Davis ThinkingWhat should newspapers do? What newspaper can’t do.
I used Wordle to generate tag clouds for both President Obama’s and President Bush’s first addresses to Congress. They share a common political lexicon, with the expected partisan differences, but a few words in particular merit comment.
There’s a lot being written about the merchandising of this inaugural moment. For a sampling of what’s available, check out Amazon. Or any newsstand around the world.
Oh that’s a trick question – you MUST have seen it because I watched it on your air.
It was no surprise that during the 2008 presidential election the candidates were compared to brands and perceived as brands. And yes, the final two candidates did have trademarks. But does that really make them brands?
Regardless of your political persuasion, it is difficult to deny that brand Obama made participating in the political process cool again. MC Yogi is just one of many who took Obama’s voice, messages and logo, mashed it up and made it their own. The result: a malleable, inspiring brand that was expressed in myriad unique ways by the people, for the people.
Regardless of the results Tuesday night, the biggest loser of the 2008 election was third party politics. Bob Barr and Ralph Nader certainly deserve respect, but neither could provide true third party legitimacy or offer a remedy for a two-party system that continues to corral diverse voters into one of two catch-all ideological tents. Obama and McCain had the star power, change message, and political climate to finally do so, but in the end they chose to offer American voters New Coke and Pepsi Clear when we desperately need the Un-Cola.
As the country winds down from the election night parties and the selection of Barack Obama as president-elect of the U.S., UE takes a trip through time to November 9, 1960. This video of the acceptance speech by President-elect John F. Kennedy is amazing not only in its historical significance, but also because the same speech could be given today. Without the wire from Nixon, of course.
What will Barack Obama do with the first presidential social network once he manages to get elected?
In brand strategy we talk about the necessity of giving people a reason to believe. That intangible aspect of a brand that causes one to pause, consider and ultimately feel right about their choice. People are turning out in droves this election to support their political brand of choice, their reason to believe. Whether it’s Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin, there is passion and belief in the intangible aura that surrounds these candidates.
In 2007, a friend and retired international campaign consultant predicted this about the 2008 presidential campaign: “The Democrats will do anything to get elected. But the Republicans will do everything to get elected.” Indeed he was prescient, since we have since witnessed yet another sleazy Republican campaign, a tradition going back to Watergate and continuing on with the George W. Bush stolen election in 2000 and the swift boat ads against John Kerry in 2004.
Senator Barack Obama visited Google's headquarters nearly one year ago to announce his innovation agenda, speak with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and take questions from Google employees. Senator John McCain also participated in a similar session as part of the company's Candidates@Google series.
While it’s too early to know for sure which words or phrases will go the distance, I offer for debate a few predictions of how word meaning may change as a result of 2008 political usage, as well as a couple phrases that will be ever-linked to Campaign ’08.
Hollywood is turning out in force, saying “don’t vote.” Because not voting is still a vote.
President Bartlet of "The West Wing" appeared at last night’s 60th Anniversary Emmy Awards, delivering an eloquent, bipartisan reminder for audiences to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. During this presidential race, pundits have said much about the power of Barack Obama’s words to move crowds, but little about Sorkin’s, and how his idealized American President inspired voters to reconsider the qualities they demand in a candidate for the country’s highest office.
I’d like to offer an alternative interpretation of Barak Obama’s recent reinvention of the presidential seal.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama spoke today in Chicago in front of a seal surely meant to convey a presidential image and his readiness for the job at stake. Instead, he made me giggle.
Love him or hate him, Obama has finally put his campaign money where his mouth by opting out of the public campaign financing system.
We've avoided politics, largely, until now, when there is a question of brand to explore. Much has been said already about "Brand Obama" and "Brand Clinton," and which is more compelling or divisive to the Democratic party. That's not a question I'll approach to answer here, but I would like to ask which of the two is actually a brand at all.
In addressing American innovation in the State of the Union Address, President Obama called America a nation of Google and Facebook. The mention is significant not only because Obama has been known for leveraging social media, but also the timing of the mention.
Many North Americans would scarcely believe their ears if they heard what Gina Burton has done. A Toronto mother of two in her early 50s, Ms Burton drove a Volvo for 10 years. But, she says, “I just don’t think that the last Volvo drove as well as the others.” So in August, she traded in her Cross Country estate for a Buick Enclave, one of GM’s upscale crossover sport-utility vehicles.
