The Changing Face of Campaign Marketing

Nearly two years ago, mobile advertising and social media forever changed the way political campaigns are run. In an increasingly connected and inter-connected world, the way to reach constituents and potential voters needed to change. And it did in a big way – to the advantage of U.S. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Limbo, the company that ran the SMS advertising campaigns for the Dems delivered over one million SMS impressions across the two campaigns and in January 2008 they released a report detailing some of what they learned about the effect of mobile advertising on voters’ attitudes and behaviors. Maybe not too surprisingly, the results suggest that SMS advertising provides a powerful tool for candidates to change consumer attitudes and voting behavior.

Limbo found that those who received the SMS had a 53 percent awareness rate – higher than might be expected from traditional forms of media but in line with other SMS programs up to that point. The overall impact however was considerable with 28 percent of voters who received the SMS campaign messages altering their voting intentions in some way. Limbo’s key findings affected two changes in voters; voting intention and candidate perception.

Voting Intention

• About 6% of those surveyed said that the advertising had changed their voting intentions significantly. 
• Men and people those age 35and older changed their voting intentions most at 7%.
• An additional 22% said their intentions had been changed a little.
• This represents a total of 28% of people changed their voting intentions.
• Post campaign, a net 10% increase in positive perception was realized.

Candidate Perception

• 14% said that their perception of the candidate was now more positive than before seeing the campaign.
• Only 4% said that their perception of the candidate was now more negative.
• This represents a net 10% increase in positive perception.
• Barack Obama saw the biggest uplift, with a net gain of 16%.

Bringing it Home

Limbo’s findings were important to us for one very big reason. Here in Central Europe, Czech Republic and our neighbor to the east, Slovakia, had particularly hard-fought campaigns by several parties this spring. Facing the very real possibility of losing it’s seats in Parliament, a Slovakian political party with a small but exceptionally loyal following called Tego Interactive to provide strategic and technical expertise in utilizing Web, social media and mobile in their campaign.

We prepared a joint mobile and Facebook campaign strategy that we believed would not only meet but exceed the party’s election goals, ensuring the retention of their parliamentary seats. The reason we felt so strongly that this was possible was:

• Mobile campaigns clearly have observable effect on political campaigns.
• Slovak Republic’s high mobile and facebook penetration make it ripe for joint mobile and facebook marketing.
• Mobile facebook users are twice as active as non-mobile users.
• Access to oneengaged Facebook user means access to 130 more of their friends.
• Facebook provides useful demographics of users that we could use to better target voters dynamically.

I wish this story had a happy ending for both Tego Interactive and for the campaign. Unfortunately the party decided other more traditional campaign strategies were more likely to succeed. Well…

Maybe you already see where this is going.

Given the strength of the strategy we presented, perhaps the outcome of the elections would have been more positive for them had the party chosen to pursue our recommendations. Old ways die hard – and apparently so do parties that don’t evolve with their constituents.

Tego Interactive’s article on whether Apple needs the iPhone to be successful in the enterprise sector is featured in this week’s Carnival so please be sure to check it out.

In short, I don’t think Apple cares much about the enterprise sector- at least as far as the iPhone goes. My guess is that Apple doesn’t lose (much) by not owning the enterprise market and therefore doesn’t care (much). Here’s why..

Integrated devices (ID) are what mobile operators call those devices that incorporate functionality other than voice and text messaging – what most of us refer to as smartphones. In a recent Q1 2010 earnings call, Rick Lindner, AT&T CFO called ID users “high quality customers”. Why? Overall, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) was up nearly 4% in the quarter for AT&T, driven mostly by an increase in data plan usage. That is significant. More important however is ID users generate an average ARPU of $90 – an amazing 1.7 times that of standard customers. Understand that only 50% of AT&T’s post-paid customers currently have data plans and you begin to see why operators want iPhones and other smartphones on their networks. This particular group of users can impact mobile operator bottom lines in a significant way, especially when coupled with a two year service commitment.

Since ID users in general are so attractive for operators, the question of iPhone or Blackberry from an operator point of view is neutral at best. In fact I would say from a raw profit perspective, the iPhone is a strong favorite because there is no longer any revenue sharing agreement with Apple. Operators would suffer by not offering Blackberry since the enterprise segment is very important.

Apple doesn’t comment publicly on this, though it is suspected that contrary to the Mac side of the business, they make more money on iPhone app sales than on hardware sales. In other words, profit margin on iPhone hardware is less than profit generated through purchases from iTunes and the App Store over the life of the iPhone. Now couple that with the introduction of iAd and the profit generated through in-app ad sales. Apple would make little if anything on Apps or ads in the enterprise space since most companies restrict their employee’s ability to make unauthorized purchases on their phones. So, no premium SMS voting for your favorite American Idol (or for our international audience, Superstar). No apps. And no App and ad revenue.

Now if Apple were to roll out strong enterprise support coupled with premium services (a la RIM) that companies could justify paying for, this might change. For now, I just don’t see Apple’s motivation to push the iPhone into the enterprise sector.

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