PardonMyFrench

Best of 2009: Econsultancy interviews | Blog

Eric Frenchman, Chief Internet Strategist at Connell Donatelli Patricio Robles talked to Eric about his experiences in managing the online campaign of US presidential candidate John McCain.

via econsultancy.com

PardonMyFrench - hey my interview for eConsultancy made their best of 2009 list. Great

My Notes from David Plouffe's Book Part 3 - Was it All Due to Obama and Rospars?

I finished David Plouffe's book a few days ago and whether you think it was due to some left over bitterness of McCain's campaign or not, the book really fades at the end.  As opposed to the Primary Season, Plouffe seems to rush through the last 70 pages of the book and becomes quite cynical.  

The biggest take aways I have from those last 70 pages are that Obama raised a TON of cash and this allowed his campaign to put states into play that Democrats would historically avoid and Obama's Digital Team of 90 people led by Joe Rospars continued to work their magic in email, attack videos (Keating 7), and online grassroots organizing.  So this really started me to ask myself, how much of the win was due to Obama as a candidate and Rospars as an internet guru and less about your every day tactics of running a campaign? Anyway.....

1. Plouffe talks about how important Sarah Palin's nomination was for fund raising and volunteering for Obama.  However, as I wrote a while back, Palin was very important to McCain's campaign when it came to energizing the conservative base and delivering donations.  No matter what you think, Palin was not one of the top 3 reasons McCain lost to Obama.
2. Plouffe talked about McCain ignoring Virginia until the last minute and quite frankly I think he hammers the campaign too much.  Did we lose VA?  Yes.  However, we were outgunned when it came to money and enthusiasm, so I'm sure (I wasn't part of any discussion, but I did hear some things) the executive staff thought that if we lost Virginia, we likely lost the election anyway.
3. Page 326 is the most eye opening page in the entire book.  This is where Plouffe recounts raising $150 million in September; they added 2.3 million supporters bringing their digital contact list to 11 million (in September) and he recounts how their internet advertising brought in several dollars almost immediately (I talked about McCain raising $4 for every $1 spent, but for most months it was higher than that in search).  They raised a whopping $100 million online. Plouffe then writes this line which sums up 2 out of the top 4 reasons McCain lost "Almost all campaigns never have enough money or people to do what they'd like....Not this campaign. It's like fantasy camp for political operatives."
4. And that's pretty much how the campaign ended for McCain.  With money pouring in Obama could advertise (and advertise a lot) wherever he wanted, opening up states that Democrats historically ignored.  Coupled with Rospars online grassroots organizing, online advertising, and use of YouTube and Facebook, Obama was able to expand the field by putting tools at people's disposal that make it easy for volunteers to organize.
5. The last top 2 reasons we lost occurs around September 15 which was the economy blowing up. This was our final nail in the coffin as no Republican could be competitive with President Bush's approval rating and the economy going south.  Plouffe pointed out how Senator McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy remain strong" and while that definitely hurt, it really didn't matter by then.  The damage was done.
6. Plouffe also points out some "tricks" the campaign tried including Joe The Plumber as well as the suspension of the campaign.  I didn't view either of these as being tricks, especially Joe The Plumber because the wealth distribution strategy of Obama is being played out today.  The real reason why Joe Plumber didn't resonate more is that early voting had kicked in and a significant amount of people already casted their votes.  It just didn't happen earlier enough in the campaign, but it was hardly a trick.
7. Finally, on to Bill Ayers.  We (as part of the RNC) ran tons of ads online on Obama's association. The RNC built a mock Facebook page called Barack Book (Cyrus Krohn's idea) and we spent millions in advertising dollars driving to that page.  We also ran dollars highlighting ACORN.  I personally built the search campaigns around these sites and Ayers, ACORN, and other future czars and questionable associations were featured.  We still lost.  Don't tell me we didn't talk enough about this.  The facts are, enough people didn't care or didn't want to believe the association - unfortunately a lot of them do now.

That's it on Plouffe's book.  Call me bitter or not, but the end of the book felt rushed and a little cynical.  I personally believe that Obama was the perfect candidate and they had a great Digital team led by Joe Rospars that made a lot of great moves at the right time.  Without all of that money, all of the great use of Digital, an economy that imploded. and an unpopular President Bush, perhaps McCain had a chance. Unfortunately, reading Plouffe's book proved to me that without a miracle, the match was over by the middle of September.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

My Notes from David Plouffe's Book - The Audacity to Win Part 1

You long time readers know that as part of Connell Donatelli I had a 3rd row seat to Senator McCain's Presidential run starting from online marketing his Straight Talk America PAC, through the Primaries including the summer 2007 blowup, and through the General Election.  I was lucky to be part of a small group that made it all the way through.

