Barack Obama Presidential Campaign Vendors List

The Obama Campaign Vendors List

WAS WH

A Comprehensive List of the Political Vendors Who Supplied Products and Services to The Barack Obama for President Campaign

MSM: TV, Radio, Newspaper
Spending on traditional media in the ’08 election cycle was high and TNS Media Intelligence tracks political advertising spending. However, this article covers only new media initiatives.

Website:
The campaign website was my.barackobama.com, which was designed and maintained by campaign staff. Project leads were Scott Thomas (of SimpleScott) and the campaign’s Creative Director and John Slabyk, Art Director on the site. Sol Sender of Sender LLC designed the Obama logo. Walker Hamilton performed general maintenance, content administration, and feature planning. Joe Rospars was a major player in new media activities, managing a staff reported to vary between 13 and 30 people at various times. He was an idea sparkplug, managing editorial efforts and coordinating the new media ad buys. An analytical team monitored and reported site activity, monitored the performance of email solicitations, and tracked the ability of ads to draw traffic to the site. MySQL software from Sun allowed the team to make gather data about the site through structured.

Online Advertising:

Data from Nielsen Online/AdRelevance reports that the Obama campaign had 416.7 million image ad impressions, compared to 16.5 million such impressions for the McCain campaign. According to ClickZ, Obama spent about $8 million on online advertising. The campaign customized ad creative to residents in different states. During the campaign, ads were tailored to issues prominent in the target states; during the general election, the campaign urged people to register and vote.

Paid Search:
According to data from Nielsen/AdRelevance, the McCain campaign outspent Obama on the paid search category. For example, in May, 2008, McCain spent $5.4 million; Obama spent $1.8 million.

Online fundraising:
The Obama campaign raised about $500 through social networking alone. Fundraising by outside groups and grassroots efforts, much of which was accomplished online, complicates the definition of what constitutes this category. During the long election cycle, the lines between the Obama campaign staff, communications, and the new media group blurred as the campaign progressed and heated up. It is probably safe to assume that most of the online staffers participated in fundraising efforts. Outside vendors included: Blue State Digital, particularly the BSD tools suite, NGP Software, and Brightcove.

Email:
After the election, the Washington Post reported that the Obama campaign collected more than 13 million addresses and sent out more than 1 billion emails, composed of more than 7,000 messages. The content was targeted, with specific groups receiving tailored messages and solicitations. Email communications were tagged with metada to provide contextual information about the purpose of the email and the nature of the response. The campaign tracked the time recipients opened emails and, if they opened them at a particular time, they would schedule the messages to be sent out at that time of the day.

Gray Brooks was the head of email correspondence for the campaign that, at least initially, used SproutIt Mailroom software to manage email.

Online Answer Center:
The campaign outsourced management of an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) answer center that reportedly handled 2 million visitors and queries between March of 2007 and April of 2008, from both online and telephone users. Data from the campaign provided center workers with context on callers, including a history of previous calls, background on the nature of the call (question, volunteer signup, etc.) to focus the response. The vendor was RightNow and Colin Jones was the executive managing the Obama account.

Volunteer Coordination:

In Texas and California, where the sheer size of the states requires exceptional efforts to coordinate the campaign effort, the social technology platform used Central Desktop. The Obama Campaign team used Central Desktop along with other technology tools to manage the process of hiring, managing and sharing critical information with thousands of precinct captain volunteers hired to drive their neighbors to the polls. Obama neighborhood teams who contacted voters included a “data” member, responsible for uploading all contact information to the central database. Central Desktop had both a public-facing functionality and private-facing functionality. Campaign staff and volunteers accessed the private-facing interface.

The public accessed the public-facing interface through their login to www.my.barackobama.com website. Central Desktop provided information to the public about local events, locations, deadlines, and opportunities to volunteer. Patrick DeTemple was Obama campaign’s Data & Systems Manager. Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia considered the public-facing use of the software an unexpected innovation on the part of the campaign.

Wiki Internal Campaign Coordination:
Internally, the staff used their access to the private-facing Central Desktop wiki interface to discuss rapid response and messaging issues. The campaign also used wiki software Basecamp to coordinate the efforts of distributed IT staff in the building of www.barackobama.com.

Social Networks:
Facebook was the tent pole of the social networking effort, effectively making every visitor a fundraiser/bundler and event planner for the campaign. By election day, the Obama campaign had 2.4 million FB supporters. Data from Forrester Research (taken from Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and DoubleClick) indicates that the campaign had more than 800,000 friends on MySpace, 112,000 followers on Twitter, 500+ LinkedIn connections, and 14,500 Meetup members. The campaign had pages on BlackPlanet, AsianAve, MiGente, Eons , Students for Obama, and probably others as well. Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, headed the overall social network strategy for the campaign.

