what can brown do for you?
“The Republicans flipped the script,” Mike Shields of MediaWeek wrote today. “After watching President Barack Obama dominate online media in 2008, Republican Scott Brown ran circles around his Democratic opponent Martha Coakley on the Web…,” Shields wrote.
“…the Brown campaign deftly employed online advertising, search marketing, social media and text messaging….Starting last Thursday (Jan. 14), Brown ran a massive ‘network blast’ on Google’s Content Network, soliciting volunteers with 10 different localized ads targeted to 10 different regions.
From Thursday until Election Day, when the campaign shifted the messaging to ‘get out the vote’ ads, Google delivered 65,553,323 ad impressions for Brown in Massachusetts alone…’This was a groundbreaking use of the Google network,’ said Galen Panger of Google’s Communications & Public Affairs team.”
Let’s review The Media Plan
1. Solicit volunteers with 10 different localized ads targeted to 10 different regions
2. Use (groundbreaking or not) of the Google network
3. Aggressive buying of traditional keyword ads on Google
4. Tying both network and keywords to searches for his still-unknown name (brand) AND to his opponent Coakley– something the Coakley brand did not do.
5. Pulling nearly every single lever Google had to offer:
- search and network placements
- InStream video ads on YouTube
- ads within Gmail
- leveraged Google Voice for its Election Day hotline—set up to aid voters at the polls.
Results
- Google tracked twice as many searches for Brown than for Coakley according to its internal data.
- 65,553,323 ad impressions for Brown in Massachusetts alone.
- Victory locally, regionally, nationally, and indeed globally.
Hey, this is not to say that mood, social movements, and just the general mashup of the political-cultural cosmos didn’t factor into this vote. Yes, the post-game analysis of metrics will shed some more spotlighted trends and theories of why this worked. But there was a strong degree of upfront trust going on here. A feel for the individual and collective stories that moved things ahead in untraditional — aggressively untraditional — media choices, without the certainty of every metric deliverable.
“I just had to look at 10 different spreadsheets,” said Robert Willington, Brown’s online campaign strategist, about how he found the volunteers to fuel the groundswell.“In a different election, we might have focused on persuasion strategy,” “But with a special election, the mission is to turn out voters. January is an unusual time for voters to vote, so we needed as many volunteers as possible.”
My CMO translation: “We had an unusual opportunity to win with voter-to-voter persuasion…not our own ‘manufactured’ one.”
Whether Brown’s victory was driven by strong advertising, candidate novelty, or the general unrest of the electorate, decisions had to come fast and furious. But in its own way, I think the core strategic-creative thinking was slowed down just enough to strip away all the noise and give rise to the brand-mantra-cum-headline-cum-tagline: “It’s the people’s seat” which itself emerges from the efficient strategic statement-cum-manifesto: “It’s not the Kennedys’ seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”
Now, that takes UPS’s consumer-focused idea of “what can Brown do for you?” to a world-shaking level.