Most business executives likely have never come across the concept. Yet despite its limited reach to a small audience of policy wonks, President Obama made it a campaign issue in 2008, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is determined to make it the law, and industry analysts are concerned that its passage would undermine investment by Internet service providers (ISPs). A recent pact on the subject between Google and Verizon — the largest representatives on both sides of the debate — made the covers of the nation's major newspapers this week. What's the fuss over this thing called "net neutrality"?
Yesterday, President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It's a 2,300 page bill containing 533 new regulations. 38% of Americans have never heard of it. Another 33% couldn't explain its key deliverable. If the point of the legislation is to restore confidence in the financial system, it seems like it's dead on delivery, and you can bet that opinion of the bill is only going to get worse (or at best, muddled) as the administration's principled opposition continues to debate settled law and the nutjobs scream that it's further proof of an alien invasion. Consumers are going to continue to lose their faith in the markets. This isn't good for Wall Street.
This week BP successfully recapped its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Test results are favorable and show that oil and gas are, for the time being, confined. This news inspires cautious optimism in the hearts of residents and spectators alike. Online, however, the social effect continues to flow across social networks and social graphs, echoing anger, hope, and the demand for resolution and prevention from BP and the Obama administration.
BP PLC, under intense legal and political pressure from President Barack Obama, agreed Wednesday to put $20 billion into a fund to compensate victims of the Gulf oil spill, and said it would cancel shareholder dividends for the first three quarters of this year to offset that cost. BP said it would pay another $100 million to a separate fund to help oil-industry workers sidelined by the Obama administration's moratorium on deepwater drilling.
In Davos, signs of recovery for the economy — but it's not the same old world.
Flouting the efforts of lobbyists to shut down his plan for a consumer protection agency, the newly combative President Barack Obama is digging in his heels. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said last week that it’s something Obama “is not willing to give up.” Thus, we open another round in the brawl between Obama and business groups that claim the bill covering mortgage and credit-card lenders is a death sentence for small companies, expensive for consumers, and will “change the way Americans do business forever.”
Republican Scott Brown's victory over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election last week makes President Barack Obama an unimpressive zero for three. Since taking office, each time he's tried to help a Democrat secure an election victory -- the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia being the other two instances -- he has come up empty. It's a pretty stunning turnabout for the man named Ad Age's Marketer of the Year in 2008, when his masterful campaign infected a nation with a fever for change and the Democratic party rode his coattails to the kind of majorities in the House and Senate that all but guaranteed approval of key party policies. Now, undoubtedly, Brand Obama is tarnished. Some political analysts and consultants believe he fell victim to a common marketer mistake: being too slow to react to a new environment.
In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No Label." The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters."
When you look at Oprah Winfrey’s multidecade run through daytime talk — most of it at No. 1 — it’s easy to be impressed by what she did to make it happen. But her longevity and success (Forbes estimated her net worth at over $2.3 billion) probably has more to do with what she did not do.
The TED Blog caught up with ad man Rory Sutherland the evening before we posted his TEDTalk. Drawing on the work of behavioral economists, Nobel Prize winners and others, he talked at length about his personal philosophy of Advertarianism, about President Obama and the healthcare debate, and even threw in some analysis on the future of media use and advertising. Not bad, considering it was well past bedtime in the UK.
In times of economic hardship, businesses are more tempted than ever to batten down the hatches. After all, management literature agrees: Transformative innovation involves taking a risk with absolutely no guarantee of a payoff. And who would want to get tangled up in that type of strategy just as a company's core business is struggling? Surely only a crazy person. Not so fast. As the saying goes, "When everyone zigs, zag." And, as our two guest columnists argue in this BusinessWeek special report on Growth Through Innovation, a resilient approach to innovation, whatever the economic weather, is critical to building long-lasting businesses.
