Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions, running on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. Typically, guerrilla marketing is unexpected and unconventional, where consumers are targeted where they would not be expecting, which can make the idea that’s being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally. The term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.”

-Definition supplied by Wikipedia-you can decide if it is true or not.

Each week, BrandWeek has an editorial piece called “Top of Mind.” For the week 12.08.2008, the OpEd piece that was offered was entitled “Can Obama Teach You? Yes, He Can.” It went on to extol him as the “Best Guerilla Marketer of ’08.” Frankly, that just rubbed me completely raw. So my first effort at the “Welt Weekly Smack Down” blog addresses this tendency to brown-nose Barack!

Barack Obama’s campaign wasn’t “genius” or “innovative” or even particularly clever, it was solidly built, well executed marketing. The real lesson to be learned is that a disciplined approach, good, old fashioned, country hard work and commitment will sell your product every time…providing your product is any good…

Ok. Barack Obama’s team did a magnificent job. They really did start at the bottom, create a ground swell of sentiment and build an impressive movement based on the country’s outrage and need for a new direction. What they didn’t do was “change the face of marketing as we know it” or “take marketing to a new horizon.” In fact, I’d have to say that the best guerilla marketing that I have seen has been the “un-subsidized” marketing that is being done to get people to believe that Barack’s campaign is “the new sliced bread.” Let’s be honest, every marketer with a pen is now going to try to convince you to “blog, Vlog and create a new, all encompassing experience” just like Obama did. They will cite his campaign and the outcomes and quote results and meaningless data points that will lead you towards the kind of utopia that your product or brand deserves, that mystical place where you “get money for nothing and your chicks for free” -Dire Straits, “Brothers in Arms”-1985.

Here’s the problem. Obama’s brand team didn’t do anything new, he just did old things (maybe some new technology for delivering the messages, but they didn’t develop it, did they!?) well. Sure, some will argue that by accepting smaller dollar amounts from individual donors (sometimes as little as $5.00), that he “innovated the way that American’s fund campaigns.” By accepting smaller incremental funding over the Internet, his campaign did take the campaign away from PACs and lobbyists and put it in the hands of the people, which fit perfectly with the circumstances. His product “HOPECHANGE” and the tag line “YES WE CAN” rode like “the 4 horseman of the apocalypse” over the rhetoric of his opponents, born aloft by the country’s misgivings over the declining state of the nation’s affairs.

By turning a donation into an “impulse buy,” he made it possible for the nation to register their outrage and disgust with their dollars, which could be done immediately and often. When McCain brought on Palin, there was a hardy spike in donations. When McCain did something to agitate the masses, Obama’s team made it possible for them to provide tangible and damaging feedback. The “outrage windfall” became a considered advantage for Team Obama. Did they innovate, or did they simply understand the environment and the demographic they were dealing with and lead them to a product that they indicated was appealing to them? I think that American Idol “innovated” that process first. By letting America vote their interest for .99 cents a pop, they made it pretty clear that when you put something moderately compelling in front of Americans, they want to respond immediately, and with their wallets!

Here is what I perceive to be the big insights to be taken away from the Obama campaign:

• Real Research, Done Right: Let’s face it, Obama’s folks knew their target markets and more importantly, they really knew their competition. Additionally, they took advantage of the networked communication and its ability to drive a behavior and record a response. They were strongly data driven. They were relentless in the pursuit of new information about their “core”, but they truly understood that because of the intense and transient nature of campaigns that their “core” was not always their “key” target and were flexible enough (largely because of the media that they chose) to shift the structure of their messaging when the numbers indicated it was necessary.

They identified objectives and stayed disciplined in achieving them, even when the plan faced obstacles. They did not abandon the plan; they adjusted it to meet the conditional requirements.

• Solid Product: Barack Obama looked, sounded and behaved presidentially throughout the campaign. He made very few gaffes. Because he was selling “change & hope,” it meant different things to different people and the very nebulous nature of the product made it ideal for anyone who was discontented with the Bush Administration. It also made it very easy to rebut any challengers. “Who doesn’t want hope? And really, don’t you think it is time for a change?”
• Great Message: See Solid Product (“change and hope” or HOPECHANGE)
• Timing: Could he have faced a more controversial Republican Party at any point in recent history?
• Easily Translatable Benefits: When you are selling “hope and change,” it means you can be whatever the consumer wants.
• Execution (good use of available vehicles, definitely): Everything in Obama’s campaign looked as though it came directly from the “future that we should all want to live in.” On the web, Team Obama was clear, concise and user friendly. In print, the images were large, the text was inspiring and the format was trustworthy. On television, even when Obama was negative, his commercials were well-edited, delivering the punch with unmistakable undertones of hope and change. In general, brilliant execution and creative. Even his infomercial looked like a rock-umentary!
• Spending: In September, the Obama campaign spent $65 million on media buys, including TV, radio, and web ads–after spending $32 million in August. His team spent, in the last weeks of the campaign, more than $30 million in a single week. Obama spent more than McCain by an incredible 4-to-1 margin nationally. He spent more than the $188 million in advertising that the GWB campaign spent. That’s a record, I think…

The point is, everyone was committed, not just to raising money, but to spending money, as was necessary to reasonably achieve the objective. In this case the objective was to get the first African American President elected, which was a laudable goal. This is important to point out. There is nothing more frustrating than working with a Brand or Marketing manager that allows you to develop a campaign based on an agreed upon budget to be spent on execution, then when it comes time to spend the money decides that they’d like to see what happens if they “run a test” with a tenth of the funds they had previously committed to. And when it fails, they blame the creative when it achieves anemic results, even for the little money that was spent.

That’s like building a car to travel from Charlotte to LA and only budgeting enough for fuel to get it to Kansas City, believing that if “it was really designed right, the car would coast the rest of the way on momentum!”

Ad spend is cumulative in value: the more people you reach and the more you reach them with a clear consistent message about a product that has real value for them, the better your results will be over time. When you try to create momentum for a product, service or brand, you must commit to a budget and follow through. If you want to see how far you can go for the least amount of money then you build a campaign for that, you don’t try to take a campaign that was supposed run on “premium” and expect it to run on the 87…

• Follow Through (from all parties): When you build a solid campaign for a product, service or brand, and then you turn it over to the company to execute, they all must buy into the idea (EVERYONE) that the sales tools must be used for what they were developed. The leads must be addressed, and the customer must be treated as though they are worth their weight in gold.

Look, regardless of who you voted for, the truth is that Obama’s folks marketed the hell out of the guy, but really, what did they do that was innovative? Disciplined, aggressive and diligent, yes, but innovative, no. I don’t know for sure, but maybe a true “innovation” would be the way that the Obama team actually trusted the Brand Development/Marketing Team to do their jobs. Nothing “new” here, just a solid product, with a great message, targeted at the right buyer at the right time (and not just once, but over and over until the message got through). Then, when the buyer responded, the “customer service folks” (campaign staff) did everything they could to make the decision easy for the buyer. That’s just good old fashioned marketing, done right.

Oh Yeah, I almost forgot, when you spend as much money as Obama’s team, you are anything but Guerilla. You are the very definition of a Main Stream Marketer.

If you think I am right, wrong or even “a little whacked,” please let me know. That’s why people write these things…for the discussion!