That's why I was quite interested to read David Plouffe's book The Audacity to Win as he chronicles his management of President Obama's campaign from beginning to end.   I got the book from Amazon about a week ago along with Chuck Todd's How Barack Obama Won (a book that looks at polling data state by state) which provides a helpful companion by looking at the end numbers.  I'm about a third through the book, but here's some of my notes....

1. Right from the very beginning they focused on Iowa - in fact I'm on page 103 and I'm still reading about Iowa. The reason was simple, using polling data they realized that Clinton was strong elsewhere and needed to show strong results out of the gate.  This was different from my experience with the McCain campaign and while I wasn't there day to day so I could have missed something, I didn't hear much about Iowa until Rick Davis came back to the campaign in the summer of 2007 and then all we heard was early states...
2. Speaking (really writing) about where I was located, Plouffe insisted early on that everyone be headquartered in Chicago to ease communications.  When I read that, I felt lucky and sad at the same time.  Lucky that I could work out of NJ for most of the time, but sad because I know I missed a lot.  Knowing what I know now, if you want to make significant contributions in a Presidential campaign you need to move especially during the General if you get that far.
3. At Obama's first two campaign stops he had over 10K people show up.  10K in Iowa at an event about a year before the caucus?  There was no mention of a MeetUp tactic (like Dean's campaign) and those kind of numbers we would have killed for.  In fact, we used to run Google Ads to drive people to signup for McCain's events prior to Palin's selection (didn't need that tactic anymore once she showed up).  So for every bitter Republican that complains about our campaign, I can't think of a single Primary candidate that could bring 10K people to an event in Iowa 1 year before the caucus. Think about how that enthusiasm for Obama lasted into the General Election.
4. The internet operations led by Joe Rospars reported directly into Plouffe showing how important it was to them.  According to the book, funny enough at the time, the internet operations took heat for not raising enough money in the beginning. Also early on they asked for people to just signup on their website to get involved with the campaign.  That was way different from my experience because right from day 1 the Search operations was geared towards raising money, which we did at an awesome rate of $4 in donations for every $1 we spent.  We had plenty of plans for growing emails but time and time again we were asked to raise money.
5. Very early on, the Obama online store for clothing and items was a huge success.  We didn't have that luxury until probably the summer of 2008.  Again this gave them a leg up on us a long time before the General Election - people showing support that early on...

Anyway that's it for now.  I'll have more later

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Kate Kaye's Campaign '08 Book Fills In The Blanks for Me On What Happened

I'm nearly finished with Kate Kaye's book Campaign '08 A Turning Point for Digital Media and as one of the folks quoted within the book I found it very fascinating.  Why?  It fills in a lot of the blanks and lifts some of the fogs of war I was unable to see during the campaign season.  Plus it is a great resource to have at your finger tips if you'd like to get a quick view of the digital media tactics used during the 2008 season.

Kate grabbed a lot of quotes from people that were running or part of the digital strategies for each of the Presidential campaigns and she does a great job of putting them together in very relevant chapters.  She also pulled some quotes from my blog which was completely cool by me.  I actually got a kick out of some of the things I wrote over the past two years.

I learned quite a few things especially what the Obama campaign did with their digital campaign and it of course confirmed how ubiquitous I thought their marketing was.  The book also confirmed for me the lack of digital marketing that pretty much all of the other campaigns did during the season.

• Clinton Campaign - very little online advertising
• Ron Paul - a lot of out sourcing to their supporters who in turn did marvelous things with it
• Mitt Romney - a lot of advanced online advertising experimentation that I was jealous of, but in the end we won the Primary.

Once you read through the chapters you'll also confirm what I've been telling you for a while.  The McCain Campaign did a tremendous amount of digital work, more than every other Presidential Campaign before 2008 and during 2008 with the exception of the Obama campaign.  It is all there in Kate's book for you to read if you never believed what I wrote.  Sure we had money problems, President Bush, and a few other challenges but we accomplished a lot even though we fell short of our ultimate goal.

Kate covers a lot of topics including search marketing, social networking, mobile, online advertising, and other subjects.   Kate's book offers great perspective and insight on the tactics used; it is also a quick read and flows just like her informative ClickZ blogs. Between this book, Kate's ClickZ posts, my blog, and techPresident, you'll get an accurate picture of the digital tactics used during the race for the White House in 2008. 

BTW - Kate's book might inspire me to write my own book on my experiences working with the McCain campaign and Connell Donatelli.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric.

