Political Marketers Launch First Interactive Promotion

Political marketing has really started to embrace the digital world and the presidential candidates are using the Internet for both fund raising efforts as well as to get their voices heard. Many seem however to still be using the old push strategy by sending out email blasts, writing in their blogs and keeping their websites up to date on all the latest news about themselves. The campaigns are just really starting to get underway, so we should be in for quite a ride between now and November '08.

I've been keeping an eye on what our New York Senator Hillary Clinton has been up do. Hillary is probably today's most written about politician. In fact I just read an article that announced a couple of new books just published about her which they say now you could probably fill up a entire bookstore just with Hillary books. When it comes to Hillary people seem to either really love her or really dislike her. There's not many in between. So, whatever camp you may be in, you have to admit she's a pretty fascinating and determined woman.

So, why am I writing about Hillary in a promotional marketing blog? Well, Hillary just completed the first ever interactive promotion for a political campaign. She ran an online contest which asked people to vote on a campaign theme song for her. She first announced this online song contest with two web videos which drew over a million views on YouTube and the campaign's website. More than 200,000 votes were cast online and 25,000 wrote in to cast their own song choices.

Then on Tuesday the Hillary team announced what this most anticipated winning theme song was. However, the news here really wasn't about the winning song, but more about the web video that  announced the winner of the contest. If you haven't seen it yet watch it here before you read any further.

This ingenious web video features Hillary spoofing the Sopranos series finale as the "boss" with a guest appearance from Bill Clinton in the supporting role as the spouse. I laughed out loud when I saw this and couldn't believe how closely they matched the drama of the Sopranos finale while still tieing in to the song contest. You can read the post I created on the Sopranos finale here.

Hillary sits at the diner table going through a juke box and you see her flipping through the song titles which are the sames names as the finalist songs that were in the contest. But then you start to hear in the background the song from Journey, Don't Stop Believin, which was part of the send up to the Sopranos, but wasn't in the song contest. Then you start to see all the similarities, from Johhny Sack glaring at Hillary from the counter as he gets up to walk by the table, to what we are told is Chelsea parallel parking the car outside. Bill even complains that Hillary didn't order onion rings for the table, but carrot sticks instead!

More than half a million people visited the campaign's website yesterday to view the video which surpassed the number of visitors that came to the site the day Hillary announced her candidacy. "We are excited by the tremendous response we've seen online for our song contest," said Clinton Campaign Internet Director Peter Daou. "Hillary has charted a fresh course online, using the Internet in creative ways to engage people and bring new voters into the process."

The blogs and newspapers are calling the video "brilliant" and "really cool". The campaign's website has the Hillary Hub where you can find all the links. I can't wait to see what they'll do next. It's going to be hard to top this one. By the way if you're wondering, the winner from the online song contest is Celine Dion, "You and I". It wasn't the one I voted for, and as Bill said in the video, he was rooting for Smash Mouth. Oh well.

Comments

[andrew]

The video didn't do it for me Donna. I haven't seen the Sopranos so all I saw is a blue collar guy glaring at the Clintons as though their political legacy had disenchanted him.

His eyes were saying.."You Clintons...sitting there smugly debating the country as though it's your little plaything".

Or maybe that's just me

[Donna DeClemente]

Thanks Andrew for sharing your perspective on Hillary's video coming from someone not familiar with the Sopranos (and outside the U.S.) I figured not everyone watched their final episode, however it was hard to just be online or pick up a newspaper the couple of days after it ran without reading about it somewhere. So, even if you didn’t watch it, I figured probably most were aware of it.

I don’t know how popular the show is in New Zealand, but it here in the U.S. it was pretty much what everyone was talking about, and still are. From the comments that I read in the blogs and the newspapers, Hillary’s campaign team made some good impressions. You have to give them credit for taking a risk which they must have figured that they'd get mixed reactions to this.