Did you ever think the next sale of Trojans or e.p.t. would help fund President Obama's healthcare reforms? While Congress has backed off on taxing such products after pressure from Republicans and a flurry of behind-the-scenes industry lobbying, it still has marketers fully in its sights. The sparring over taxation and advertising regulations has only just begun. So far, marketers appear to be faring well in what American Advertising Federation's evp of government affairs Clark Rector described "as busy a time as I can recall in quite a few years." Given the activist bent of the Obama administration and the Democratically controlled Congress, he added, "the thinking is that the business community is under fire and marketing tends to be the most visible face of that."
PSFK recently covered what the internet is killing, and this video we came across shows through various statistics how the internet is changing our lives. For example, the average American teenager sends an average of 2,272 text messages every month and more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, NBC and CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948, when ABC first starting broadcasting. The cleanly presented video runs through some shocking statistics about technology and the dramatic shift of our society.
"My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." U.S. President Barack Obama felt compelled to speak these words to the leading U.S. bank CEOs at a White House gathering to which they had been summoned on April 9, 2009. Driven by public anger at the financial crisis, the President employed a metaphor invoking images of "peasants with pitchforks" rising up to demand better treatment. That Iranian students, indigenous Peruvians and Somali pirates feel similarly inspired to take violent actions affecting global businesses reinforces the point. Based on recent polling data, it is would seem that his uncharacteristic use of alarmist imagery was not misplaced. According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, 49% -- or fewer than half of the people surveyed in an annual assessment of US attitudes -- support an independently functioning free market.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." -- Plato That may have been true 2,400 years ago, but it may not be so true today. In fact, in our always on, desperately seeking stimulation media environment, you have to say something -- and something meaningful and arresting, or at least communicated in an engaging way -- to keep the hungry masses satiated. Else, they'll go somewhere else. Sometimes it takes smart people a long time to catch on to this new reality (many never do). Sure, they understand that Ali became "The Greatest," Elvis "The King," Gandhi "The Mahatma" et al. through a combination of endowment, passion, and hard work. But they also know, intellectually, that manufactured spectacle played a supremely important role in their progress; spectacle, by the way, that at times both engaged and enraged the masses.
When Barack Obama hired John Berry to head his Office of Personnel Management earlier this year, the president did not mince words. “John, we’ve got to make it cool again,” Obama said to his new hire. Many of the nation’s brightest graduates are snapped up by tech start-ups claiming to offer not only high compensation but the feeling of being part of something exciting — not to mention such perks as meals by gourmet chefs, exercise and laundry facilities, haircuts, massages and other amenities designed to smooth the transition from college to adulthood while instilling a sense of loyalty.
As I have often contended, people can be viewed and managed as brands, especially people who have very high public profiles. In October of last year, just before the November elections, we polled Branding Strategy Insider readers on the John McCain and (now) President Barack Obama brands. Just recently, more than 200 days into President Obama’s presidency, we repeated the survey to determine in what ways perceptions of him might have changed in such a short period of time.
What was he thinking? John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, criticized Obama's approach to health care, and called for a private sector approach. Let's do the cultural math and establish how Mackey damaged the brand and took money out of share holder's pockets.
The term “pop culture” appeared around 1960, just as its meaning became confused. High-culture up-and-comers were embracing pop imagery and tropes with a vengeance, and the best and brightest creators of entertainment were suddenly producing work of thrilling sophistication and complexity. It was also the coming-of-age moment for the first baby boomers, a cohort defined by its television-saturated upbringing and unparalleled level of college education — a generation, in other words, unapologetic in its love of commercial pop even as it put on arty airs.
As the clock ticked toward 6 p.m., Mr. Henderson told directors of General Motors that management believed the struggling auto company’s only path was into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “I’d been at G.M. 25 years, I’d been the C.E.O. 60 days, and here I was, recommending that G.M. file for bankruptcy,” Mr. Henderson said in an interview last week. Mr. Henderson, Mr. Obama and the scores of lawyers, financial experts and restructuring advisers whose careers were at stake were guiding G.M. along a financial, political and emotional tightrope a few months ago, and their decisions shaped what G.M. has become today. And it is not yet clear whether the risks they took, and the government’s enormous investment, will pay off.
If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.
Generation Y. Generation O (for Obama). Millennials. Echo boomers. Call them what you will, the tens of millions of Americans in their teens and 20s compose a market as hard for advertisers to figure out as it is alluring and lucrative.
