Maurice Cherry and Jon Birdsong recently interviewed Lenny Stern in New York City for TechDrawl. Stern is a founding partner at independent shop SS+K, Shepardson Stern and Kaminsky, the agency of record for the Obama ‘08 campaign and creator of a multi-media campaign targeting young voters in 22 battleground states. The campaign also enlisted Omnicom Group’s GMMB. Both agencies worked with AKPD Media’s David Plouffe, the campaign manager, and AKPD founder and Senior Advisor to President Obama, David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. Blue State Digital built the tools for online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy and peer-to-peer online networking. The campaign utilized BSD’s Online Tools Suite to mobilize over 3 million individual donors to contribute over $500 million online, to motivate over 2 million social networking participants, and to create and promote more than 200,000 offline events across the country.
SS+K, founded in 1993, has an enviable list of clients including Citi, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Time Warner Cable, Delta, Livestrong and the GAP, among others. SS+K calls itself a “mash-up of politics + creativity, fueled by entertainment + technology” and they use both traditional and non-traditional media in client solutions. In the ‘08 Presidential election, SS+K’s work was a vital element of the ground-breaking social media campaign driving 4 million unique visitors to vote for change.
If you are unfamiliar with the social media data from President Obama’s election, it is worth examining.
Two weeks before Election Day, Obama’s campaign was mobilizing millions to get out to vote (GOTV) and rewriting the script for field operatives. Deputy field director Mike Moffo asked GOTV operatives nationwide to use a new guideline and script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, an alleged secret advisory group of 29 of the nation’s leading behaviorists, according to Michael Grunwald in TIME. (The existence of this behavioral advisory team has never been acknowledged. It is alleged to have included Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, Dan Ariely of MIT, author of Predictably Irrational, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of University of Chicago, author of Nudge, and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton). What was the new guideline for GOTV? A simple message: “A Record Turnout Is Expected.” Studies by psychologist Cialdini and others in the group found that the greatest motivator for people to do the right thing, to stay on marked trails in national parks and to go to their polling place and vote is the suggestion that everyone else is doing it. Be a part of it. Don’t get left out.
Pretty brilliant.
The Consortium’s white paper proposals on messaging, rumor control, including their clever fundraising online lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama, were footnoted to peer-reviewed academic research. Moffo told TIME, “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it.”
In this video, Jon Birdsong asks Stern to define social media as it relates to their clients.
Stern also says SS+K is well-positioned to ride out the recession because more clients would demand nontraditional approaches that use their budgets more efficiently. ”Marketers have less money to spend,” he said. “It’s not about convincing them to spend more, it’s about spending smarter with better strategy. We feel like what we do and how we do it are better positioned for this marketplace.”
http://www.vimeo.com/7766677- Rodney Fernandes
- Charles Lumpkin, III
- Ernie Johnston
- Willie L. Jackson
- Russell Jurney
- Jason P. Young
- Jason Green
- Ofra Tessler
- J. Smith
- Paul Stamatiou
- Richard LeBer
- Michael Slaughter
- Tim Dorr
- Jackson Hughes
- Ben Chestnut
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[Credit: Rahaf Harfoush for "Yes We Did']