Using Search for Political or News Rapid Response

During the Presidential Campaign season I didn't realize I used search marketing for a very unique tactic - Political Rapid Response.  In fact, while moderating a panel on search marketing at AAPC a lot of folks came up to me after the panel and asked me to elaborate on using search for Rapid Response.  In this YouTube video, you can hear Peter Greenberger at 1:20 singing our accolades using search for Rapid Response. We used Rapid Response in quite a number of very high profile situations including:

• Sarah Palin Defense - Forget about the day she was announced as McCain's running mate which is a whole different story, the story I like to tell is when I was called over to McCain's Hotel in Minneapolis on Labor Day during the convention to fix some search problems.  In particular the truly disgusting blogging stories that tried to say that Governor Palin lied about giving birth to her last baby.  Besides running Rapid Response on that story, we also bought words around the most search on keywords including Palin Nude Photo, Palin is Hot, Palin Vogue Photo and Sarah Palin Photos.
• Joe The Plumber - You can see this post I made watching the search results on Joe The Plumber and you'll see we had a search campaign running within minutes of Senator McCain mentioning Joe The Plumber.  That night I watched that debate from McCain campaign HQ in Crystal City, but had no idea it was going to be mentioned and built that campaign from scratch on the fly.  Not only that, I put in thousands of economic and financial services terms in over night.
• ACORN Voter Fraud - While driving my daughter to a doctor's appointment I had Fox News on when they were talking about a breaking story that involved fraudulent voter registration records submitted by ACORN.  By the time I got home, I built a search campaign around ACORN and waited for the results to pop. It took a few days for the rest of MSM to pick the story up, but when it did, the campaign was already ready to go.
• Countering Joe Biden's Announcement

Rapid Response doesn't just have to be for political campaigns.  Issue Advocacy can certainly use it as well as private companies and even news organizations (ex - Fox Sports).  So how do you actually use search for Rapid Response?

HOW TO USE SEARCH FOR NEWS RAPID RESPONSE

1. Dedicated News Hounds - Of course political campaigns have a war room, but for a variety of reasons I wasn't tapped into it.  I kept Fox News, CNN, and CNBC running in the background of my office so I was very likely to catch breaking stories.  You also of course can use Google Trends multiple times per day. 
2. Google Trends Is Your Best Friend - Even if you get a story elsewhere, Google Trends is helpful because it quantifies how hot a story is and helps get you started with keyword development. 
3. Website Access - The person building the campaign must either have an in-depth knowledge of your website to know where to point the traffic to or access to someone who can build landing pages on the fly.
4. Autonomy - The person or group building the search campaign needs autonomy to build it on the fly.  Sure you might have some legal approvals, but the way to lose out on the traffic is to get bogged down in an approval process.  Don't lose your traffic with a slow approval process.
5. Budget - Some times we were given new budget other times we just used the extra spend available from a very high ROI on search.  This search activity comes and goes and you need money quickly to run a campaign.  Also, keep in mind that some times this search activity is brand new and you might have to suck up a high search bid as Google learns more about the activity,
6. Hire An Expert Like Me

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The GOP Needs A Shore State Strategy

Since the end of the election I've watched people argue over what happened to the Republicans and Senator McCain.  A lot of folks have jumped on the Republican don't get the internet mantra and I've always known that was never the answer.  Some people think it was Governor Palin and once again I never believed that.  I've always known we lost because of an extremely unpopular President, the economy blowing up on 9/15, and running into the great Obama money making machine.  The blow up in the economy was a double whammy with President Bush's unpopularity which continues to haunt Republicans because of out of control spending, Government growth, and lack of fiscal discipline; all things that go against Reagan's strategies for winning elections. 

I attended quite a few AAPC panels and not just the ones where my fellow Campaign Solutions friends were on.  Two in particular were quite fascinating for me and both were recaps of the 2008 courtesy of Whit Ayers, Charlie Cook, and Ron Brownstein.  From that panel I learned a lot of interesting points including (these are my notes and so the exact number below might be incorrect, but directionally...):

• Obama won 80% of the non-white vote and also won like 2/3 of the under 29 year old crowd; there will be 18 million more of them (Millennials) by 2012
• Obama also won white, college educated while the only group that Senator McCain won was non-college educated whites
• Aiming at the South has issues because of the Electoral College vote.  The last non-narrow Republican win that included major Shore states was 1988.
• Since 1992, 14 Shore states representing 69% of 270 Electoral votes have consistently voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate (*exception is NH 2000).  That's basically starting down 190 votes to ZERO putting the pressure on OH, FL, and VA (increasingly going blue) for the GOP to compete.  This means narrow Republican Presidential victories (see 2000 and 2004) when we win if we continue on this strategy; this also only means continuing to focus on the Republican base.

These shore states are WA, OR, CA, ME, NH*, VT, MA, CT, RI, NY, PA, NJ, MD, and DE and they haven't voted for a Republican in 20 years.  Let that sink in for a second.  In 20 years almost 70% of the electoral college hasn't gone to a Republican and that points to a branding and messaging problem in attracting voters in these states.  Simply stated, these states include big businesses like media, agencies, pharma, banking, financial services, internet, ivy league colleges - well you get the idea: targets that the current Republican message falls short.  BTW - would it surprise you that these states are also where the MONEY comes from?

