Promo - January 2008 - (Page 26)

CYBER STUMPING Talk about event marketing: Oprah showed up at an Obama rally, and got attendees to make 120,000 get-out-the vote calls from their personal cell phones. ★ 2008 presidential ﬁeld taps consumer promo playbook By Brian Quinton ★ ELISE AMENDOLA / AP IMAGES In case you missed it, something very interesting happened last month at Barack Obama’s rally in Columbia, SC. A viral marketing event broke out. The 30,000 people who half-filled a football stadium to see Obama and queen of all media Oprah Winfrey were asked to text their cell phone numbers to the campaign and sign up for mobile messages. They were then instructed to turn over the tickets they’d received at the door and look for four first names and phone numbers of registered Democrats in the state. Would they take 10 minutes right now to call those four people and urge them to vote for Obama in the South Carolina primary in January? They would and did, in large numbers. In other words, Obama’s campaign found a way to data-mine a live event and then got people to make up to 120,000 campaign calls. And charge the calls to their own bills. “It was brilliant,” says Jim Calhoun, CEO of viral marketing platform com- pany PopularMedia. “With that tactic [requesting phone numbers], he’s getting around the government restrictions on making election calls to mobile phones. They’re finding really ingenious ways to leverage technology and get people started advocating to others like them. It’s an instantaneous phone bank, and it wouldn’t have been possible four years ago.” Welcome to “brand politics” in the 21st century. The same way that Kennedy and Nixon hired ad agencies in 1960 for slick commercials when voters were still getting used to television in their living rooms, today’s crop 26 January 2008 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - January 2008

Promo - January 2008 Contents Editor's Note Viral But Virtuous Slap Shot Power Chords Tuning In Auto Play Trekkies Unite Commentary Retail Report: Get In Here! Generating Store Traffic Yankee Candle Shopper Marketing What Seniors Want Cyber Stumping Party Hearty Q & A: Paper Trail Ambush Marketing The Agency Center Resource Center Back-End Foundation Index of Advertisers

Promo - January 2008

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