Zeno Group Blog

PRWeek’s Alex Bruell interviewed our CEO, Barby Siegel, last week about the agency’s plans to expand its technology capabilities on the West Coast and trends in the consumer space.

If you follow golf, you were probably surprised to see PGA Tour pros competing this week at the Quail Hollow Championship in Charlotte. Quail Hollow? That sounds like the name of a golf course, not a car manufacturer or sizable financial institution. How could an event be going on with out a title sponsor? Well, the event does have a sponsor, but the sponsor has chosen to remain nameless rather than deal with negative publicity over unnecessary spending. The situation cries out for some well-crafted messages on the benefits of sponsorship. So where are the PR practitioners to lead the way?

As the Charlotte Business Journal points out, the event’s title sponsor, Wachovia Bank, and its parent company, Wells Fargo, decided that despite spending $7 million annually to sponsor Charlotte’s PGA event, the company was better off lurking in the shadows, opposed to facing backlash from angry Americans who view corporate spending at golf tournaments as another example of financial mismanagement. This attitude stems from a February tournament in California when title sponsor Northern Trust took a bashing in the press after details of their client entertainment practices emerged.

But rather than taking the easy way out, why isn’t the Wachovia/Wells Fargo team standing behind its sponsorship with some messages on why the deal is good for business? As the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money; isn’t that what’s happening here? Shouldn’t the bank’s communications team be bombarding us with stats on how $7 million spent at a golf tournament leads to X amount in returns? Shouldn’t we be introduced to key clients and accounts that were attracted to Wachovia thanks in part to some well-executed schmoozing at Quail Hollow? While it’s a noble move for the company to donate tickets and advertising time to charities, why are the efforts to lure customers being abandoned?

One wonders if the lack of messaging stems from a lack of evidence to support the messages. CNBC’s Darren Rovell theorizes that no one is speaking up on the value of sports sponsorships because the ROI might not exist. If that’s the case, then it’s time for the organizers and promoters of these events to get their messages ready because they’ll need plenty of help luring future sponsors.

The Technology of Politics

Last Saturday, my colleague Alex and I had the opportunity to attend the Election 2008 conference at the University of Southern California. The two panels we sat in on were entitled “Challenges for the New Administration and the Two Parties: POLITICO Editors and Reporters Look to the Future” and “Technology in Politics: How Campaigns Use the Internet to Talk to Voters.” Though the first was extremely interesting from a political perspective, the latter (and its focus on digital media) is what interested me most.

Over the past year, it was evident that online technology and social media played an integral role in the 2008 Presidential election, with some even claiming that the Internet won Barack Obama the election. Though I don’t personally agree with that bold claim, Obama’s use of the Internet and social media to mobilize and directly connect with supporters certainly helped.

What Obama Did Right

During the 2008 Election, Obama used social media in ways no other candidate ever has. Obama had a Facebook fan page with more than 3.2 million fans (Michelle also has her very own fan page), and a Facebook application with 164,551 subscribers. He had a MySpace page with more than 1 million friends. He even created his own social network, MyBarackObama.com. Some 3.2 million supporters donated to the Obama campaign through an excellent, well-maintained Web site. He had a Twitter account and tweeted frequently, ultimately becoming the single most followed entity on Twitter. His campaign launched an iPhone application (something that panelist Becki Donatelli admitted the McCain campaign was quite jealous of). He even announced his pick of Vice President via text message. Yes, now President-elect Barack Obama has made social media part of his everyday life (even post-election, when he took his weekly address online.)

It is clearly evident that times are changing – not only in Presidential campaigning, but in our overall media consumption habits as well. I credit Obama for thinking a few steps ahead of the rest, being the first Presidential candidate to launch a truly integrated campaign (and get it right). As one of the panelists on the above mentioned Election 2008 technology panel stated – Obama didn’t invent the technology; he simply perfected it.

What McCain Missed

Though some attribute McCain’s loss to his lack of engagement with technology, personally I don’t think it was his lack of using the technology (he did, after all, have a Facebook fan page, a MySpace page, and a Twitter account, to name a few); it was more a matter of his objective (which, unlike Obama seemed to be a means to an end instead an end itself). We heard it in nearly every public speech and interview made – “McCain has the experience” – and along with his experience in office, he also has more experience campaigning, even being directly involved in the 2000 race for the Republican Presidential nomination against George W. Bush. Though he lost the race, he did learn a lot about campaigning in the process, taking those lessons and applying them to the race in 2008. However, McCain seemed to have taken the wrong lesson out of 2000, focusing more on the end result (ie, media relations and generating positive press coverage) and not enough on connecting directly with supporters.

Obama, on the other hand, brought excitement to the grassroots approach. To him, it was important to go straight to the people, not the media, and the Internet served as a key player in helping him do so.

Will TV ads (and traditional media) become obsolete?

The recent hype around Obama’s use of online and social technologies makes this question seem more real then ever – will TV ads become obsolete in future elections, being replaced solely by online initiatives? While some think yes, a few of the panelists surfaced an interesting perspective – offline ads help drive people online.

Take a look at the sheer numbers – TV ads are not becoming irrelevant anytime soon, and candidates are still focusing heavily on paid advertising (in addition to his online initiatives, Obama also bought half-hour primetime segments on CBS and NBC less than a week before the general election, for example). TV ads may be diminishing in importance, but it will be a long time before they completely go away. However, the panelists pointed out that now, we are seeing more of an online/offline plan. Online and social technology and traditional media serve completely different purposes – the Internet is used to activate the base and raise funds, then the money raised is being used to get people sitting at home on their couches to go online. It is now vital to synchronize both and integrate into one solid campaign.

Looking ahead to 2012/16

During the conference, one panelist made the bold claim that by 2016, campaigns will no longer exist in brick and mortar buildings; instead, they will exist solely online. Though traditional advertising will still play a dire role in campaigns, social media will become increasingly important to candidates seeking election as it becomes more mainstream. Due to both advances in technology and a growing number of media outlets for people to choose from, it will become vital for candidates to have a short, buttoned-up message.

Moving forward, Presidential candidates won’t be the only ones to use social media in campaigns; candidates at the local level will begin to jump on board as well. Campaigning via social media is cheaper, more effective, and easier to mobilize a core group of constituents to act.

Last, technological advances like TiVo and XM Radio have empowered consumers to choose what information they want to receive. Often, the casual constituent (or as Joel Benenson calls them, the “Up-for-Grabs” voter) doesn’t hear political messages via TV and radio ads; they hear about them through YouTube videos or e-mails and SMS videos forwarded by their friends. It is now important for candidates to broadcast their message across as many different channels, in as many different ways as possible to reach that casual constituent.

Microsoft launched its new “I’m a PC” ad campaign this week, a long awaited counter attack to Apple’s brilliant campaign featuring a classic PC using nerd who can’t compete with the hyper hipness of the Mac guy.  That ubiquitous Apple campaign has been running for a couple of years now, and it does a great job promoting all the positive aspects of Apple’s lifestyle appeal while affirming the differentiating features of the Mac platform versus the PC.

Now Microsoft is firing back with a mimicking approach that strikes at Mac where it is perhaps most vulnerable – its own smugness.  The campaign was teased over the last few weeks with a puzzling spot featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld buying shoes.  If the teaser strategy was to get people scratching their heads and talking, it worked (at least around our office water cooler).

The new spots depict real people around the world stating “I’m a PC” and reflecting on who they are and what they do – reinforcing the fact that 90% of the world is using the Windows platform and doing some pretty important (and pretty cool) things with it.  They may or may not be as cool and hip as the Mac spokesman, but really, who is? 

As a dual Mac user (at home) and a PC user (at the office) I can recite the pros and cons of both, and I endure daily the challenges of working cross platform.  But based on the images projected by these two campaigns I guess I fall more in the PC camp.  It will be fun to watch if people self-identify with the PC users in the new campaign, and if the campaign actually moves the reputation and sales needle for Microsoft.