Prior to going off on my own and working with CDI, I spent 15 years in corporate America.  I basically grew up at AT&T and then worked at Harrisdirect.  At AT&T I worked with some of the largest agencies in the world while working on major product launches.  At Harrisdirect, we were the company constantly rebranding as the name switched from DLJdirect to CSFBdirect, to Harrisdirect, and then finally E*Trade. 

What does this all tell me? If a brand was EVER in need of a rebranding it would be the Republican Party and here's where I'd start if this was my product. 

1. I'd start with a hypothesis that Reagan's core messages of a strong economy, job growth, military strength, and smaller government are still valuable.  Other issues while still important would be pushed to the background (see Obama note below).
2. Focus groups and quantitative studies to firm up strategies and tactics.  I'd run these on a monthly basis to watch changes.
3. I'd look for candidates that can pull in Shore states.  That probably means pushing issues that play in the South to the background.  Basically, an Obama messaging strategy of being a liberal in disguise as a centrist.  Behind the scenes work your agenda, but on the surface focus on core issues, #1 above.
4. Engage youth and Latino markets because that's where the new voters are.
5. Stop competing with President Obama on small issues and focus on jobs and economy (tea parties are a great start).  2010 is our key election which puts September 2010 as ground zero.  Obama has offered up a lot of information and I'd track that job forecast and GDP forecast and hammer away.  Eventually even with non-job creating expenditures and pork, the economy will turn around but everything I read says that real growth won't be until 2010.
6. Think Twitter sound bites and explanations (I know this post is long).  If you can't explain why Obama's military budget is wrong, don't give the liberal press and comedians their own sound bite of why Republicans say he cut the budget when the bottom line # went up 4% or so.
7. Ronald Reagan is our brand essence and not a major message.  It is time to stop putting President Reagan in TV ads, debates, and political talking points.  It is time to stop looking for the next Ronald Reagan.  Today's new voters don't care and the ones in between them and 40 year old voters like me, were not voting when Reagan was a political force (Governor to President).  Continuing to mention him in messaging is like Major League Baseball talking about their heritage.
8. Finally, the internet isn't just a fund raising ATM.  It is a way to reach voters in the Shore states cheaply and effectively organize and communicate.  Stop dropping direct mail.

It is time to rebrand and plan for 2010.  It is time to win some Shore States.  It is time that the Republican brand become competitive in these states because that's where the voters are.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Our Search Work for John McCain Wins Best Tech Award at AAPC

This year's AAPC (American Association of Political Consultants) conference was an extraordinary event.  Connell Donatelli and Campaign Solutions (basically Becki Donatelli's political companies) won a ton of Pollie Awards for our political and public affair marketing work.  I'm pretty sure nobody has come close to winning abound the 40 awards we got this year.  The one I'm most proud of is the award we won for best use of new technology for the search marketing work we did for Senator McCain.

You long time readers know my involvement in the campaign in the search marketing work, but in my zeal to promote the work I often didn't think I gave enough credit to some of my team members.  It really was remarkable work that a small group of us did all of Senator McCain's work in addition to the RNC's.  We spent millions of dollars for both McCain and the RNC and that was just in the last 10 weeks of the campaign - you folks out there in corporate America would be jealous of the marketing.  Some of my favorite memories.....

• Meeting with Rick Davis as part of the Straight Talk America PAC and listening to early Presidential conversations and political tactics; none of those meetings would have occurred if it wasn't for Becki Donatelli.  I also wouldn't have had the drive or the experience if Becki didn't share her knowledge with me.
• Ryan Waite and Jason Johnson were the creative geniuses behind some of our best banner ads and creatives that we ran.  Most specifically, the hippie Hillary ad that superimposed Hillary's head on a hippie body.  That ad as I remember had click rates north of 2%.  The other famous ad we ran was One Man Video which was a flash ad with 5 seconds of Senator McCain leaving as a POW; the great thing about that ad was that it included video inside standard flash size limits.
• Jackie Huelbig whom I've known for many years was our ace reporting genius who probably had the toughest job around - she had to put up with relentless requests from me and Becki when we had to know yesterday what the results of our search campaign were and how much money we brought in the hour before.  Jackie was also the one that helped me clean up a lot of the ads and loaded up the hundreds of video and display ads into Google AdSense.
• And finally, of course the campaign that pretty much gave me free reign to do what we needed to do; I can only remember one ad that was rejected and that's because I thought it was controversial enough during the Michigan Primary that I wanted a check.

This video that Ryan produced for our AAPC award is a great summary of the importance of our search campaign.  It features Peter Greenberger from Google,  Rick Davis McCain's Campaign Manager.  Friend and former RNC eCampaign director Cyrus Krohn.  Give it a watch - it shows how a well run search marketing campaign can handle rapid response, email and donation generating tactics, all while bringing much needed branding and traffic to issue pages. It really was an awesome experience.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount - Looking at The Obama Rubik's Cube of Marketing

December 10 - 11 I attended the Internet & Politics conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard University and it was quite an eye opening experience for me.  Besides the Harvard faculty, you had various bloggers, political consultants, and members from campaigns - and in particular the McCain and Obama campaigns.  Day 1 was spent mostly going over Obama's grassroots/field campaign and the integration with their online strategy.  That's what it hit me that we were watching the results of a beautifully played out game of chess.

