Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe speaks on the magic of one-on-one conversations

The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 2009 has seen its share of big and packed sessions. However, nothing matched the energy that was seen in the morning session of June 25, 2009, where David Plouffe, Campaign Manager for Barack Obama, spoke on ‘Audacity of Successful Brands’. The session was hosted by Bob Scarpelli, Chairman and CCO, DDB Worldwide.

Barack Obama didn’t plan on being a President, or so began Plouffe. According to him, Obama just rolled the dice in the middle of everything, and thought that America was at a brink, where he had the opportunity of doing something meaningful, as the President of the United States. Obama was clear in his thoughts and steady in his approach -- qualities that the campaign highlighted across the two subsequent years – but he was till then unknown to the American audience.

Many have described the Obama campaign to be the most groundbreaking political campaign in the American history, and Plouffe spoke to the audience on the overall thought process behind this campaign.

The media mix – new, traditional and social

The Obama campaign used new media, traditional media and social media, with the focus on creating one-on-one conversations with Americans. The team had taken a block-by-block approach in achieving this. Plouffe said, “When we stated in 2007, ours was the longest of the long shots and the odds were very low. The approach from then was to marry grassroots level campaigning with technology.” He informed that the team was strong on the new media component and had raised half a billion dollars online, where the average contribution per person was 85 dollars.

“We observed that students and retirees formed the major component of the support that Obama was seeing. Irrespective of how much came from a donor, we treated them as the big donors – they got con calls from Obama and from people such as me. In the meanwhile, we began registering millions of voters. Our grassroots army changed the composition of the electorate, and what we finally did was made it younger, had a lot more independent voters and got many new votes from Latin America and African Americans,” added Plouffe.

Technology made it possible for the campaign creators to achieve real time communication, and be able to directly communicate the message of the campaign. This marriage of grassroots marketing and technology gave this campaign strength and scale. Plouffe observed, “We thought we needed to be in every space. The campaign had managed to get a new audience interested in politics, and this included the young Americans and then the other extreme – the retirees. The advantage was that when there is someone new talking about politics, people lean in closer. The volume and diversity of the campaign was the next block.”

Be everywhere

New media was a strong component of the Obama campaign but TV played a huge role as well. Obama was not known to the American audience, and hence television was used as the mass form of communication to make him known to the American voters. The way television was used, according to Plouffe was “unconventional” and hence even “risky”. There were 30-sec spots done with Obama and the risk here paid off. The American audience were buying in Obama’s message.

‘Treat people like adults’ was the simple philosophy that the campaign followed. “It was an important part of our communication,” Plouffe said. He added, “We explained the problems that the country was facing and most importantly, the campaign supporters were also encouraged to not use any scripts. Nothing is stronger than authenticity and especially the younger audience can make out whether you are authentic or not. We just wanted people to speak from their heart on why they were supporting Obama. Sure, they had to know the answer if someone asked a question on what Obama was proposing, and what his message was, but there were no scripts.”

Another important philosophy of the campaign was fire in all cylinders, and same message across all delivery platforms. So the day Obama was speaking on healthcare, the TV spots was on healthcare, the online communication was healthcare, the supporters involved in the door to door campaigning were also speaking on healthcare. “The alignment across all forms of contacts is difficult but very important because people are busy, and you get only snatches of their attention.”

In all, the Obama campaign realised that nothing was more valuable than a human being speaking to another. The campaign had created an army of people who went precinct by precinct supporting Obama and these supporters were empowered. You cannot hide who you are in a two-year period, and the biggest success factor of the campaign was to have a remarkable candidate at the centre of it.