Case Study: Barack Obama Campaign ’08
Background
Not only did Obama raise more money than any candidate in history, but donors actually found ways to continue contributing by funding independent marketing campaigns aimed at accomplishing one thing: Get Obama elected. Our goal was direct: motivate the young vote. See our contribution…
Our Approach
Utilize a custom audience analysis report on 150 million active consumers on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube augmented with 30+ psychosocial attributes that collectively represent the U.S. population in most age groups. We now had a firm footing to evolve our social media branding and content strategies. Young voters were not to be dictated to, but instead given a chance to view emotional, sometimes funny and always impact carrying content.
The execution of these strategies was carried out within the social networks utilizing carefully branded and highly targeted portals to message our target. These portals provided viral tools, videos, a mobile social network and most importantly a gateway to direct calls to action and ways to impact the campaign.
Guerilla marketing and online pr worked in tandem by reinforcing featured content with online grassroots uprisings and street teams. We utilized our far reaching relationships within the music and Green/LOHAS communities to garner support from tastemakers.
Online PR and daily political campaigning would rise questions surrounding strange topics, which we would then optimize and filter voters towards our content and message. Video optimization would funnel people searching for: “where to vote in Florida”, “Obama on Economics”, “McCain Virginia”, etc. toward our Barack Obama American promise video. On many of these important and highly trafficked key phrases we had over 10 of Google’s front page links monopolize with our Obama videos.
Client Goals
The two months leading up to Election Day became tense and once again looked to rely heavily on campaigning within the major swing states. This is also where we were asked to spend our time and more directly with young 21-30 year olds in the swing states. To utilize our expertise in digital marketing and get persuasive content in front of young voters funneling them towards calls to action.
Results
A well executed messaging campaign resulted in an extremely high click through rate; very impressive conversion ratio and perhaps most importantly triggered a viral response from our target. Overall receiving over 100,000 impressions throughout the blogosphere, over 500,000 impressions throughout the social networks and over 500,000 views of our optimized video content this campaign resulted in over 1 million targeted views in two months.
Strategies and Tactics
- Audience Analysis Report
- Social Media Brand Strategy
- Social Media Content Strategy
- Viral Applications
- Guerilla Marketing
- Online PR