In no place has the seismic illumination of communication as an innovation been more punctuated than the Obama administration. Yes, while smart and astute policy adjustments and groundbreaking new lawmaking have been vital to our nation's healing, so, too, has been the manner in which these transformative changes have been communicated.
The Obama administration's most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. Are you searching for a Food and Drug Administration report that used to be obtainable only through the Freedom of Information Act? Just a mouseclick away. Need National Institutes of Health studies and school testing scores? Click. Census data, nonclassified Defense Department specs, obscure Securities and Exchange Commission files, prison statistics? Click click. Click. Click.
For those of us familiar with the strange land that is Washington, DC, it’s tempting to snicker a bit at the sudden star turn of the field of behavioral economics in our nation’s capital. Books like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits are being passed around like samizdat. Human beings, the thinking goes, bear little more than a passing resemblance to the “economic man” of classic econ textbooks. We’re messy creatures, not altogether skilled at maximizing value, or efficiency, or all those other things our self-interest is supposed to drive us to attain.
With new titles like “deputy chief technology officer” for former Google head of global public policy Andrew McLaughlin, "director of citizen participation” for ex-Google project manager Katie Stanton, and head of the new White House Office of Social Innovation for economist Sonal Shah, once head of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org, it seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is racking up insiders from the grand monopolist of internet advertising just because it can.
There’s no such thing as a captive audience. Gone are the days of neat and discrete moments in time where advertisers talked to target audiences. Today’s is a culture in constant motion. And the dizzying array of platforms, constant connectivity and ever-increasing speed of information has left the ad industry out of sync with its audience. People don’t live in quarterly campaigns, nor do they distinguish communication channels. They expect faster and constant communication with their brands across more media platforms and conversations. Every month, week, day, on the hour. It’s now about how fast brands can move, how relevant they can be and what they can offer in the here and now. There is a always need for “slow” and carefully crafted brand strategies and stories. But, with culture in constant motion there is also a need for marketers to be quick and nimble, so they can find opportunities where their brands can tap into cultural conversations that are part of people’s lives.
It was recently suggested by Barack Obama that we should borrow and spend less and save more, not rebuilding the economy on the same sand but instead lay a new foundation for prosperity. It’s not the message consumers, this country, or the rest of the world is used to, particularly in a recession.
It’s not every day that the president of the United States plugs your company’s product, but it happened to Alan Mulally on Tuesday, when President Obama took to the Rose Garden to unveil the administration’s new fuel economy initiative. Surrounded by environmental activists, government officials and the chief executives of the Big Three Detroit auto companies, Mr. Obama declared that by 2016, the car companies would have to produce vehicles that got, on average, 35.5 miles per gallon, a big jump from the current 27.5 miles per gallon.
It’s no coincidence that the fifth and final season of the HBO cult hit The Wire—one of the smartest and toughest dramas to hit the small screen in decades—focused on the floundering of the city newspaper in the struggling city of Baltimore.
Joe Rospars, the man behind President Barack Obama's new-media effort during his election, said the campaign didn't win because it used the latest technology. Rather, its secret was a holistic approach -- one easily copied by regular marketers -- that integrated digital tools into the overall strategy.
The blowback from President Obama's interactive town hall has been intense and widespread. It's all terribly interesting, though not for any of the reasons people think. The incident signifies the end of one, increasingly troubled stage in the courtship between the President and social media, and — we can only hope — the beginning of another, more realistic and mature stage. At this critical juncture I'd like to offer some relationship counseling.
Some companies are in the steel business, some are in the cookie business, but General Motors is in the restructuring business. For 30 years, G.M. has been restructuring itself toward long-term viability. For all these years, G.M.’s market share has endured a long, steady slide. But this has not stopped the waves of restructuring. The PowerPoints have flowed, and always there has been the promise that with just one more cost-cutting push, sustainability nirvana will be at hand.
One of the two major political parties in America has opted-out of participating in government. It's a slash-and-burn strategy, and it makes perfect sense from a branding perspective. Circa about 1950, that is.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt reassured anxious Americans through his famous fireside chats over the radio. Now, in the 21st century, President Obama has found his own fireside equivalent, launching an online town hall meeting Thursday where he will answer citizens' questions about the troubled economy and his efforts to fix it.
