Cannes: Obama’s campaign manager on the “grassroots army” James Livesley in Cannes
The campaign manager behind the election of US President Barack Obama told a packed auditorium in Cannes how the election campaign harnessed digital technology and advertising to create a “grassroots army”.
Speaking in a DDB organised seminar, David Plouffe, the campaign manager who was mentioned in Barack Obama’s presidential election victory speech, told Cannes delegates how the campaign married digital technology and appeal to grass roots Americans, helping turn those who had shown no interest in politics before, into campaigners.
Talking of the start of the campaign, and the battle with fellow Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, he said: “Some people like to say Hillary Clinton was IBM, Barack Obama was Apple. I can assure you we weren’t Apple, it was more like a high school science lab, we started with nothing.
“But I think we benefitted from looking at everything with a fresh pair of eyes. We did not have the dusty playbook on the shelf about how Barack Obama was going to run for president.
“Out of that came a belief in building a grassroots campaign married to the use of digital technology. Grassroots and technology were not additive, they weren’t something that was a bonus, they were a core to who we were.”
Social media and more “old school” digital tactics like websites and email were used to motivate “grassroots” Americans to spread Barack Obama’s messages.
‘We had citizen fundraisers who used our social networking site, mybarackobama.com, to raise money. We valued those people – they got conference calls with Barack Obama and with people like me. We treated them as well as our big donors, so they knew we valued what they were doing. We used our grassroots army to change the electorate.
“Time after time the electorate was younger than it had been before, with more independents and Republicans and it made all the difference in the world. And technology made all that possible – sharing lifts with people, communicating messages to them, it was real time communication.”
Plouffe described the Obama campaign strategy of “alignment”, a strategy he believed other organisations should take note of.
“You had to be firing on all cylinders. On a day that Barack Obama was in, let’s says Toledo, Ohio, if his speech that day was about energy, we made sure the volunteers that day were talking to voters about energy, and we had advertising on that focused on energy, and our internet advertising was on energy. But if the person knocking on someone’s door is talking about healthcare, and the TV ad is about tax cuts, and the website is about Iraq, people are going to wonder ‘what’s going on here?
How can you run a country if you can’t be telling me the same thing in your campaign?’
He added: “And I think this is a mistake a lot of organisations make. You’ll see what’s going on digitally, which is maybe a little detached from the television advertisement, which maybe detached from the employer communication, which maybe detached from a speech the CEO gives. Now the world is not simple, but the quest for alignment, in a world were people are very busy, is really important, and that was a fundamental philosophy.”
Despite the success of Obama’s digital and advertising strategies, Plouffe insisted these were merely the means of motivating people to communicate with each other.
“We always knew who the undecided voters were. We would reach them, yes with TV ads, yes with web advertising, but we always thought the most important thing we did was the contact from volunteers. And we are still emailing millions of Americans with messages, from the President in some cases now, about what he is trying to accomplish in Washington. And when we send an email now it reaches more people than last week’s ABC and CBS nightly news combined. And then they share that message, they consume it, and then they spread it. What they trust is that human contact. It really is a story about people.”