I love chess.  Not because I'm particularly good, but because I love the strategy and tactics.  So much so that both my 6 and 8 year old play and if you're not careful the 8 year can beat you.  The best part of chess is how you can setup an opponent many moves ahead so that by the time they figure it out you have checkmate.  Obama's campaign had all experts fooled right up until the end.   

1. I like Kate Kaye's articles on the online spending and strategies of the various campaigns.  Obama outspent everyone online and the only bright spot we had was politic's greatest search campaign .  However, the disparity in online advertising wasn't the amazing part.
2. Lots of professionals reported on Obama's amazing ground game. It wasn't that the other campaigns didn't have a ground game.  McCain did in the primary and in fact used that with online advertising to win the primaries.  Obama's ground game and networking was awesome, but that wasn't what impressed me the most.
3. Obama's dominance in social networking due in no small part to Chris Hughes was not the amazing part either - though it did towards the end of the campaign cause me to totally ignore it as a viable channel for undecided voters.
4. The constant loading and viewing of YouTube videos was also impressive delivering to Obama $40+ million in equivalent TV viewing.  It wasn't like team McCain or anyone else other than Ron Paul had people spontaneously creating great video that could rival Obama girl, but that wasn't what got me fired up.
5. Finally the almost billion $ raised was key and certainly eye opening and that fueled everything else, but what impressed me the most was...

The discipline the campaign showed to ensure that their website-myBO.com was the central hub for all activities.  Everything fed into this so that they didn't need to use microtargeting they could data mine the information from what people gave them.  They could market in Republican strongholds like Washington Township NJ (aka Long Valley) where even though Obama would get beaten by McCain 2:1 it didn't matter because Obama leaders like Kevin Nedd could organize efficiently and use tools to create events.

People connected to the campaign because of how things fed into their information hub. Obama had all the experts fooled because of the way they viewed his campaign from different perspectives.  At the end of the day, it all turned out to be the same.  An enormous networking organization fueled by a centrally located database.

At an AAPC conference in the summer in NYC I watched Andrew Rasiej on a panel and I thought he was a bit smug.  Not so much that it was annoying, but the kind of smugness you get when you play chess and know that the game was over in about 10 moves but that your opponent is still struggling to win.  I'm not sure if Andrew knew all, but looking back that was what the smile-smugness was about.

Obama had a lot of people fooled for how integrated the campaign truly was.   The really amazing part was how integrated everything was and how well they kept it under wraps.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric   

2008 Election Recount Part 5 - What's The Value of a 300x250 Flash Ad?

This is part of my 2008 presidential election recap.  You can find Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on the links above.  This posts looks at the value of a 300x250 flash ad and since that sounds a little boring I'll make this post as a fictitious meeting that never occurred.  Oh and in case you want my answer before reading the post - the value of a 300x250 flash ad is not much these days....

eCampaign Guy - Thanks for coming here.  Let's review where we are with our online ad buys - search and display with only 4 weeks to go.

Marketing Consultant -   Sure.  Well our display buys are going ok.  We had 6 ads in rotation and most of them have CTRs under 0.50% and we aren't getting enough conversions on the back end, so we pulled more out of rotation.  Our best ad in the past year was the "Meeting Unconditionally" ad or Hippie Hillary.

eCampaign Guy - What kind of results did you get with those?  Any other good ads?

MConsultant - Those ads got CTR's north of 2% and the amount of donations and email signups we got from those were through the roof.  CPA's less than $1.  Pre-roll ads worked great for us.  Basically, fun or entertaining or scare tactic ads work the best.

eCampaign Guy - Gotcha.  How's the search doing?

MConsultant - Paid search is off the charts.  We are returning at least $2 in donations for every $1 we are spending, CTR's are awesome, we are driving tremendous amounts of traffic to your Obama attack sites, and maxing out the daily spend.  Any chance to get more money?

eCampaign Guy - No chance to get more money.  Well at least search is returning.  Think we should brainstorm new display ads?  How long will that take?

Creative Chick - Well we can have some new ads for you to look at tomorrow, but your approval process takes some time.

MConsultant - I have a better idea.  Why don't we cancel the remaining display buys and plow all of that money into paid search.

eCampaign Guy - Well, we are getting better results and better traffic.  We still haven't received the results of our branding study so we can't know for sure.  Yes - that's a great idea, let's move it now

Of course the meeting above didn't exactly go like that, but the end result was the same.  Yes for both the RNC and McCain I advocated moving almost all of our dollars into paid search because it was working so well.  The good folks at the RNC and McCain agreed without much of a discussion and in fact pored more money in with a few days to go, pretty much guaranteeing it was the largest political search campaign in the history of politics.  We didn't quite turn off display ads, but here's when I think they were worthwhile...

