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UK PR’s RUSH TO COPY US CAMPAIGN TECHNIQUES

April 8th, 2008 by Mark Hanson

 IMG_3712 PRs on this side of the pond, me included, are devouring coverage of the US election, seeing what ideas and innovations we can import into our own sphere.

 

My eyes lit up when I saw this story in PR Week about a new start-up in the UK that’s looking to ape Barack Obama’s search strategies and offer advice to clients in the UK. I decided to put a bit of flesh on the bone in terms of what Barack’s strategy is on search;

 His two main players are Josh Orton, who left in October, and Scott Goodstein  (primarily and who is behind this) built a system that integrated the campaign’s PR and press efforts with PPC advertising. Orton worked more with the blogosphere, but their system basically focused on two key points

1) Speed - they focused on getting PPC (pay-per-click/Adwords) ads up as soon as they found out a story was about to break. The main problem was that their geeks at HQ weren’t talking to the journalists (only Obama’s press people) and so information flow was something they tried to fix. They got their early morning discussions with senior staff to also include possible stories that would break in the various parts of the country, and that memo was then passed to the Pay Per Click-optimising team.

 

2) Targeting - they started with name targeting, but then branched into devising a strategy for John Edwards’ keywords as well (e.g., using “poverty”, etc). Then branched into policy targeting, and in early January (just before Iowa) began looking at regional trends (e.g., people in Iowa were searching for “energy subsidy” and so made sure Obama’s ads were there) and matching everything together.

They basically flooded the market, and at one point were bidding against themselves for ad placement!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under PR, Politics, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “UK PR’s RUSH TO COPY US CAMPAIGN TECHNIQUES”

  1. Daljit Bhurji Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    Hi Mark, Very interesting post and I think you are right that the Presidential campaigns are going to help push the boundaries of Social Media and Search in PR. Google’s decision this week to drop the protection that was in place preventing keyword bidding on registered trademarks is also going to shake things up big time in my opinion.

  2. Johnny Chatterton Says:
    April 10th, 2008 at 9:29 pm

    Interesting post, Obama’s campaign is certainly pushing the boundaries in every way. This is evident across his entire campaign, from the clean website to his great Facebook strategy (check out the Obama application).

    It’s refreshing to see a politician who is not afraid to try new things, push technology boundaries and to speak his mind. The interesting thing for me is because Obama’s campaign is using lots of web techniques that are not targeted (YouTube, Facebook, his conventional website) he is gathering supporters from across the world. Who knows what role they will play in the election, but it is surely a good sign for America that a serious contender for the President is so popular overseas. Want proof? Check out http://www.theworldwantsobama.org

  3. Anthony Ball Says:
    April 14th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

    Now this is an interesting one - what I’d like to see is the audience they think they reached with this vs. the more traditional methods of campaigning.

    Didn’t know Google had stopped enforcing trademark bidding - that could open up a lot of issues and legal challenges for them.

  4. Matt Says:
    April 16th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    PS you entries RSS doesn’t work and I want to subscribe!

    Cheers

    matt

    My RSS is - /www.montagecomms.com/xml/matt_anderson/blog_feed.xml

  5. Michael Cooper Says:
    April 16th, 2008 at 12:40 pm

    Matt,

    Thanks for the heads up. We’re looking into it right now.

    What aggregator do you use by the way? Google Reader? iGoogle?

    Cheers,
    Mike

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