Obama: Marketer of the Year

American elections are massive, elaborate marketing campaigns. Every four years, owners and managers of the State further refine the arts of propaganda and perception management, showing off their shiny, new, prepackaged political frontmen. Industries align themselves and make investments in State control, and the rest falls into place. Campaign contibutions are the most relaible tools for predicting policy outcomes.  An extraordinary spectacle, a hollow gesture of a functioning democracy, bought and paid for by the business class. Every year, the advertising/PR industry gives out awards for the best marketing campaigns, usually to super-hip firms like Apple or Nike.  For 2008, Advertising Age named the Obama campaign Best Marketing Campaign of the year. Evidently, industry leaders and PR executives are stoked about the emergence of a new marketing model: hope and change. “I honestly look at [Obama’s] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions. Perhaps it isn’t so new, “hope and change”, but nonetheless, we can expect the Merchants of Cool to adopt the Obama touch as their preferred modus operandi in cajoling American consumer society. After all, they came up with it in the first place, it only makes sense that they build upon a proven model of sales success: the 2008 elections. Hope and change can sell Presidents or popsicles, because the marketer-consumer dynamic is essentially the same. As Obama drops bombs on other human beings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine…perhaps Iran, or now Somalia, and as he dutifully executes the systematic plundering and consolidation of the American/global economy, continues to evade major concerns like single-payer health care and radical energy reform, Madison Avenue is showeing him with rewards for the most effective use of marketing techniques-with some emotional/psychological manipulations and occasional appeals to reason- in selling Brand Obama. As the chart illustrates, Brand Obama beat out Apple, Zappos, Coors, and Brand McCain for the year’s finest advertising strategy.

Brand Obama won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered here at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference.

How they voted

Marketer	% of votes
Obama	36.1%
Apple	27.3%
Zappos	14.1%
Nike	9.4%
Coors	8.7%
McCain	4.5%

Source: Meridia ARS