Eric's Reason's for Running 300x250 Ads

1. Ads that generate earned media
2. Ads that generate internet exposure
3. Google content ads included video ad units
4. Pre-roll video to guarantee a TV like experience
5. Streaming video ad units that are highly targeted

That's it and in that order.  Of course that's after you max out and fully fund your paid search or social networking campaigns.  Right now unless it is via Google, why lock yourself into an ad buy that requires long creative timelines for something if you are lucky gets better than a 0.50% CTR?  You shouldn't because the value of a 300x250 in getting lower and lower; stick to newer ad units and paid search.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 4 - Why Weren't We More Social?

This is part 4 of my series looking at the 2008 Presidential Election.  Past posts are: Part 1 The Palin Effect, Part 2 Monday Morning Quarterback, and Part 3 The Death of Microtargeting.

So one of the questions that everyone likes to ask or write about is why didn't Senator McCain's team embrace social networking?  My answer is, well we did but we were challenged by money, people resources, and our own supporters.

First a little disclosure.  It is no secret that I am not a believer in using social networking sites for PAID online advertising.  That's especially true for MySpace which is where I believe good advertisers go to die, especially if they do direct deals with them.  Facebook, I have a little more faith in, but I am hard pressed to recommend them for advertising too.  YouTube I love and I've run campaigns there; I especially love YouTube because they are powered by Google which always makes me happy.  So, standard display advertising is a waste of money on most social networking sites, but I do (and did) believe they are critical for involving supporters and pushing CRM messages.  OK, so what do I think happened.  Three things....

1. No Money - as much as social networking costs next to nothing when compared with advertising, it still costs money to develop widgets and content.  When compared with Senator Obama, we were at a significant disadvantage.
2. No People - social networking done correctly needs people to do the outreach.  Unofficially I've heard that Senator Obama's eCampaign totaled around 95 and Senator McCain's totaled around 15.  At that level of disparity you have to make choices by prioritizing items.
3. Different Supporters - While I believe there were quite a number of people that supported Senator McCain that would spontaneously create videos, Senator Obama as well as Congressman Ron Paul had a much larger pool of people that would create content.  Here's a screen shot of videos when you search on YouTube for Barack Obama and John McCain (filtered out crap).  Other than "Dear Mr. Obama" and "Obama's Citizenship Problem" the number of positive McCain supporter videos are nowhere to be found and even if they were further do on the list, they would not have nearly as many video views.  Heck, even our best professional fan video - Raisin' McCain by John Rich only generated 152,000 views.

McCain's team had a Facebook page and we pushed messaging through it added widgets, and had 600K+ supporters.  To put that in perspective, we had 3.85 times as many supporters as Hillary Clinton.  Yes, Obama was a monster when it came to Facebook but then again you could argue he had inside help to get him started. We did some advertising in Facebook and for a very small micro-target it performed great, but didn't scale.

We used YouTube from the very beginning.  When the campaign imploded during the Primary season we had to use YouTube to push out video ads.  Web videos was a key strategy for us especially before we won New Hampshire.

The blogosphere was also very important but it was a tough row to hoe prior to wrapping up the nomination and then it took some time after that.  The vast majority of Republican blogs are very conservative writers and those are our activists.  It was BRUTAL during the Primary season.  Town Hall bloggers were rough, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Race42008, and so on.  I should know because I monitored posts.  I made comments.  I reached out to bloggers.  I mixed it up with people.  I interacted with Mitt Romney's army of supporters and took on Ron Paul's zealots.  Town Hall's Hugh Hewitt DROVE ME FRIGGIN CRAZY and years later I still find it difficult to read his posts. 

I marshalled bloggers to help John McCain win TechCrunch's Tech President endorsement.  Heck, who do you think put John McCain's SecondLife together just in case?  If you were one of my Twitter followers in the last month of the campaign you saw campaign posts from the Daily Briefing.  We pushed out widgets, video contests, tried donation gathering from MySpace, Yahoo! Answers, MySpace Townhall, etc and etc.

So when people say John McCain's team wasn't social, they are wrong.  We were very social.  Did we run into the greatest use of social networking marketing in the history of the internet in the form of Barack Obama? YES. 

If we were more social would we have won the election?  No.  We still had to deal withan unpopular President, the economy, and money problems.  Senator McCain's eCampaign Team was VERY SOCIAL and any marketer should be jealous of what we accomplished; that is unless you were on Senator Obama's campaign.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 3 - The Death of Microtargeting?

Part 3 of my series recounting the 2008 election.  You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

So did Obama's election really kill Microtargeting?  Perhaps not, but it definitely puts it in perspective as a tactic that is not a "must do" when it comes to elections.  I'd also argue that Team Obama was the first marketing program to actually deliver on the 1:1 marketing promise of the digital revolution.

