Big stuff going on today in Pennsylvania with the primaries and all. Thought today might be a good day to tell you about this month’s cover story I read in Fast Company, ‘The Brand Called Obama.”
Fast Company author Ellen McGirt quotes ad agency DDB Worldwide’s Keith Reinhard:
“Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand: New, different, and attractive. That’s as good as it gets.” Read full story: Fast Company: ‘The Brand Called Obama
New. Different. Attractive. Those are good words to describe what you want in a new brand. And especially today, when there’s so much happening in people’s mindspaces, you want something that will Stick.
Remember when Al Gore was running for President? Some stories floated around about his brand in magazines like this. And about his brand makeover when he came out with the web TV channel Current.com and won an Academy Award for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth .
But in 2008 things are a lot different.
The article points out: “Obama’s inclusive rhetoric is pitched to appeal to a Web generation of voters who want to be involved in creating messages and policies.”
For example, Barack Obama is on MySpace.
People are making posters for him and putting them up around Fremont. I saw one very nice one with high-contrast black and white imagery that was street-like and urban on the support of a bridge.
Social networking
And how many candidates have had musicians voluntarily make and publish promotional videos for them? This got a lot of buzz when it came out, and today ‘Yes We Can’ on YouTube has more than 7 million views.
At a seminar I went to on “Web 2.0″ sponsored by the MIT Enterprise forum, about 400 people packed into a room to understand how to make “use” of social media and social networking. For making more sales, I mean.
Pretty eye-opening to see everyone anxiously seeking some kind of magic formula for how to “leverage” the new networks. I read yesterday in the paper that LinkedIn tripled its membership in the last year, while Facebook only doubled theirs. Or something, I’m writing from memory. But LinkedIn? Really?
What I walked away with from that seminar was this: it’s impossible to find an easy answer on how the web’s new networks that connect people really work. The very nature of this way of promoting messages is chaotic and unpredictable. See DK’s post on what the discoverer of fractal geometry says: Benoit Mandelbrot: ‘The idea that perfection is a cube is over’.
I mean, a viral marketing campaign that’s free, professionally done, clean, and gets 7 million pairs of eyes’ and ears’ continuous partial attention?
The people at the MIT seminar with me all would’ve gone, “Wow.”
Seven million. That’s a lot.
Maybe some of them were people watching from Pennsylvania? —DK
Link to the full story: Fast Company: ‘The Brand Called Obama
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