Political Campaigns

Quotes for the week ending 12 Jan, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“information overload makes it difficult for anyone to separate essential air from smog.”

Steve Rubel, on the value of curators who distill information for others.

“I’m past the age when I can claim the noun ‘kid,’ no matter what adjective precedes it. But tonight…

John McCain, addressing a New Hampshire crowd on Tuesday, on his comeback.

“But to have access to the electoral marketplace, he has to pass the Halle Berry test.”

Bob Garfield, ad critic in Advertising Age, on Barack Obama’s ‘acceptably black’ marketability.

“Social media does not mean shameless social mountaineering, and I can bet you are not going to make yourself very popular as a communicator by sending out stuff like this.”

A member of Melcrum’s Communicators Network, annoyed at the spam-like New Year’s greeting sent by another member to hundreds of others.

“Marketing is low-hanging fruit for politicians.”

Alam Khan advising mobile marketers about the need for self-regulation, to avoid political intervention.

“Email blows away all other social networks.”

Max Kalehoff, on Online Media Spin, on why plain vanilla email is still king of the hill.

“We are always cultivating our media, who are not just our vehicles but in fact they are our primary audiences.”

Madhavi Mukherjee, at India PR Blog, on the ‘stalagmite theory‘ of how PR cultivates its audience over time.

“It takes an industry to raise a child”

Paraphrase of Intel’s response with regard to pulling out of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project, and launching it’s own rival People’s PC.

Quotes for the week ending 5 Jan, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

“You and I will heal this nation and repair the world and finally have an America that we can believe in again in four days time.”

Barack Obama, in New Hampshire, following his win in Iowa. (Quoted in The New York Times)

“Though it’s tempting to get into a race where your aim becomes to reach 1000 followers on Twitter or and equally high number of Facebook friends, it doesn’t offer anything more than a temporary ego boost. “

Rohit Bhargava of Influential Marketing, on one of the three things he plans to do in 2008, including “making better friends.”

“The key is little ‘m’ media – the information, the experiences, and the stuff that we consume and share every day.”

Brian Reich, on how organizations need to change the way they approach media.

“Make no mistake, the Web is taking over. Applications are moving to browsers en masse…”

Washington Post’s 25 most innovative products of the year.

“I equate social networks to snowflakes, no two are the same.”

Tom Whittaker, responding to post by Krishna De on Facebook (which she calls relaxed and eclectic) and LinkedIn (which she says is used by people in Leadership roles.

“It’s very ‘fudgable’ “

Dan Wool, on the Business Journal’s top 10 list of PR agencies in Phoenix using head count as one of the criteria, being flawed.

“Users can restrict who sees their information, and block users”

“Computing Which?” magazine, quoted in Media Guardian, on why Bebo beat Facebook and MySpace among social networking sites.

“Sack the political thug!”

Editorial in Leader Newspapers on Sri Lankan Cabinet minister Mervyn Silva who stormed a government TV station and had red paint thrown on him as he was ‘rescued’ by police. The station broadcast the embarrassing saga live.

10 things we obsessed about in 2007

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Here’s what I will remember about 2007 from the perspective of marketing, social media and communications. We obsessed about these stories in PR, marketing and social media.

1. Facebook made us rethink what social networking could do for one-to-one communications.

2. Network neutrality became a debate that not just the geeks and telcos were interested in.

3. Short codes gained popularity as the new URLs, as text messaging took off. Sadly, it took the shootings at Virginia tech for universities to realize the value of this kind of messaging.

4. Mashups became more entertaining than the original. Think: the “1984″ spoof ‘commercial‘ about Hillary Clinton, viewed over 3 million times.

5. It was the year micro-blogging (with Twitter and Jaiku) got taken seriously,

6. This was the year email spam (in the form of “co-worker spam” and “PR spam”) hit a tipping point, forcing communicators to take a good hard look at databases, and how to try to target better. Not convinced? See the rumpus Wired editor, Chris Anderson’s “sorry people you’re blocked” post did.

7. A new, intriguing search engine called Mahalo (made possible by humans, not just algorithms!), the future of Wikipedia, and whether “amateurish” knowledge is helping or hurting us.

8. The toy for grown ups: the iPhone, what else?

9. Beacon, Facebook’s daring experiment with something called “social ads.”

10. Obama-mania, both here and abroad.

(cross posted from ValleyPRblog)

Nagative campaigning, Mark Antony style

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How does one market a presidential candidate?

The “soap” analogy (packaging, promotion and the the rest of the 4 Ps) is no longer relevant. Today’s political marketing strategists employ more subtler techniques. The negative ads have got so sophisticated that they don’t even look like ads.

Take Hillary’s campaign. The pitchman isn’t simply the talking head of some famous person. It’s a talking head of the first pitchman, the former incumbent. The medium isn’t even TV –it’s a much distributed YouTube video that happened to originate on television. The ‘negative’ isn’t even negative, in the Sean Hannity kind of slam. It appears so balanced, you can almost miss it.

Watch how Bill Clinton carefully labels Barack Obama without sounding negative, and having lightening responses to Charlie Rose‘s deeper questions that would have trapped anyone else. There’s block-and-bridge, and like Shakespeare’s classic technique having Mark Antony call Brutus “an honorable man,” he’s all praises for Obama, while stomping all over him.

When probed about whether he thinks they are all fit to be president, Bill prefaces it by saying “not to criticize anybody…” calls Obama somebody who is … “a compelling and credibly attractive, highly intelligent symbol of transformation.” Before that he described him as someone with “enormous talent, staggering political skills.”

The key (negative) word here is “symbol.” Earlier on he made it clear that “symbol is not as important as substance.” He calls Hillary the “agent of change” and Obama a “symbol of change.” Careful repositioning of the competition, without sounding like the old-fashioned negative ad.