Microtargeting was typically thought of as a holy grail when it came to political marketing - you know the NASCAR dads and the Walmart Women.  The Clintons' political strategist Mark Penn wrote a book in time for the election season called Microtrends.  It seemed that it would help decide the Presidency this time around, but the traditional microtargeting tactic didn't seem to help Obama win the Presidency; to me it seemed that the Obama team used more of a macro marketing view powered by people in the long tail.  Allow me to explain....

Back in my AT&T days I built statistical models for consumer as well as business marketing teams.  A few of these were of the profiling basis and others were of the responder type.  The profiling ones used regression to figure out the key characteristics of a customer base.  We then used the profiles for marketing purposes by varying the creatives and the messaging especially when we didn't have enough dollars.  However, the two fundamental flaws of this tactic are that you have modeling errors and that the variables that you can plug into the model are limited by the dollars you have and the people you have to crunch the numbers; basically there are almost unlimited amount of variables that you can plug in.

The political analogy looks like this.  In a central office a group of quant jocks examine polling data to see what the latest trends are and how the candidate polls by geographic groupings.  There are social trends (religion, guns, marriage, etc), economic trends, national security trends, and etc.  Based on the polling data you map out a messaging and targeting strategy for the intersections and then what the voter segments look like (voter profiles).  Then the quant jocks use their data to score lists of customers (voter registration files) and wham you have microsegments. 

This really isn't that much different from the private sector.  They key point here is that like the private sector there are centrally located analysts that push the marketing segments out to the rest of the team.  From what I can see and from what I experienced, Obama didn't operate with this model...here's what I think they did.

1. They obviously tracked their polling around macro groups of voters.  New voters.  Hispanics.  Blacks. Whites. Women. Democrats. Republicans, Independents.  Youth. Seniors.  Large important voting blocs.
2. If they cut lists and altered marketing based on these segments it was very subtle and I didn't catch it.  They obviously had the money to microtarget, but then again they had more than enough money to not worry about microtargeting.  Based on my 10 years at AT&T, 5 years in the brokerage world, and 10+ years in digital marketers only worry about microtargeting when they have scarce dollars and need to focus them in a few key groups or likely responders.
3. Team Obama bought a ton of TV and of course had the network roadblock.  Network TV advertising is expensive and untargeted (especially when compared with Digital).
4. Obama's digital advertising supported #3.  The banner ads were everywhere including Drudge and Townhall.  The ads were beautiful and smartly used Flash, but the messaging didn't vary much (join us, visit site, or find polling location).  They made extensive used of network ad buys and I do know they used retargeting pixels; retargeting pixels proves that they had a smart plan of funneling people through a process to continue the conversation on their own terms.  Perhaps the remarketing is where the customized messages occurred, but I couldn't be sure (I didn't make it a habit of clicking on opponent ads).
5. They maintained from the very beginning a 50 state strategy.
6. Team Obama made the most extensive use of the Long Tail of Marketing by turning the customer segmentation over to their people-powered campaign.  As I wrote above there are always errors in customer segmentation because you can never put in every variable into your model.  However, by empowering their supporters with tools from their website, the supporters were able to make their own personal customer segments.  Of course they didn't name these segments but when you get right down to it - if you speak with enough of your friends about their issues, then you can create your own messaging for them and you know how to speak to a customer segment of 1.
7. No other marketing campaigns today can actually speak with a customer segment of 1. I'd argue that Team Obama was the first marketing program to actually deliver on the 1:1 marketing promise of the digital revolution.  BTW - it wasn't that our campaign didn't offer the same basic tools, we just lacked the money and people resources.
8. Of course they could have data mined the information to look at people that didn't register, unsure, etc and their army of supporters were only too happy to provide the information for use - they had an army of data collectors more powerful than any list of polling samples.

With Team Obama's unlimited funding sources and the huge list of volunteers and staff, they were able to throw the old playbook out the window.  They didn't need to use a micro-targeting approach. 

Obama was able to focus on macro voter blocs and then they provided the tools to their army of volunteers who attacked the Long Tail of voters on their behalf. 

Did they kill Microtargeting?  Probably not, but when you have unlimited funds and a product perceived to be just what people wanted, you don't need to worry so much about Microtrends.  You can actually deliver on the 1:1 marketing promise of the digital marketing revolution.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 2 - Monday Morning Quarterback

Part 2 of my series on election 2008.  Part 1 can be found here.

PART 1:  MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK

Well you know what happened.  Obama won 349 electoral college votes with 63.9 million votes and McCain won 163 with 56.4 million votes (CNN as of this writing still has MO and NC too close).  Comparing that with President Bush's outcome in 2004 , Obama received 1.89 million more votes.  He received 2/3 of the 18-29 year old vote (18% of vote) and McCain received 53% of 65+ (16% of vote).  More fun facts for you:  Obama received 95% of black votes, 67% Latino, and 55% of people with income below $100K.  60% of voters decided who they were going to vote for before September and another 14% in September.  And, making an educated guess 20% of all voters decided who they were going to vote for after the Joe The Plumber conversation.  Finally, according to Real Clear Politics Senator McCain had a 48.0 to 45.6 lead on September 9 which quickly evaporated when our economy blew up.  So what happened...