Have you seen or heard President Barack Obama pitching his stimulus plan lately? If you say no, you are clearly either lying or actually living under a rock.
What happens to a brand when the euphemism itself starts to take on derogatory overtones, even if only in the mouths of the mean-spirited?
You will be seeing a lot more art by Shepard Fairey on the streets of New York this spring. But it won’t be in the form of the illegal guerrilla strikes he has been committing since his days as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design 20 years ago, nor anything like his famous Obama Hope poster. For starters, it is in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, for whom he has also designed swanky red, white and black Russian Constructivist-style limited-edition shopping bags.
The Obama-YouTube love affair is at its end…at least in its official role on whitehouse.gov. The Obama administration recently bailed on its embeddable YouTube videos and chose clips powered by Akamai, a web service hosted on local servers rather than those of Google. The administration cited concerns over privacy voiced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Digital Democracy.
Forget the Nike Swoosh or the Starbucks Mermaid. Get ready for the ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) circle!
Barack Obama’s online presence drove his campaign’s early fund-raising and his primary victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton. His campaign’s use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube proved that he was part of the Web 2.0 generation. In the run-up to November’s election, Senator Obama — or one of his staff members — typed more than 250 updates to his Twitter account at twitter.com/barackobama. So what happened? President Obama hasn’t tweeted once since being sworn into office.
How will Obama's presidency change hip-hop? Barack Obama arrived at the Oval Office with a long parade of expectations in tow. One special-interest group with a particularly colorful wish list is the hip-hop community, which has been plotting this moment for years.
It's been an interesting month in our nation's capitol, and the Obama administration is hard at work addressing the country's problems. As with every first-term administration, its primary challenges are to engage lawmakers on Capitol Hill with its new policy agenda and assemble a team that will instill confidence in the American people. If they succeed, in four years they will be rehired. In essence, this process is the political equivalent of establishing the brand.
President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?
With President Obama's signing of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” better known as our national Hail Mary stimulus bill, billions will be ladled for infrastructure projects ranging from roads to mass transit to rural broadband. But the law also contains a measure promoting a less-noted type of economic infrastructure: government data. In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, Recovery.gov. That step may be more than a minor victory for the democracy. It could be a stimulus in and of itself.
It's Presidents' Day here in the United States (Washington's Birthday is the actual federal holiday), so I decided to weave our new President into a short article on brands.
Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology, energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and design, each company on the following pages illustrates the power and potential of innovative ideas and creative execution. These are the kinds of enterprises that will redefine our future and point the way to a better tomorrow.
Federal relief alone won't sustain the economy. A new Cabinet position would help to sharpen the focus on the innovation needed in the U.S.—and worldwide.
Who says government moves too slowly? A couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog entry on how the FDA might leverage social media to better address the peanut-butter and salmonella recall issue. Shortly thereafter, some ostensibly random dude named Andrew P. Wilson pinged me on Twitter with a heads-up that the Department of Health and Human Services is making headway on that very issue. Not only that, he said that on that very day, HHS started a social-media team.
Has Pepsi aligned its marketing graphics and rhetoric too closely with that of President Obama's election campaign? That issue has been ricocheting around the blogosphere of late and Pepsi brands chief Frank Cooper officially addressed it as part of the company's pre-Super Bowl press conference this week. At one point, Mr. Cooper almost seemed to suggest that the Obama campaign may have found the inspiration for its own logo in Pepsi's marketing images -- rather than visa-versa. <div style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;"> <a href="http://adage.com/video"><img src="/images/random/video_alladage417bar.jpg" width="417" height="40" border="0" /></a> </div>
"The fruits are in the roots." This is a key concept in the M.B.A. course I teach at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. In class, we explore the soulfulness of organizations -- how to discover it, harness it and profit from it. President Obama's inaugural address is a primer on this subject as well as an important lesson for marketers who believe our industry could do better. The president believes that going back to our fundamental truths -- our soul -- is indeed what propelled our nation to greatness.
President Barack Obama's use of YouTube has drawn fire from the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is questioning whether it poses a threat to people's online privacy.
A new television program to support Procter & Gamble's "My Black is Beautiful" advertising campaign is under development by P&G and BET Networks and will launch by early March.
