Three Minute Happiness

James Cooper

The credit freeze is for suckers. Obama’s marketing budget is now so humongous that he may not actually be able to spend all his millions by Election Day on November 4th.

 
Unlike Richard Prior in Brewster’s Millions though Obama has executed a flawless spend of his dosh, something that has rightly earned him Advertiser of the Year over here. There are a few things that are interesting about this. The first one being that the general consensus is that had a ‘big agency’ been in charge of his marketing campaign they more than likely would have made a pig’s ear of it. That’s not particularly encouraging for the state of the mainstream industry. But I don’t think that’s really news is it? What’s more interesting is how Obama got to rack up another $150 million just last month.

 
We all know about the great things that Obama has done. He’s on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook etc. and just appeared in a few X-Box games. All boxes ticked - and all with serious budgets. This is a digital or social media planner’s wet dream. It’s easy to experiment when you have so much cash though. I wonder if Obama didn’t have so much money would he have played it more safe with all the normal TV boll*cks? I guess we will never know, but I have to think that he would have still done a good proportion of the neat stuff.

The other story was of course the Shepard Fairey poster. This has become the image of the campaign. It’s perfect in every way. It effortlessly makes Obama cool, yet statesmanlike and introduces a whole new generation into politics. What ad agency wouldn’t be proud of a piece of creative like that? Take the coolest street artist around and get him to create content for your client. And if I had a dollar for every brainstorm I had sat in since the poster came where someone has said, “And we could get Shepard Fairey to do X,” then I would be joining Richard Prior on the Brewster’s silliness. But of course no agency came up with the idea. No one from the Obama campaign contacted Shepard. He did it on his own accord. And that’s the killer.

Consumers are tired of being told what to do. There is enough information out there these days on your product, service or cause for people to make up their own minds. They will then act accordingly. So Shepard Fairey created the poster way back in the primaries, stuck it up over LA and charged nothing. He thought it was a good idea, his way of helping a cause he believed in. And all these people that are giving Obama money by the sackloads every day (about $5m a day, every day) are also doing it because they believe in Obama the brand.

So the question is how do you behave as a brand in such a way that people can’t help but want to at the very simplest level, purchase your brand, but go beyond that. Way beyond, so that come the time when you have to slice up your media spend you actually have too much money to spend in too little time. Nice problem to have.

I have a theory that Burton Snowbaords may have achieved this marketing nirvana but that’s another post for another time.

PS. Thanks to Paul Daligan for the Brewster analogy.