Campaign Social Network:
Site – my.barackobama.com: At its high point, MyBO had 2 million active users, more than 100,000 profiles, 35,000 affinity groups, and was the coordination point for 200,000 events. About 70,000 people raised $30 million using MyBO. And in the last four days of the campaign, users made 3 million telephone calls as part of the get-out-the-vote effort.

Then-Senator Barack Obama retained Blue State Digital (BSD) to build and manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign. TextPattern software handled the content management for the site. Comodo provided security and trust assurance services.

Using the BSD management dashboard and the BSD Toolset software, authorized staff could control the look and feel of the pages, create new fundraising and action initiatives, set up email and fundraising campaigns, and manage community content and blog pages. Some of the programs included tell-a-friend, peer-to-peer fundraising, event planning and coordination, messaging, and community rating of content. Staff could access continuously-updated site performance statistics and monitor such activities as visitor activities, gauge volunteer and donor commitment through participation on the site. MyBO was also the collection point for user-provided data, such as voting habits, donation history, and issue salience. Users could also customize the site by setting preferences. And they could establish their own fundraisers, meetings, and events.

Online voter registration:
Part of the my.barackobama.com website, my.barackobama.com/voteforchange, the Vote for Change initiative provided a portal for voters to get help with voter registration, find vote information, request absentee ballots and find polling locations.

Viral Video:
The most important use of viral video was on www.youtube.com, where there were 1800 video uploads by supporters. The campaign video channel had 115,000 followers and nearly 20 million video views. On Ustream, Obama video garnered 809,000 views.

The most popular viral videos were not produced by the campaign at all. Will.i.am created “Yes We Can,” and Youtube shows that the video has been viewed 14 million times there. In addition, the video is posted on many different sites, including AOL. In addition, the link to a video produced by MoveOn.org generated 15 million emails. The video super read: “Obama loses election by 1 vote.” At several places through the video, the visual included the person’s name provided by the forwarder. An example is a sign outside a church, “God loves everyone. Except PROVIDED NAME. Finally, a spoof video of Tom Brokaw describing a McCain victory pointed visitors to www.voteforchange.com. It was an immediate hit before being pulled by NBC for copyright violation.

Mobama:
Scott Goodstein headed up the overall mobile effort, including mobile web site, text messaging, iPhone applications and iPhone GPS.

Mobile web site:

Users clicked to www.obamamobile.mobi in order to subscribe to mobile services, including text messaging. The site incorporated solicitations to “tell a friend,” by sending visitors to a page where they could text their friends. It also provided mobile-sized messages about the candidate, news, mobile phone wallpapers and ringtones so that anyone who called the user would hear Obama’s voice answering the phone. It also gathered information through a mobile poll.

Text Messaging:
Before the election was over, the Obama campaign collected 2.9 million text message addresses. The SMS text address for the Obama campaign was 62262 (OBAMA). To activate the service, users sent the message GO to that address and then received news, ads, early announcements, and campaign-related messages such as “vote early.” The campaign also utilized text messages to encourage users to forward the text to their friends to grow the network. In some rallies, the campaign asked attendees to pull out their cell phones, to text a specific code to 62262, which would supply the campaign with a date of signup, location, and mobile phone number. In to support efforts in battleground states, text messages were geo-targeted by zip code to Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Montana, and Wisconsin.

In some battleground states, the text message vendors were Quattro Wireless, providing the servers and mobile network through Sprint Boost. The “vote early” campaign used the ChaCha interface and was coordinated with Rock the Vote (RTV, www.rockthevote.org). By sending a text message to RTV, a ChaCha live person would send information about how to register and candidates’ platforms and voting records.

Another major initiative was the offer to send news of the selection of the vice president on the ticket, The Biden announcement text messaging was handled by aggregator SinglePoint, partnering with Distributive Networks to send out the text messages.

iPhone:
The iPhone application was one of the Top Ten free downloads on iTunes almost as soon as it was launched. iPhone users could browse images, videos, and campaign information. The campaign tapped people in the social network of supporters who lived in battleground states by scanning the personal phone book and putting them in an “Obama contact list,” urging the user to phone those people to support Obama. The iPhone GPS provided directions to rallies, campaign offices, and volunteer meetups.

Online Video Game Advertising:
The campaign purchased ads inside of Electronic Arts’ top nine games for Xbox 360 Live, running from October 6 until the day before the election, November 3. Visible to players in 10 states, they received messages featuring Obama urging them to vote. The ads appeared in game-appropriate venues, actually integrated into the game so that drivers saw billboards, contestants saw stadium posters, and so forth.

Fun:
Go to www.logobama.com and create your personalized version of the Obama campaign logo – your photo goes in place of the sun.

List Prepared by:
Joan Van Tassel, Ph.D., Communication Theory & Research.
An educator, author, and multimedia journalist. Currently,
an Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the
Communication Arts Department at National University.
Joan teaches courses in media story-telling, strategic
communication, communication technologies, content
production, and journalism. Joan can
be reached at Click here to contact this Author.