Entry 12

Obama campaign took unorthodox approach to ad buying

Washington Post, November 15, 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-influence-industry-obama-campaign-took-unorthodox-approach-to-ad-buying/2012/11/14/c3477e8c-2e87-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_story.html

Summary

For the TV ads, Obama's Campaign team chose a novel strategy that deviates from typical "norm" that most of the Presidential campaign usually follows. Unlike buying certain airtime according to TV ratings and watching demographics, Obama's Campaign team only bought time of day in certain channels. Before releasing the advertisement, the "optimizers" gathered information by phone call and door to door survey to make sure that the campaign is targeting the right audiences. Then, the team bought a detailed data for TV viewers, including demographics, matched up the collected data with their own internal voter list and poll responses, and targeted two particular voting populations: voters who still on the fence against Obama and his sporadic supporter. Consequently, Obama's Campaign gained great success in TV advertising in a way of buying many channels to contact with voters and outnumbered Romney in TV advertisement, while using less money than Romney's Campaign spent. For the most part, the new advertisement strategy that Obama's Campaign team implemented for the Election 2012 brought about successful and efficient result for the Obama's Campaign.

My thought

It is interesting that his advertising strategy is quite successful. It is a common idea or a norm that it is much efficient to target certain demographics by showing advertisement to particular TV viewers in specific time. However, I realized that there are different way of attracting voters effectively instead of buying the airtime but buying many channels. Even though it sounds economical to show advertisement based on demographics and TV ratings, it is much efficient to buy as many TV channels as possible and appeal as many voters as possible. For the most part, though it deviates from the norm, the choice of Obama's Campaign team was a wise and creative solution for outnumbering Romney in TV advertisement and exposing himself to larger voting population than Romney did. In brief, Obama and his Campaign team did a good job in attracting voters and inducing the victory in the Election of 2012.