Hasta La Creative!

I’ve written before about Barack Obama’s sophisticated marketing machine. Today’s Salon reveals even more:

Now Obama’s campaign is aiming to be ahead of even the GOP’s standard in applying sophisticated data mining techniques across the board, supported by all the traditional canvassing, door-knocking and other work it’s been doing. The campaign is collecting some of the most helpful data on its own. For example, aides can track what time you open e-mails from them, and if you show a consistent pattern, they’ll start sending them at around that time of day. “The marginal benefit of sending some people an email at 2 o’clock vs. 3 o’clock vs. 4 o’clock might not make sense [at first],” said Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, the firm that did John Kerry’s online advertising in 2004. “But once you start getting an e-mail list that’s 3 million, 4 million, or 10 million people, increasing the returns for a fundraising e-mail by 5 or 10 percent means additional returns of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

If you’re one of the 1 million people who have a login on Obama’s social networking site, they know how often and when you visit, and they can use that to gauge how committed you are to the campaign. A few months ago, the campaign sent out a three-page survey asking people about their voting habits, how often they go to church, which groups and issues they identify with and whether they’ve given money to political candidates in the past. The point of all of the online gadgetry is to get people to show up for offline events. “We’ve tried to orient the tools less as a social network and more as a mobilization network,” said Joe Rospars, Obama’s online director. “We’re creating opportunities for people to get out there and do things — the campaign is election-outcome oriented.”

Offline, volunteers are canvassing neighborhoods where they think they’ll find supporters, or getting contact info at Obama’s big rallies, picking up chunks of similar data. Unlike with previous campaigns, Obama’s aides dump all the information they get into one centralized database. So if you give the campaign $50 from an online solicitation, then show up at a rally organized offline, the campaign knows that. Likewise, if you join Obama’s Facebook group (approximately 1 million strong), then later buy an Obama ’08 umbrella, aides file that away for possible use later.

And they’ve also gotten into sales promotion: Donate between now and July 31st, and you could win tickets to the big stadium acceptance speech.

Regardless of whether you like Obama or not, do you find all this data mining a bit creepy for a political campaign? It’s not new, but it’s been taken to an entirely new level.

He’s got one sale to make in November. People will either buy it, or not. And he’s got a savvier marketing team than any retailer or credit card company. Are consumer marketers paying attention to this?

Robblink, ask and ye shall receive – after bemoaning not having the spot(s) in his Be Kanye post here TBWA scratched our backs and sent us the whole campaign and credits.

The infomercial teaser has been running on TV and online for the past couple of weeks, leading to the launch of ABSOLUT Kanye’s Vision spot, ‘Tablet’. Both can be viewed on www.bekanyenow.com. The infomercial was accompanied by wild postings and small space print ads.

The partnership with Kanye West is the latest part the In An ABSOLUT World Visionaries campaign launched earlier this year. The campaign invites artistic luminaries and consumers to visualize and share their vision of an ABSOLUT World. www.absolut.com/iaaw.

TBWA\Chiat\Day is the creative agency and Greatworks is the digital agency.

Inside is the wild posters seen in major metropolitan US cities now.

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The Denver Egotist tips us to this neato Denver “river” conveyer belt created by Sukle (you know, the guys who did that awesome redesign of Total Beverages.) Quicktime movie under the image to watch it in action.

Now it looks like ones food is river rafting. Cool.

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When I saw this HowStuffWorks.com commercial on TV, I felt it had to be YouTube inspired….and it was.

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When this summer’s hottest superhero flick, The Dark Knight, finally debuts, will audiences be baffled to see that Katie Holmes, who played Rachel Dawes in the last Batman film, has magically morphed into Maggie Gyllenhaal? I doubt it, since most people are probably just as baffled by Katie Holmes’ presence in a major motion picture anyway. But The Onion’s A.V. Club takes the opportunity to look back at “The Darrin Effect: 20 jarring cases of recast roles.” Named for Bewitched’s famous “Dick swap” with the character Darrin Stephens, The Onion’s list digs up some truly obscure switcharoos. There were three Cagneys on Cagney & Lacey? Three Kitty Prydes in X-Men, including Juno’s Ellen Page? Four Marilyns on The Munsters? Of course, a special prize has to go to Roseanne, which intermittently switched between “original Becky” Lecy Goranson and “second Becky” Sarah Chalke, now better known as Dr. Reid on Scrubs. They even worked the two-Becky gag into the opening credits of season 8. Can you even imagine how freaky it will be to see Katie Holmes morph into a completely different person? Oh. Wait. Photos via EW.com.

—Posted by David Griner

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In an effort to generate additional revenue, six major U.S. air carriers have decided to cover their boarding passes with ads — at least giving disgruntled travelers something to look at as they wait out delays and rifle through their wallets for cash to pay baggage fees.

A page on Bounce from Joey Green’s book Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose

“A sufficiently thick stack of Bounce will actually stop a bullet!” (source)

Adweek has an excellent article today by Andrew Adam Newman about marketers slowly acknowledging and at times embracing secondary and often unintended uses of their products:

“For several years, a list that details quirky uses for Bounce dryer sheets [AdLab – probably this one] — including tying them to belt loops as a bug repellent — has been the subject of viral e-mails and blog posts. Procter & Gamble, which makes the dryer sheets, was well aware of the phenomenon, but did not acknowledge it.

But the more online chatter the company observed about alternative uses, the more the resistance dissipated […]. Brand managers decided it was time to “lean forward and take a risk on our part” and to try “to capture the consumers’ passion for the product and use it as leverage.”

It was time, in other words, to promote the off-label uses of Bounce.”

“Canada Dry Club Soda, for example — which, along with other club sodas, is lauded by consumers as a spot remover for clothes and carpets — says it’s just good business.”

P&G collects ideas for off-label uses of Bounce on BounceEverywhere.com.

Two books:
– Joey Green’s Fix-It Magic: More than 1,971 Quick-and-Easy Household Solutions Using Brand-Name Products

– Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose: And Hundreds of Offbeat Uses for Brand-Name Products

Previously on AdLab:
Ethnographic Research on Packaging Usage