adrian monck

The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign

Obama textMy chums – the Carnivores of Journalism (read in tooth and claw) – are ripping apart the lessons for the news media from the online electoral campaigning of President-elect Barack Obama.

Here’s my message for the old news media. You missed a revenue stream. Auction endorsements.

Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Facebook wrappers. This is not the Paypal public sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twitter his way to the White House.

First the groundwork. When it came to polling, surveys and research, Obama clocked up $22m to McCain’s $1.75m. Big difference.

Then the Obama campaign spent another $22m on fund-raising via direct mail with people like these guys.

McCain spent just $7m with companies like this. Maybe Republican direct mail companies offer three times the bang for the buck…but I doubt it.

The simple facts are that Obama outspent and outraised McCain – especially in small donations. 48.3% of Obama’s $640m total came from people donating less than $200. John McCain got just a third of his funding from the same source.

The donors bought influence. Not over Obama (pitching less than a couple of hundred bucks isn’t even going to get a night on the Lincoln bed-pan), but over their fellow citizens via the hoary old medium of TV advertising.

Of every dollar that Obama supporters gave, 29 cents went straight to buying TV ads. Because television reaches those hoary old folks who – y’know – vote.

Incidentally, banks turned out to be better at predicting November’s voter intentions than October’s market movements. Take a look at the donations from both candidates’ Top 20 lists.

Obama McCain
Goldman Sachs $874,207 $228,695
JPMorgan Chase&Co $581,460 $215,042
Citigroup Inc $581,216 $296,151
UBS AG $454,795 $147,465

And what about the corporate donors of the new media? Are they any different from the corporate donors of old money? Not necessarily, except that they haven’t learned to play both sides.

Google mostly wants a free hand from Washington to cement its lead in online advertising — but it also wants help bullying telephone and cable companies into letting its services and ads flow unimpeded on high-speed broadband lines and cell phones, a cause it has dubbed “network neutrality.”

This election was won and run old school. Obama spent $18m on live events to McCain’s $6m. So let’s remind ourselves how Obama won:

    Planning – polls
    Fund-raising – mail-shots
    Mass media domination – TV advertising
    Live events – good old-fashioned, new-fangled showmanship

Room for any of those in your part of the news business?

Adrian Monck

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5 responses to “The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign”

  1. Adrian, I have to disagree with you here. You miss one very important piece of the puzzle: the ground game. Think back to the Iowa caucuses, where Obama blanketed the state with volunteers and staff while Clinton relied on traditional media spending. Or Indiana, where Obama had something like 50 offices to McCain’s handful.

    And in the final days of the campaign, Obama volunteers used phone lists to contact voters in swing states. I was contacted numerous times by the campaign volunteers to drive people to the polls or make phone calls or canvass in a neighboring swing state.

    That’s as crucial as TV advertising, IMHO.

  3. Adrian,

    If Obama had over $600 million, and he spent $18m on live events, and $22m on direct mail, and $22m on fund-raising, and however much on tv ads, that’s still a large chunk on administration, posters, etc. Total administrative expenditures for all campaigns ate up a significant amount of dollars Reference