Sorry about the diatribe, but it’s been an interesting week; an historic week, even: Lewis Hamilton becomes the youngest Grand Prix winner ever; and Barack Obama becomes the first black president. Both of these are interesting because they demonstrate two extremes of planning a campaign: in the Barack case, an intelligently prepared campaign strategy that used social media to broaden the reach and exposure of a political campaign to previously unheard of levels; and in the case of Lewis Hamilton, a thoughtless attempt to seize on the competitive nature of sport that went hideously wrong.
Obama and the power of Facebook (http://my.barackobama.com)
The Barack story is interesting, because there is a parallel with the Conservative rise to power of the early 70s. In both cases, the political parties/candidates recognized the power of new channels to activate and capture the attention of previously hard to reach candidates. In the 1970s the channel was TV; in the case of Obama it was the internet.
There is a lot of material about the Obama campaign (I’ve included two links below), but for me one of the most interesting and unique features was its use of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Chris Hughes, the founder of Facebook, was brought onto the Obama team and immediately set about activating a whole tranche of activities, run by engaged supporters. Some of the stats have been included below:
· More than 1.5 million people visited the mybarackobama website and organized themselves into 35,000 separate groups
· Over 150,000 meetings and events were organized during the 21 months of Obama’s presidential campaign
· Supporters bombarded YouTube with videos of his speeches to boost his online presence
· The campaign raised over $600m in donations from 3million people, many of whom contributed online
· When the Republicans started the viral rumour mill, the Obama camp used the internet to counter the various rumours that were being aired.
Simon Rosenberg, who worked on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, said: “He’s run a campaign where he’s used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he’s reinvented the way campaigns are run. Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multinational corporation versus a non-profit organisation.”
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24610850-5018194,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7412045.stm
Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton
In the run up to Sunday’s Grand Prix, competitive fervor was at an all time high. For those of who were either dead or simply don’t care the premise was this. Felipe Mass, racing on home turf, needed to come 1st or 2nd and needed Hamilton to come 6th or 7th respectively to win the grand prix. If Hamilton came 5th or higher he would automatically win. Added to this, Fernando Alonso, who had very public spats with Hamilton last year, had implied in press conferences that he might try to assist Massa (or at the very least hinder Hamilton). Man vs. boy; Spain vs. England; black vs. white. Take your pick – there were plenty of angles to choose from.
In the pique of nationalistic fervor, TBWA, an Omnicom agency created a site called Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton. The site, which translated means “Burst Hamilton’s Tyre”, invited visitors to place a virtual nail on the track at Interlagos, the setting for Sunday’s title showdown with Felipe Massa in the Brazil Grand Prix.
The site was closed down after hundreds of abusive messages were posted, some of which referred to Hamilton as a “half-breed” and others which used the n-word. It’s a classic campaign of an organisation creating something and then foolishly not monitoring how it gets used.
Now let’s be clear – this isn’t the first time that a voodoo style campaign has been created; in the most recent football world cup there were sites where you could stab effigies of key players with a pin in an attempt to curse them prior to a game. It isn’t even the first time that an agency has used the web to push the boundaries of acceptable marketing behaviour. The problem here was that the agency didn’t respond immediately when offensive comments started to get published and when Lewis won the championship, the story became incredibly newsworthy.
There is only one fitting epithet to this story…