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 age 35 and 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 who 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 one engaged 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.