1. Senator McCain was impacted by President Bush's dismal approval ratings and the Obama campaign NEVER stopped trying to link McCain with Bush.  Every surrogate spoke of more of the same, voting 90%+ times, McBush, etc.  That was hammered home and I saw it in search ads when you Googled Senator McCain, in blog posts, and of course in bumper cars.  We knew this problem going in - EVERYONE KNEW THIS PROBLEM.  Could we have fought this better online?  Not with banner or search ads.  The only way to have combated that was with a more social networking strategy and better blogger direction.
2. The economy blowing up pushed us to an area we couldn't recover from.  I believe that our plan was the better plan for the USA and I also don't believe that Senator Obama's tax plan as currently offered will ever become law.  We spent tons of money online in the form of display ads as well as search ads.  We were the first ones to jump on the Joe The Plumber issue online and based on my past brokerage experience with Harrisdirect, I created a mini-online brokerage search campaign. I saw quite a number of blog posts from people commenting on our ads on stock tickers and other brokerage terms.  However, a ton of people already had made their decision before the economic blow up and we ran up against Obama's tax calculator.
3. Obama's legion of followers defied logic.  Without re-stating the obvious, we had plans to target the Youth, Women (Wal Mart), and Hispanics going back over a year.  Women in particular we were targeting both with messaging as well as online media for a long time (way BEFORE Hillary dropped out of the race).  Even for Hispanics we ran our own in-language search marketing campaigns in Yahoo and Google, but sadly we could never get traction outside of search for these groups.  Our beating among the Hispanic vote was even more of a shocker for me, because last summer the immigration issue via the McCain-Kennedy bill almost destroyed us.  In the end it just wasn't that Obama recognized these new groups, but they used modern data mining techniques to organize and activate them via social networking.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 1 - The Palin Effect

I have a ton to write about my experiences - almost as much to fill a book, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be.  Who knows. Anyway, at a high level I want to give some of my thoughts on the main digital strategy tactics used or not used in the campaign.  However, a few ground rules to start. 

First, this is my own personal experience.  Second, I won't guess or estimate what the major tactics of the campaign were because I don't want to be accused of being a "hanger on".  Third, when I do write about major themes it will be under the context of using digital to communicate and organize.  You want high level scoop you are at the wrong blog.  I did have a lot of interaction and meetings with the campaign manager (Rick Davis), the deputy campaign manager (Christian Ferry), of course my boss Becki Donatelli, the eCampaign team at McCain (Mike Palmer) and the RNC (Cyrus Krohn), but I spent the vast majority of my time in my office in NJ so I was removed from the actual day to day operation.  Finally, why am I doing this?  This is my own digital log of what I've done and I'm a sharing kind of guy.

So, what am I planning on writing about starting today?

1. The Palin Effect
2. Monday Morning Quarterback
3. The Death of Microtargeting?
4. Why weren't we more Social?
5. Ron Paul 2.0
6. The value of a 300x250
7. The Long Tail of Search Marketing

PART 1 - THE PALIN EFFECT

I actually planned on the second post to be the lead, but there is too much chatter in the blogosphere regarding anonymous McCain staffers bad mouthing Sarah Palin.   As I stated above, I'll only write what I know or have seen and around Gov. Palin that is extremely little.  However, one thing that I will say about the Palin bashing is that unless an actual named Senior Staffer says anything I wouldn't believe a word.  Sure perhaps some of those things happened, but maybe it is the exception and not the norm or perhaps it is just typical campaign stress.  I don't know, but what I do know is this...

• Prior to Governor Palin we used to run search advertising campaigns to drive people to come to events.  That was only done once after her selection to be McCain's running mate.
• August 1 - August 28th was already our best month in generating donations for the campaign via paid search
• In the three days including her nomination day in August we generated 220% more donations than the 28 days prior and as I wrote above, August was already our best month
• Her search campaigns included everything from defending rumors, to searching for pictures, Troopergate, as well as her name.  She was extremely popular in search activity and remained so until the very end.
• She was a key component of our digital marketing because ads with her in them typically outperformed other creatives.

Do I believe the rumors running around right now?   No, that is until someone from the Senior Staff confirms them.  However, from my cheap seats in Long Valley NJ, she was just what Senator McCain said she was " someone that has brought enthusiasm" to the crowds and the base of voters.  The data I have and saw completely verifies this.  So if you are wondering, well why didn't McCain win?  Well I have a post for another day, but let's just say that even economic wunderkind Mitt Romney couldn't have helped much after the economy imploded.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric