Barack Obama - 44th President-Elect of the United States of America. Photo courtesy Jim Young/Reuters.

On 4 November 2008, Barack Obama became the 44th President-Elect of the United States of America. He is the first African American to hold this post in world history. He will be taking the oath of office as President on 20 January 2009, on the steps of the west front of the US Capitol in Washington DC.

There is a lot from his campaign that he will be carrying forward into his presidency. David Axelrod is to be his Senior Advisor. Hillary Clinton is to be Secretary of State. His monumental online campaign is to be converted into change.gov, a portal from where he aims to keep communicating with the American public on his policies and plans, getting feedback from them, and thereby creating a true democracy.

Though his critics are undoubtedly waiting with bated breath and gleeful anticipation for him to stumble and make his first mistake, no one is really expecting overnight miracles from him either. The unemployment figure in the US is presently at 7.2%, the highest in 16 years. The American economy is in shambles. And the War in Iraq is at a dead end.

But if Obama can show the same commitment, diligence and level-headedness that he has displayed during these past 23 months there is reason to be assured that America has chosen the right candidate, at the right time.

And what do I take forward from this campaign? I guess it is the essential belief that there is more to public relations. That it is not all spin, manipulations or triviality as it is sadly often painted as. It is instead a key profession, which when well-executed, can be a catalyst for positive change, and therefore needs to be taken more seriously and given the credit it deserves.

Obama’s campaign will go down in history as a benchmark for effective political PR, with future campaigns measured against its milestone success for a long time to come.

'Help Stop Barack Obama' wallpaper from americanelephant.com, one of the numerous anti-Obama sites on the net.

It might seem from my previous posts that Obama’s win was a foregone conclusion. That was not so. He won by only 53% of the electoral vote. There were numerous challenges his campaign had to face on every level at every stage, every day.

I was earlier going to just touch upon them in my conclusion, which is my next and final post, but I guess it warrants a post of its own. Thanks Luke (one of my classmates) for the idea. And I shall name this post as per your suggestion as well – 7 of 6: what could have gone wrong!

Born Barack Hussein Obama II to a Kenyan Muslim and Caucasian anthropologist, the middle name of Barack Obama is, yes, Hussein. Does it matter? Apparently it does to millions who see him as anti-Christ not just because of his race, but the religion of his father as well. Images of him dressed as Osama Bin Laden, slogans labelling him a ‘Supporter of Terrorists’ and an ‘Anti-American Socialist’, and hate websites hitting out at him exist in the multitude. A Google search for Obama anti-Christ finds 1,650,000 pages.

Whilst some of it can safely be credited as Republican smearing of a Democratic candidate, most of it is unfortunately a reflection of the deeply rooted intolerance in societies against colour and faith itself.

An article in washingtonpost.com (13 May 2008), describes the raw racism and hostility that Obama’s field workers, volunteers and campaigners encountered on a regular basis. Racially derogatory remarks, spiteful tirades, and ugly typecasting were common occurrences as they canvassed and sought votes.

Finally, there is often a fine line between what is perceived as too much and what is not enough. His mass mailing and text messaging have been categorised as spam by some, his smooth talking rhetoric an ‘empty suit’, and his belief in Christianity a cover up for his middle name. Time and again it seemed his campaign was going to simply blow up in his face.

I leave you with a video from Fox News. It vividly illustrates this whole post and the battles the campaign had to fight against. It also illustrates why Obama’s win and his campaign are, in retrospect, viewed as being truly remarkable. It was the sheer perseverance of this campaign that saw it through to the end. As they say the slow and steady finally wins the race.J

Another book which helped me in ‘un’packaging Obama, made for great reading, and is a good old-fashioned textbook is Packaging Politics: Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy (second edition) by Bob Franklin.

Franklin is a Professor of Journalism Studies at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (Cardiff University). He has written 20 books and numerous reports, both research-based and for the government.

In Packaging Politics (pp. 279), published by Arnold publishers, Franklin examines the different ways in which all stakeholders in political communications have increasingly become more proficient and supportive of using mass media to get their messages across as well as presenting themselves to the public. The nine chapters draw on interviews with key individuals in the political communication sector in Britain.

The book elaborates in detail how in Britain, a media democracy, “politicians and policies are packaged for media marketing and public consumption” (p. 24). Franklin builds his case by exploring core controversial questions such as does packaging politics inform, persuade or mislead the public? Are politicians and the media adversaries or accomplices? And what is the relationship politicians have with the media, hierarchies, partisanship and resources?

He finally concludes by maintaining that extensive packaging of policies inevitably has negative consequences in a democracy. He believes it creates nations which instead of being abuzz with democratic vibrant dialogue are populated by voters who have been “reduced to a carefully orchestrated silence.” The book is noteworthy in that it takes the mystery out of the hype and makes the subject real and tangible to anyone who has an interest in the inevitable yet controversial relationship between government and ‘free’ media.

Franklin interestingly dedicates his book to those “who decided to protest their opposition to the government’s policy on war with Iraq by marching and gathering at Hyde Park… instead of staying at home and watching the demonstration, packaged by spin doctors, pundits and journalists on the early evening television news.”

Though most of the research I have carried out for this blog has been based on online newspaper articles, journals and videos, there are two books which have helped in giving a structure to my writings and the ‘deconstruction’ of Obama’s election campaign. In this present post and the following one I would like to talk about these books.

An Introduction to Political Communication by Brian McNair, which I have referred to in an earlier post, is published by Routledge. McNair is a Professor of Journalism and Communication in the University of Strathclyde and has authored 10 books and over 40 academic essays on media and culture.

The textbook (pp. 250) explores the relationships between politics, the media and democracy in the UK, USA and other democratic societies. McNair divides his subject into two main parts, namely, Politics in the Age of Mediation, and Communicating Politics.

The 10 well-researched and easily comprehensible chapters look at political advertising, marketing and PR, as well as communication practices used by organisations ranging from grassroots campaigning to strategies and tactics used by governments and international bodies. McNair takes his understanding of the subject a step further and also reveals how the myriad stakeholders in political communication use the media. These include politicians, pressure groups, trade unions, NGOs and even terrorist organisations.

Chapter 7 (pp. 130-162) is an excellent study focusing on political public relations in detail. It expounds on the history of political PR, key events in the development of political PR, and discusses the techniques used in government information and media management.

The edition I have been reading is the third edition. It includes thought provoking analyses of the re-election of New Labour in 2001, George Bush’s 2000 election, the September 11 atrocities, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The more recent edition (2007) covers political events such as the re-election of Bush in 2004, the invasion of Iraq, and the increasing role of the internet in political communication and public relations.

Peppered with references and written in the critical discursive style, this book is indispensable for any political PR student. It succeeds in providing a holistic view of political communication and PR at a time when the media has become an essential tool for democratic governments.

Barack Obama with wife Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha. Photo courtesy www.barackobama.com/photos.

Do click on the picture above. It links to 35 astonishingly beautiful photographs of Barack Obama from his presidential campaign, each one carefully managing Obama’s public image.

Image management is one of the key pillars of political public relations. It deals with issues such as how does the world perceive you? How do your voters see you? Do they trust you? Do they like you? No matter how wonderful a human being you may be it invariably all boils down to your image. And it is only if people like your image, that there is a better chance of them lapping up the rest of your PR campaign too.

Obama’s image is that of the ‘good Christian family man’. Everything he says and does builds upon this image. I’m not saying it is a false image. But that it is a carefully presented image.

Throughout his campaign he has included his wife, Michelle, an attorney from Chicago, and his two daughters, Malia (10) and Sasha (7), in the limelight thereby portraying himself not as an individual but as a husband and father first. It makes him look human. Just like us. Just like we would like to be. You know he is not going to cheat on Michelle. Somehow it translates to ‘he is not going to cheat on us either’. He is a good father reads ‘he will take care of all of us who are depending on him’.

Like most Americans his religious journey was about trying to find a religious identity for himself from the multiple influences in his life. He finally found his faith in 1988 at the Trinity United Church of Chicago of which he was a member for 20 years.

An article in the Christian Post explains how the Church is intricately tied to his campaign, “Obama speaks about the Church as an abiding force in American public life and his speeches are peppered with biblical allusions, his favourite phrase being – I am my brother’s keeper.”

Interestingly, Obama’s faith itself is not blind. When controversial services by his former pastor and other ministers created political obstacles for his campaign, he resigned his membership from the church. After all, image counts.

On the international arena, Obama’s appeal has always been particularly strong. Though ‘proudly’ American, his background cuts across religion, nationalities, race, colour, and class. When he won the presidential elections, the world celebrated with him, seeing in him a ‘global’ leader and foreign political leaders heaved a sigh of relief, pledging their support to him.

There is in fact no one specific word to categorise Obama. He is naturally charismatic, intelligent, talented, retrospective, and even-tempered. An alumnus of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he has worked as a community organiser, civil rights lawyer, senior lecturer in constitutional law, is a best selling author, and is on the board of various civic and philanthropic organisations.

It is important to note that he was all these things before he started his campaign. Image management is a tricky business, but when the ingredients are right, it is relatively easy to sell the right image. With Obama, luckily no grand makeovers or pretences were needed. All that had to be done was to take what was already there and put the cherry on the top.

I’m going to let the images do the talking in this post, for I honestly feel they speak for themselves. But there are three elements about Barack Obama’s incredibly wide and popular range of publicity material which I would like to bring your attention to. Firstly, they all possess a very high degree of sophistication in design and quality in tune with the brand image which I went into in some detail in an earlier post. Secondly, all the goodies are on sale. Either at his online store or through partner agencies and thus work as a source for his campaign funding. And finally, there is something for everyone. For the veterans, for the republicans, for all creeds, colours and lifestyles. The posters, stickers and buttons embody pluralism at its widest.

The second image is particularly interesting. It is a collection of limited edition poster prints from the Artists for Obama Gallery where practicing artists have donated their art and merchandise to help Obama raise money for his cause. Yet another example of grassroots participation.

EnjoyJ

Endnote:

Image 1 – Gift Items, http://store.barackobama.com/

Image 2 – Posters from Artists for Obama Gallery, http://store.barackobama.com/Artists_for_Obama_s/1018.htm

Image 3 and 4 – Campaign Posters and Banner,

http://www.moviegoods.com/movie_poster/barack_obama_2008.htm

Promises, promises and more promises. That is what political advertising is inadvertently all about and Barack Obama’s was no different. The difference lay in his spending power.

Since McCain chose to use federal funds (meaning tax payers’ monies) he only had US$84.1 million to his disposal. Obama on the other hand raised his own funds from innovative tactics such as new media and text messaging. The result was, as Evan Tracey of Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) put it, “There’s nothing Obama cannot afford to do.”

The main issues his 118 television adverts focused on were taxes, jobs, energy, environment, health care, and the most overriding of all, how to end the war with Iraq which was eating into the American coffers with malicious greed. A couple of biographical ads on Obama’s life story completed the collection.

Obama’s deep pockets allowed him to advertise in states that normally did not even see presidential election adverts, for example, Alaska and Montana. He could also afford to place national adverts during special events and prime times for maximum viewership. During the Super Bowl season, which coincided with the primaries, Obama bought ad space in 24 cities. The adverts were seen by 97.5 million people. His commercials in NBC and its cable networks’ 2-week broadcast of the Olympic Games cost him US$5 million and reached 25 million viewers.

His advertising budget on TV adverts was an estimated US$230 million, though CMAG puts the figure at US$250 million. According to TimesOnline he aired 1,342 ads in the Washington DC area during the first three weeks of September in comparison to McCain’s eight. In October, the final month before elections, his advertising reached heightened frenzies. He had an average of 7,700 commercials running per day at a month’s budget of US$100 million. There were simply not enough channels for Obama’s adverts and monies.

The real extent of Obama’s spending capabilities, however, came to its fore on 29 October 2008. For the first time, after 16 years, a White House hopeful placed a series of 30 minute adverts at an average cost of a million dollars apiece on seven US TV channels, including CBS, NBC and Fox.

Produced by media consultant, Mark Putnam, the carefully packaged infomercials did not bother to attack McCain as was the accepted norm for political advertising. Instead it focused on Obama’s plans for the country, human interest stories of the average American, and high profile testimonials. It ended with the line “I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy once again.”

It’s what the millions of Americans wanted to hear.

Clockwise from top left - Obama on Facebook, www.barackobama.com, Twitter and MySpace.

According to statbrain.com, the official website of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign - www.barackobama.com – gets 2,553,683 visits per day. Please note PER DAY. And the total number of links to the site is 2,682,473.

Obama’s facebook profile has 3,607,683 supporters, his MySpace profile has 1,083,117 friends and his twitter profile has 158,268 followers (it’s relatively new). My head’s already spinning. And these figures are just the tip of his monumental online campaign.

When Obama was putting together his cause with David Axelrod, his strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, grassroots participation was concluded to be the soul of the campaign. And in today’s digital era what better way was there to reach the voters than to meet them where they hung out, namely, online through websites and social networking sites or ‘socnets’ as they are called, and using e-mails and text messaging.

And so Triple O, Obama’s online operation was created with a handful of whiz kids. Meet 27 year old Joe Rospars, the new media director, Chris Hughes (24), co-founder of facebook and the architect to be of My.BarackObama.com or MyBO, and Kate Albright-Hanna (32), award winning CNN producer and the brain behind his heart-warming videos.

Technology and the Internet were put at the heart of the election campaign. It was used to raise funding, communicate Obama’s messages, and most importantly, enlist, encourage and garner supporters.

A staggering US$500 million was raised through online funding alone during the 21-month campaign, heralding a new digital era in presidential funding. The average online donation was US$80, and the average donor gave more than once.

In addition to his own website, Obama went one step further and created his own social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, for supporters networking. It has 2 million members and 35,000 volunteer groups.

