Just cleaning out some emails and found this:
Obama The Brand
my.barackobama.com
Surfing the Web for the dregs of election coverage very early this morning -- would Ted Stevens survive in Alaska? -- with half an ear cocked to the television pundatariat , I decided I'd better get a jump on the morning's roundup of brand marketing.
Nothing was noteworthy on the major newspaper and wire service Web sites and RSS feeds. All the mail bulletins were about election results. The trades lay fallow.
I did learn from Beverage Daily that "Pepsi Stays Dairy-Free Despite Yogurt Drink Launch" in Asia.
And the Wall Street Journal carries a rave review of "The Widow Clicquot" by Tilar J. Mazzeo (Collins, 265 pages, $25.95), a book about Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin who, through brilliant marketing and the attention to such details as the quality of corks, laid the foundation for champagne becoming a global brand. But her major breakthrough is a tad anachronistic -- a distribution coup at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
When I found myself clicking through to a British Web site reporting about a survey that determined that sending customers Christmas cards through the post increased brand loyalty by up to 30%, I resolved to not drag you through a lot of irrelevancies.
John Lewis (D-Ga.), the congressman who has deep roots in the civil rights struggles of the Sixties, was on at least two networks last night talking about the "nonviolent revolution" that had taken place with the election of an African American president.
"If someone had told be back in 1961 ... that I would be witnessing this unreal and unbelievable transformation of American politics, I would say you're crazy, you're out of your mind, and you don't know what you're talking about," he said on ABC .
So the question -- as a French Canadian friend of mine who lives in Rome and heads a new NGO in Geneva, Switzerland, asked me the other day -- is "exactly how" did Brand Obama prevail? With the cachet of Apple, how did he wind up with Microsoft numbers? (Not quite, but you get the analogy.) - Read the whole story...
What Obama Can Teach You About Millennial Marketing
Ad Age
Earlier in Age (back in August), Peter Feld wrote about Obama's appeal to millennials. "The qualities he projects -- a cool, smooth aura, the communal values of hope and unity, his teeming crowds and his campaign's seamless graphics -- are the essence of appealing to millennials."
And how does he project this, besides at mass gatherings that appeal to the civic-minded under-30s? By the campaign's mastery of cutting-edge social media such as my.barackobama.com (known internally as "MYBO."
For this generation, "the new pronoun is me, my. Using my-dot brings it to a personal level," says Allison Mooney, who tracks youth trends for Fleishman-Hillard's Next Great Thing.
But those under 30 are decidedly not tethered to anything as restraining as the Web. "Perhaps inevitably," Feld writes, "among the first apps introduced for Apple's new iPhone ... was an Obama "Countdown to Change" calendar that ticks off the seconds until Election Day." - Read the whole story...
The Brand Called Obama
Fast Company
"Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand," Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, told Ellen McGirt, in a piece published earlier this year. "New, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets."
This story also delves into Obama's appeal to millennials of diverse backgrounds who, it points out, "will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010." But why was Obama so successful in reaching them online? Because, according to two professors who have been studying Web sites and social media in campaigns, his campaign featured constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back.
Plus, it successfully tapped into other online communities and came across as authentic. "There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web," says Karen Scholl, a creative director at the digital-advertising agency Resource Interactive. "And they can smell a fake."
"There is no question that the brand of Obama -- what he represents to the next generation of Americans -- is important," McGirt concludes. "A business that ignores this message does so at its own peril."
The comments to the piece are themselves a fascinating read, by the way, and I intend to return to them as soon as I finish writing. - Read the whole story...
Branding Our Consciousness, Or Typecasting By Typeface
The Guardian
Leave it to the Brits to explicate Obama's "trans-media, upmarket consumer brand" by looking at the typeface used for the headlines on its campaign materials. It's Gotham - "a gloriously unfussy sans serif designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2002," we're told. "Gotham is assured, elegant, and plain-speaking -- just like Obama."
"Hillary's soporific serif, a horribly heavy weight of New Baskerville, feels stuffy and elitist," the article continues. "John McCain's branding is unashamedly militant; his sans serif Optima is the same as that used to engrave the names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington."
- Read the whole story...
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