It’s renowned as the most digitally savvy election campaign yet. The story of how Barack Obama used social media to build grassroots support has become the stuff of social-media legend.
But when David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, took to the stage at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival today, the surprising message for marketers was to keep it “old school”: email and TV are still critically important.
Right from the start of his seminar, hosted by the DDB Worldwide agency, Mr Plouffe played down the digital credentials for which he is best known. “Some like to say Hillary was IBM and we were Apple,” he said. “I can assure you we weren’t like Apple. It was more like a high-school science lab.”
But the campaign’s standing start actually proved a boon, from a strategist’s perspective. “We didn’t have a dusty playbook on the shelf of how to run a campaign,” Mr Plouffe said, allowing the Obama team to build a “grassroots campaign married to the use of technology”.
Grassroots supporters – at the centre of the campaign at the behest of the then-future president – were employed to raise half a billion dollars, transform the electorate with new voter registrations and “move the message”.
That message was distributed through emails and text messages, but wasn’t too proscriptive. “We didn’t want our supporters reading off a script. We said speak from your own heart about why you are for Barack Obama. Nothing is more powerful than authenticity. People have a very, very sensitive bullshit meter.”
That’s conventional wisdom in social-media marketing. But Plouffe – who mentioned Facebook, MySpace and Twitter only once in his entire presentation – said those sites were just part of the arsenal.
“I know it’s fashonable to suggest that TV advertising is less and less important. In our campaign it played a huge role. The quickest way to speed up and get people known is to reach people in a mass way.”
But Obama did TV “unconventionally”, sacrificing reach by cutting 30-second spots in some states to pay for 30-minute and two-minute ads in the “Oval office address” mould.
Facebook and MySpace were part of Obama’s efforts to be in “every space”, but Plouffe didn’t fuel the social-media mythology that they won the election; Twitter wasn’t even a major force when the campaign began.
“The real drivers for us were old school – they were email and they were web,” he said.
The legacy of that email campaign is that the Obama administration can still communicate with 10m Americans – “directly, not through a media filter”, said Plouffe, at a time when people trust media less and value personal recommendations more.
“That may not be as sexy as a TV ad or a press conference, but I can’t think of anything more valuable than [staying in email contact with supporters],” he said.
“There is nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being.”