Last night was the first time in a long time a President danced in public without having to issue himself an immediate pardon for his crimes against, well, style, grace and the dignity of the office. Presidents don't set the tone the way monarches once did, but this President has the potential for being deeply transformative of American culture. Obama could change not just the things we care about, but the way we care about them, not just the things we do but the way we do them.
CNN.com sets record for live video streams. Some sites overcome with traffic; report technical difficulties.
According to Audi's CMO, the company is communicating the "inherent spirit of progress and innovation that is the core of our corporate DNA" by sponsoring this historic day's news.
Barack Obama promises to reboot the White House. But first he'll have to navigate the blogosphere and deep layers of federal gobbledygook.
President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration will form a story line in an upcoming issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Spidey's alter-ego, Peter Parker, spots an Obama impostor while photographing the inaugural events, according to the Associated Press, and Spider-Man swings into action to sort things out. A basketball test and a Spidey-Obama fist-bump figure in the story arc.
Forget about vacuuming up pine needles. It's time to get started on the next retail countdown, with Amazon.com launching a special site for the upcoming presidential inauguration.
Tech-savvy tactics helped give Barack Obama's presidential campaign an edge. Now, several of the ad-technology companies that powered the campaign's digital push are touting their role in its success, hoping to gain an edge over their own competitors.
Agencies are parlaying their expertise in marketing the brands of other companies into creating and marketing their own.
Pepsi is kicking off the new year with the debut of the first TV ad by its new agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day. "Wordplay," began running on Dec. 28 on YouTube and a microsite, Refresheverything.com. It's meant to appeal to the next generation, known as millennials.
For Madison Aveue, the biggest problem in 2008 was that most advertising was overtaken by events as the year wore on. The best-laid marketing plans of mice and men — or “Mad Men” with mice — proved no match for a historic presidential race and an enormous financial crisis. Here is a recap of some high and low points of 2008.
Every time he does something as president-elect that could be construed as presidential, Barack Obama has been saying, “We only have one president at a time.” But Mr. Obama will soon be doing something before his inauguration that has long been the province of presidents: appearing in a public service campaign.
Video games -- with their captive, observant and engaged audiences -- would seem to be a natural venue for advertising. But other than a historic buy in "Burnout Paradise" by Barack Obama's presidential campaign, ads haven't made much progress in the gaming sector.
Barack Obama is headed to the White House on Jan. 20, but taking the massive email list his campaign used as a fund-raising force probably isn't in the cards, according to a campaign official. One posssible reason: if the White House employs it, it would then become the property of the federal government and would be accessible to future administrations.
The combination of a new administration headed to the White House, along with our country's established leadership in innovation, has us standing at the crest of a trail that could ensure we never enter this chasm again. Let's get back on our feet and remember what we are made of.
It was perhaps the most successful online presidential campaign yet. And MediaPost's Search Insider Summit attendees were treated to a rare look inside Barack Obama's online strategy during a town hall discussion Thursday in Park City, Utah, which kicked off the three-day event.
As the Detroit auto companies contend with their worst financial crisis in decades, the most famous American auto executive has stayed largely out of sight. But William C. Ford Jr., the executive chairman and scion of the founding family of the Ford Motor Company, has been preparing for a bigger role in the industry’s plan for survival.
Snazzy new technology isn't enough to bring transparency to the White House.
When he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern.
Four years after delivering the speech called "The Audacity of Hope" that would launch him toward the White House, Barack Obama has become a case study in audacious marketing, an object lesson on why you should forget inherited notions of whom your audience can be.
There is a lesson in president-elect Barack Obama’s calculated win for all media and advertising players struggling to crack the targeted demographics code: Know your constituents.
Two critical assumptions turned D.C. conventional wisdom on its head and helped provide Obama with a major strategic advantage over McCain. Here's how.
Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing.
The Illinois senator built his decisive win on three leadership principles: a clear vision, clean execution, and friends in high places.
By comparing the most compelling benefits to the perception of each presidential candidate we are able to determine who is best positioned to be elected president.
It's obvious that this is the most talked about election in the history of the world, and I think there are some lessons for every marketer, regardless of nationality or political leanings.
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