Obama may digitise but did he monetise online?

When I first came across Obama's use of social media and blogged about his barackobama.com site here in April 07, I noted its potential and asked a couple of questions:

'Registering to vote is made easy.....Will the Internet lead to more people taking part in the political/democratic process by making participation easier and more accessible?'

Answer: Yup - this election achieved an unprecedented record level of people voting, with huge amounts of people voting in advance and many queueing for 3-4 hours to place their vote.

'...it's a great example of 'Recruiting for Power' in practice and also demonstrates that recruiting people via the Internet for votes or anything else for that matter (note the fundraising options) is extremely effective.'

Yup - the site recruited 1.5 million volunteers and generated $600 million from 3 million people, which were fundamental to the success and election of Obama.

Now, everyone knows that in this 'Youtube'  election, Obama's online strategy has been superb and has given him the funds to win the election.

However I read an article a couple of weekends ago which reveals the challenge if not the dichotomy of the Internet platform, especially from a media and publishers perspective.

Of the $700 million that was reportedly spent on advertising in this campaign, it has been estimated that less than 1%of total expenditure has been allocated to online advertising. So whilst the Internet has powered the whole communication strategy,it has recieved a miniscule proportion of the paid-for advertising - such is the free, democratic, user-generated nature of the medium.

Herein lies the challenge that many media, especially 'traditional' media face when devising their digital strategies. How can we translate the incredible value that this digital communications medium offers into tangible financial value, on a par with media that has gone before?

Comments

[Matt]

Great post Sinead and one you certainly earned the right to write after flagging up Obama's ultimately winning strategy such a long time ago.

You do also highlight a conundrum that is currently facing a lot of publishers and other content providers. One to which there isn't an obvious or easy answer.

Times are changing in more ways than one!

[Alex Hens]

I understand your point – well raised as ever – but I think there are some elements here that perhaps aren’t considered in your post:

1. from what I can tell the internet throughout this campaign was “largely” pro Obama (am sure there are plenty of stats to prove this one way or the other). With so much pro-Obama e-mobilising of key influencers within the space (bloggers and the like) and the space “largely” democrat friendly then, if my assertion is right, where would have been the logic in pumping more money online?

2. Again talking from a position of only limited appreciation of the political map in the US – my feeling was that the demographic that needed swinging were quite simply most effectively reached and influenced through more “traditional” media (and I bet that’ was evaluated plenty by the various party campaign teams too). Again – therefore more logical to battle head to head against the opposition where those people were most likely to catch it.

3. In politics, I believe, it’s as much about being seen to stand up and fight and evaluated for that fight as it is to fight clever. We all know that Obama won the internet battle – but that was the clever fight. Mainstream America want to see (or at least have been bread to expect to see) and judge against big budget head to head traditional mass media battles. Had Obama not pumped his money there he would likely have been the ”nearly man”.

4. This is politics – not “normal” advertising. Politics gets passions going more than anything else (and rightly so) – so in largely social environments (a bar, a special interest or sports club or the internet) the conversation is largely self fuelling. Perhaps there’s actually less need to pay for presence within the internet? (brands spend millions catching your eye to then try and get you talking about them – with such an election that was happening anyway)

5. This is politics – it’s pretty much an exception to marketing rules on every level. I mean where’s the sense in spending how many millions and wasting so much time over 10months criss-crossing the country to say the same thing to different people in person (if you count being spoke to at a mass rally “in person”). We live in the era of mass communication. We’re all trying to reduce our carbon footprint. But not when it comes to politics. Seeing the whites of the candidate’s eyes (even over the heads of 10,000 other supporters) is something you seemingly can’t replace in the people’s psyche.

Now I completely agree with you there will of course be alarm bells ringing for the reason that you have set out – but I think that they’ll just add to the cacophony already in such organisations and, may I be so bold as to suggest, that paying too much attention to these particular bells would be, shall we say, unnecessarily alarmist.

If the current economic troubles has taught us anything surely it is that short termism and greed can only lead to bad things in the longer cycle. Economics will dictate that the price of online advertising will/must increase as it continues to prove its worth and advertisers & marketers work out how to best utilise the medium. So if you’re a publisher/broadcaster and have a strong well established brand and you’re investing in it within the emerging digital landscape then is it really that likely that you’ll catastrophically fail?

Sure, you’ll probably have some short term disappointments and may not on paper look as promising as younger competition, but I think such businesses are actually more at risk from blowing their future through paying over inflated prices for web businesses they don’t understand and can’t monetise just so they have a growing digital presence. The problems have as much arisen, IMHO, from city types with bugger all idea of what they’re looking at punting that businesses they don’t understand could be the next big thing (not understanding what that would mean either), but at the same time banking on the fact that the people who’ll buy these by then further grossly overinflated shares somewhere down the line won’t have a clue either.

Now of course this is the kind of assertion that could well come back and properly bite me on the (not inconsiderable) rump, but whilst I agree with you that translating the value of the internet into tangible financial value is an interesting challenge, I think it’ll probably work itself out just fine (for both marketers & media), given time, good business management and solid/continual investment & innovation – but that’s how all businesses are run. Isn’t it?!