Obama has a further 5 million supporters in other socnets, with his profiles appearing in more than 15 online communities. These range across all strata of society, from LinkedIn to Eons – an online community for boomers.

New media is ofcourse not just websites and socnets. It is e-mail and text messaging as well which Obama revolutionised the use of. He has 13 million addresses on his database. 7,000 different messages totalling 1 billion e-mails have been sent out during the campaign. Over a million people are signed up on Obama’s text messaging programme.

And this is my favourite part. Who needs CNN or Fox News or NBC when you can have your own channel? Obama’s YouTube Channel has 1,827 videos and has had 20,318,853 views! He also has his own video portal BarackTV on BarackObama.com. Though most of the videos are about the candidate, many feature the supporters. “Early on, we wanted to capture the sense that this campaign is not just about Obama,” says Albright-Hannah, head of the channel.

And that’s what struck the gold. This campaign is about the supporters. It is about their initiatives and their participation. And Obama spoke to them in their language and reached their home turfs to talk to them. He took politics and made it digital in an online world.

Endnote: All statistics for the websites and socnets are as of 31 December 2008. The campaign employed only 95 people in its online operations.

How to brand... a presidential candidate (slide show). guardian.co.uk.

I came across the above slide show a few months ago and loved it at first sight! Perhaps more so since being a designer first, and secondly a communicator, it was fascinating to see how the imagery we all had started taking for granted had actually been pieced together.

The visuals used had created a sophisticated and highly effective brand marketing strategy. Nothing had been left to chance. I’ll go over the iconography and building of brand Obama briefly in this post, but do click on the slide show (it is 11 slides long) and see how a successful president candidate was branded.

For starters, the halo the logo forms when placed behind Obama’s head uses trick imagery to imbue Obama with a sense of divinity and simultaneously trigger specific emotions, namely admiration and respect, in the viewer.

Obama also used a range of below the line paraphernalia often associated with corporate branding – lapel pins, stickers, novelty merchandise, you name it. But that’s not all. Obama’s staff hand painted banners at rallies as an expression of grassroots participation and their hopes.

Now this is interesting. The colour scheme of red, white and blue signifying the sun rising over a ploughed field is actually a symbol for change, and a new dawn in America (the red stripes in the field represent the American flag).

And finally the typography or the typeface used. Obama chose Gotham. Not just a random choice again. Gotham is very elegant and simple, but more importantly has associations with American vernacular traditions. In comparison McCain used Optima which was used to engrave the names of the veterans in the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC. Not exactly happy memories!

A heady mix of colours and symbols, grassroots appeal and big media know-how, and Barack Obama managed to win the Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year Award for 2008. This was with stiff competition from Nike, Coors, Apple, and Procter & Gamble Co.

So next time, all you designers, as you toil away in front of your computers using InDesign, PhotoShop or CorelDraw, please remember Obama. It can make or break your campaigns. EnjoyJ

David Axelrod, right, listens as Barack Obama speaks to the media. Photo courtesy Jason Reed/Reuters.

An effective PR campaign tells you what you want to hear. Or better still makes you believe that what you hear is what you want to hear.

Barack Obama met David Axelrod, his chief strategist and guru responsible for his election campaign, in 1992. It was, however, not until 2004 that they were to work together when Axelrod helped run Obama’s campaign for the US Senate.

Long time friend, advisor, confidant and always by the side of his candidate, Axelrod strategised the 2008 election campaign word to word, moment to moment. He made his millions on the way (2.1 million to be precise), but it was his idealism and genuine liking and faith in Obama that drove him. In Obama he saw a dream that had the potential to come true. He often likened Obama to Robert F. Kennedy and told The Washington Post (2 May 2008), “I thought that if I could help Barack Obama get to Washington, then I would have accomplished something great in my life.”

Fifty-three years old, Jewish and from New York City, Axelrod started off his career as a political reporter in the Chicago Tribune. In 1985 he founded Axelrod and Associates, now known as AKP&D Message and Media, a PR consultancy specialising in producing media for the Democratic party.

His re-election campaign for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African American Mayor, in 1987, set a template for Obama’s 2008 campaign. It also helped create a niche for Axelrod in “helping black politicians convince white voters to support them.”

Often referred to as a political poet, his Kennedy-era sense of idealism, focus on personality rather than issues and the use of motivational inspiring speeches were to become the hallmarks of Obama’s campaign.

The Obama campaign, subsequently, was based on two main strategies: Change and Grassroots participation. As Axelrod noted in Time CNN (30 October 2008), “Obama wanted a campaign from the ground up because that’s the kind of politics he believes in and that’s how change happened.” And from there came the slogan ‘Change We Can Believe In’, and the marketing of brand Obama.