Come to think of it, it’s a bit like a soap ad –Dove‘s repositioning of “beauty” not as anti-aging, but “pro-aging.”

US to world: You’ve read the press, now watch the video

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Doing PR for a a complex organization is one thing. Doing PR for a country embroiled in two wars is no walk in the park.

So when Karen Hughes, the U.S. Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs talks of the “long struggle” ahead of her office to improve the image of the US abroad, she must really mean that it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

I admire the move the State Dept took with Dipnote, a blog that (I featured last month) lets people in those tough diplomatic spots in Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan talk about what they are up against. On this blog, Hughes talked about her new video (created for the State Dept. by Disney, of all organizations!) that addresses a problem/opportunity she had identified: The need to lay out America’s welcome mat. Perhaps this message has not been communicated enough, considering the accusations of racial profiling, even by airlines. Perhaps all the talk about a fence around the border and Bush’s backing a guest worker program has sent mixed messages that we are –selectively– in lock-down mode. If you’ve been outside any US consulate you’ll know that these garrisoned buildings, bristling with security personnel and cameras are a necessary evil.

So what’s a Public Affairs czar to do?

A video? To be sure it smacks of old-school advertising, and propaganda. Also, when you watch the happy people and slow motion images it comes across as too glossy, too Hollywood. To a first time visitor a few kind words from a visa officer at the embassy, or an airport baggage handler would sear a permanent image in my mind far greater than a video.

Hughes rightly talks of a the US as a complex tapestry, but as we know all to well, the threads of that tapestry are not spun by Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Hollywood and Pennsylvania Avenue. They are coming off the loom of real-time media and citizen journalists in other countries, the families of people caught up in wars and poverty blamed on the US whether we are involved or not. In the flat world, we are so intricately connected (woven if you will) a video will just not cut it.

I am reminded of a previous effort –the so-called Shared Values campaign that was created by ad woman Charlotte Beers. It was so far out of touch with the reality of what was going on at that time, it was halted. It’s time to start looking for Disney-esque fixes to complex issues.

Facebook president with analog touch

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As I have been observing before, McCain’s campaign, after early signs of engine trouble, is now picking up speed. He’s adjusted his slogan from “Straight Talk Express” to “No Surrender” in classic repositioning tactic –no different from the way packaged goods tweak their slogan when sales start to tank. He’s got Facebook profile and a MySpace presence –as do Obama, Clinton and everyone else.

But will next year’s election be decided on the basis of a slogan, the contender’s social media presence or something else?

A recent poll by the Associated Press says that John McCain has a “solid shares of suburban, college-educated and Midwestern Republican voters.” The Washington Post last Sunday was somewhat optimistic too. “No surrender” is well timed, and probably resonates well with the Petraeus decision. But slogans aside, McCain seems to be doing something right. He may be more analog than digital, but in my opinion that could be what’s makes him more like the real thing.

Having watched the genesis of the YouTube debates, and now the Yahoo election debate, this going to be the first social media election where public opinion is sampled, targeted and better understood before the actual polls.

Markos Moulitsas –he of The Daily Kos – had this to say of supporters’ ability to assemble and the candidate’s capacity take charge of their own narrative:

“Because there are now so many more millions of people who are being engaged by politics online than in the last presidential election, our ability to control or fight back against media narratives is much stronger. We can create our own stories and push back against the ones that are BS. To me, the beauty of this medium is that there are so many centers of power in Netroots that no one can ever really dominate.”

In other words, if every candidate is plugged into the social media, a ‘Facebook President’ may need something extra.

To me that could require one thing: Good old-fashioned momentum generated by good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.

Election Advertising

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Lest we forget, amidst the embarrassing campaign ads we had to stomach during the U.S. elections, there were some high points.

Take this copy for Mini Cooper:

“Let’s always be law-abiding liberals on the gas pedal and ultraconservatives at the pump….Let’s lobby Capitol Hill for more twisty highways. Let’s all skip the mudslinging and stick to the road ahead. Let’s motor.”

7-Election

Then there was the 7-eleven coffee promotion, called 7-Election. It was as simple as offering customers a choice of a John Kerry or George Bush coffee cup in the chain’s 5,800 stores in the U.S.

The race, predictably, was neck-and-neck –with 65.4% of coffee ‘voters’ undecided. But when the results were tallied, Bush got 51.08% of the votes! It may not be a scientific poll, but as this story shows, considering that a million people a day drink 7-eleven coffee, it’s a promotion that’s got some clout.

As for Brand Bush and Brand Kerry…

Since several other marketers had joined the brand-wagon, Landor Associates interview 1,262 registered voters and found that:

Bush was associated with Bud Light, IBM and Ford (“reliable”, “humble”, “heritage”, “solid”)

Kerry is associated with brands such as Heineken, Apple, and BMW (“high-quality”, “high-performance”, “hip”, “young”)

Among undecided voters: Kerry was Starbucks while Bush was Dunkin’ Donuts.

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Street Spam and Election Advertising.

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

signs

Len Gutman, fellow IABC chapter member and PR pro, writes about a topic after my heart: Political Spam on our street corners. The article, Sign forests just political poster pollution appears in yesterday’s Arizona Republic.

Like Len, I don’t get it. They have such poor impact, especially when cluttered together. Besides they all look alike, in the standard 3 colors. Brand differentiation? I doubt their campaign folk give it a thought. They follow the same principle of spammers, sometimes planting the same sign twice in one spot. The next time you drive by a vacant lot, take a look at the street spam and tell me if their advertising money is justifiable.

Just for grins, take a look at this sign.

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