The Obama campaign: GOTV brilliance

[Neecy]

I'm an independent contractor for ChaCha, a mobile SMS service that answers text and voice questions from users (the questions range from directions, to college football scores, to advice on dating, to utterly bizarre stuff. We work from a desktop program that texts answers back to the user's cell phone). Our users generally fall in the teenage-mid 20's category.

Today we got an internal announcement that the Obama campaign has contracted with ChaCha for the following:


Today ChaCha will begin an advertising campaign for the Barack Obama campaign in certain U.S. states. This is new territory for us: political advertising.

We would like to note that this is not an endorsement of a candidate, but a paid mobile advertising campaign. The Obama campaign has engaged us to help them reach several demographic segments via ChaCha’s mobile answers service. We also approached the McCain camp, but we were not engaged by them.

In a nutshell, this is how the campaign will work: Obama campaign ads will be automatically placed in some answers sent to customers. In the ad, the customer will have the option of replying with the keyword OBAMA to receive information on where to vote in their state. An automated message will be sent to the customer, in the same way that all our ChaCha Keywords are handled.


This is brilliant stuff. GOTV information, targeted to specific swing states in a demographic we need to win, done in a tech-savvy way that our users will like. Funny that Gramps isn't buying into the concept, but when you don't understand email you probably don't get SMS, either.

I feel good that my contributions to the Obama campaign are being used in such amazing ways. Now they're definitely getting more from me!

[mtnsnake]

1. I've been delighted with the way Obama has run things from the very start

and this is just one more example of his expertise in campaigning. You can't just be a great candidate, you have to also be a great campaigner and run a great campaign from all angles. Obama is proving to be one of the most careful and precise campaigners ever, IMO.

[napi21]

2. Do you have any idea how much this is costing the Obama

campaign? THAT might be the reason McNuts said no? When they pulled out of Mich. I got the impression they're running low on cash.

[Neecy]

3. I don't know

I doubt that it's a huge outlay, though, especially since they're targeting specific states.