional one-to-many tactics, spending, for instance, hefty sums on broad TV ads, its more remarkable achievement has been to translate the concept of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.
Obama has grasped the nature of the "Distributed Internet" and sent his messages to those (online) venues that are already populated with the audiences he wants to reach. The "Yes We Can" mash-up video by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am was a free gift for Obama and became a viral hit. The campaign's daily email blasts are smart, to the point, and written in a genuine voice that is credible and non-intrusive. Obama's Facebook group is blossoming. The BarackObama.com site offers widgets, ring tones, photos, and other social media assets that supporters can use to spread the word beyond the site itself and into the self-reinforcing orbit of the social web. And MyBarackObama.com offers fully customizable tools for blogs, mini-social networks, mini-fundraising, and events, etc. At campaign rallies, Obama's team hands out lists to the people waiting in line, asking them to call undecided voters from their cell phones. All of that illustrates the marketing genius at work here: Obama's impact has been so big because the campaign has managed scaling down to the smallest possible level of offline and online engagement.
When your brand's essence is a vector, your base becomes a movement.
The web 2.0 analogy does not end with content production and viral distribution. The "product" Obama itself is a mash-up, a (hyper)-text, a rich media (re)-mix of statements, tunes, vibes, opinions, and facts. Obama embodies what Manuel Castells calls the "networked society," and he not so much taps into the aggregated "wisdom of the crowd" but the collective intelligence of engaged and enlightened citizens. In the Fast Company story, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, another poster boy of the networked society, describes Obama's "adaptive leadership" style: "A leader gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it's part of the contract."
It seems logical then that Obama, in his speeches, has been using the pronoun "we" far more often than "I." This is emblematic of the open-source nature of the Obama conversation. Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen elaborate on Henry Jenkins' comment that "Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement:" "Movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, they ask people to become self-motivated. Barack Obama understands that people want to be part of the process. It's the end of retail politics and the green shoots of networked politics premised upon engagement. Obama says: Yes, you can write your own profile. Yes, you can meet supporters near you. Yes, you can plan and attend events. Yes, you can network with your friends. Yes, you can become a fundraiser. Yes, you can write your own blog. Barack Obama is saying: yes, you can be part of this, you can be part of history. You see people embrace what they create." And who doesn't want to be part of something larger than oneself -- a cause, a network, a movement of like-minded and yet diverse voices? It is this inherent transcendence that lends Obama his power. It is a lesson in how to build brands in the age of hyper-fragmentation: When your brand's essence -- in this case: aspiration -- is a vector, your base becomes a movement.
When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.
The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) -- a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into. Obama's entire campaign is based on the principle of "picture-in-picture web," as Steve Rubel coins it. Or, to borrow another one of Rubel's lines: Obama is a web service, not a web site. He is the "blue ocean" and not the (little) rock. He is, in the dictum of advertising agency Resource Interactive, an "open (on-demand, personal, engaging, and networked) brand" -- a franchise brand that anyone can hijack, re-shape, and remix a la carte. That makes him vulnerable and volatile (think of the "I got a crush on..." video or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube ) but at the same time powerful and unstoppable. When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.
It's a remix culture, stupid!
Henry Jenkins argued in his keynote at SXSW Interactive two weeks ago that accusing Obama of plagiarism (as the Clinton camp did when it brought forward that Obama had borrowed words from past speeches of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) misses the point: It's a remix culture, stupid!
It is thus no coincidence that Norman Lear just announced his initiative Remix America, co-sponsored by the USC Norman Lear Center, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kaltura.org, and the American University Center for Social Media. In the spirit of Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody," Remix America is a "multi-partisan" forum that invites Internet users to take clips from the site's "American Playlist" and add other clips and audio to produce their own remix/mash-up vision of America -- as a new platform for patriotic dissent and political commentary.
From Norman Lear's speech at the Take Back America conference: "This country has always been a remix, yesterday's 'melting pot' is today's remix. What did Jefferson and Paine and Adams do but mash up history. Take a little from the Magna Carta, a little from John Locke, and a whole lot of rebellion. Now, thanks to the web and digital technology at Remix America everyone can join in. (....) I see a viral explosion of Born Again Americans, Americans of all ages and ethnicities, conditions and backgrounds, awakening to their power as free citizens in a free society. I see them doing it in 3-4 minute bursts, mixing and mashing their stories and hopes and dreams with the words, images and music from the American Playlist, to give us all a glimpse of the America they wish for."
The Huffington Post's new "Fundrace 2008" feature allows you to see who the big donors are in the 2008 presidential race campaigns, with a Google maps mash-up that lets you search by region, donor name, party affiliation and donation amount. It's a light-hearted but also serious look at who the big donors are (it mostly tracks donations over $200) and, in some cases, you can see who's playing "both sides". They also track donations from employees at specific companies. For example, Microsoft and Google employees have primarily given to Democrats by over 2:1 ratios.
A great example of using technology to bring greater transparency to the democratic process.
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