“Conan! What is best in life?
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
Political campaigns have long been at the forefront of advertising psychology and brand construction. As this morning’s SXSW Interactive panel What your Startup Can Learn from Barack Obama and Howard Dean proved, they’re basically quick-fire start-ups, with contributions standing in for venture capitol, and a very focused end-game.
It’s an arcane art. The Obama campaign, Sunlight Labs Director and former Dean campaign op Clay Johnson said, got so fine-tuned on what did and did not work that they knew what font and font-size was most effective in fund-raising emails. Even self-professed token Republican Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard admitted that they did a good job, noting that John Kerry didn’t pay attention to Dean’s developments and lost.
The tactics of the Obama campaign are being dismantled and analyzed by every ad exec and campaign manager. The political pros are probably ahead of the curve, especially on localizing a national campaign, added Michael Bassik, chief digital officer of the latest reboot of Air America Media. It’s a habit: The Obama campaign lived by the mantra of “fail harder,” meaning they experimented with every medium and outlet. The purest example may have been adopting iPhone apps before they had real market penetration. If they’d flopped, no big. But if they succeed, then the campaign is ahead of the curve and helps define the new tech.
But the real trick, Johnson added, is the big strategy of having an opponent. However, that opponent is not your competition: They’re too small, too temporary to be effective. Find something bigger, more conceptual to battle. Even this panel, he said, has an enemy: Bad SXSW panels.
This article appears in March 13 • 2009.