Marketing John McCain plus Election Results Implications for CMOs

Fred Davis, CEO of Strategic Perception, Inc., a political consulting firm, offered some timely political discussion with his presentation, "Marketing John McCain plus Election Results Implications for CMOs."

Davis has created many political ad campaigns before John McCain. He created George W. Bush's four years ago, Sarah Palin's governor race in Alaska, and many many others.

Davis' first client, Jim InHofe in Georgia, was a candidate that was 30 points down in the polls when he first took him on. The agreement he made with that first client, who had no money, is that he would do the campaign for nothing, but his client couldn't have any input on the creative. While there were moments of near heart attacks (the first ad had men in pink tutu's in prison dancing with each other), in the end, his candidate won by 15 points, a 45 point swing.

Davis attributes his success in political advertising to taking advantage of traditional ad marketing techniques. He created signature humorous political ad campaigns (often negative) and purposely avoided those negative "He lied" campaigns.

There are some major differences about Davis' political ad business versus when he was working in traditional advertising. Those difference are:

• He gets his money upfront.
• He's always out of work on November 5th and he knows immediately if his client is successful or unsuccessful.
• He has major issues with the press.
• He usually gets the final say.

Managing the John McCain campaign
Davis went into the John McCain campaign with 95% of the country thinking they were on the wrong track. Given that McCain was a Republican, he was tied to the George W. Bush presidency. As a result, Davis realized McCain's campaign had to be about character and not about issues.

Davis has made many controversial ad campaigns, most notably the negative celebrity ad that included Paris Hilton. He showed two very funny ads that attacked Obama's lack of accomplishments and were supposed to run during the DNC, but unfortunately never ran because the woman in the ad died the day before they were supposed to run.

McCain simply couldn't raise as much money as Obama. He did George W. Bush's campaign for $180 million which was plenty of money. This year John McCain had $200 million, which was a nice increase. But Obama's team raised $700 million and were very targeted on spending. For example, in just New Hampshire, the McCain team was outspent by Obama's 10 to 1.

In an effort to save money, Davis was strongarmed into doing a series of hybrid ads which meant he had to split a 30 second ad which really ended up being 12.5 seconds to get their message out. You need the last five seconds for the candidate to say, "I'm John McCain and I approve this message."

Davis believes what really happened that caused the demise of McCain was the country's financial collapse. Most of America started thinking, "Maybe I do need the government to save me." Barack Obama embodied that the government could save you.

Check out all coverage at The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit.

Improving the landing page experience for visitors

I spoke with Jason Smith and Seth Rosenblatt of Interwoven about what have been the biggest improvements and changes at Interwoven. I had interviewed Interwoven at the last CMO Club conference in NYC. I needled them a little, but we got to the answer I wanted eventually. Watch the video until the end. :)

Check out all coverage at The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit.

CMO roundtable discussion on social media

Drew Neisser, President of Renegade, led a breakout session entitled, "Leveraging Social Networks in this Economy." (Note: that's NOT Drew in the photo.) He first asked what level of social media engagement CMOs had in the room. And it was a huge range from nothing to "kicking butt and taking names."

To see YOUR social media quotient, take The CMO Quiz.

It was a round table discussion where everyone was offering some input. Here's a summary of some of the insight and questions:

• Being present in social networks, you're not changing the behavior of what they're doing. You don't have to drag them somewhere else. You're catching them in the environment where they're already interacting.
• One company asked customers what their horror stories are and they took those stories and turned them it into a weekly online cartoon strip.
• First inclination of a company was to ignore social media. But then quickly realized that consumers are savvy and they can sniff out B.S. and they couldn't ignore social media.
• One company cut back press releases by 50% and increased the number of videos. And for those remaining press releases, they made sure they include the videos. Wasn't extra resources, just a realignment of resources.
  
• Social media release allows you to embed multimedia beyond just ASCII. One other CMO tried it and said it didn't dramatically increase their coverage.
  
• If you're creating videos, you want to make sure people are seeing them. You need to concern yourself with distribution.
• On negative comments associated to your brand, sometimes you just have to let customers' comments ride. But when it's your employees making negative or off target comments, you need to step in.
• If the goal is to drive revenue through social media,
  
• Suggest responding to RFPs with multimedia. In one case of a Google RFP, videotaped an employee using Google's services to complete the RFP.
• Give a reason every single day to come to their Facebook page, blog, etc. They constantly have events.
• Who has nothing to say, joked one CMO?
• Have a clear path to ROI before you even embark on social media.
• Social media is about talking with and engaging. It's not about marketing to. If you do start marketing to then you lose your audience.
• People started admitting to mistakes and I pointed people to an article I wrote for Mashable entitled "Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus."
• Another recommended story that I wrote from Mashable that got a lot of coverage is "Sixteen Great Twitter Moments."

Check out all coverage at The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit.

Marketing Effectiveness: Just Hit Your Foul Shots Baby !

After watching the Memphis vs. Kansas NCAA Men’s Basketball Finals last night, I kept thinking back to the fact that Memphis was up by 9 points with around 2 minutes left in the game and ended up losing. One of the keys to blowing the lead: missed foul shots. They make just one more of the many they missed in the last 8 minutes of the game and they are national champions. Kansas won in overtime.

As a CMO I know I constantly look for that big strategic idea that will change the game for my company, or the most creative tactic that will engage our customers more effectively. Looking back I can pinpoint a number of times where just plain lack of attention to detail or missed fundamental execution has negatively impacted actual results. Examples include:

1) Holding yourself, your team and agencies accountable to meet deadlines. You commit to a date, you make the date. How many times have I let things slip and that piece of analysis goes another 2 weeks before completion, the required product marketing content is not completed by the end of the month as promised, or my agency needs 2 more weeks to complete planned changes to your website.

2) Lack of clarity around roles/responsibilities within your department. I come out of meetings having discussed a number of great ideas and deliverables and not everyone is clear on who owns what.

3) Putting the right metrics in place to not only keep score better, but monitor programs more closely for quicker response times. Defining the right metrics, not just the ones you need to demonstrate your value to the business, but the metrics you need to monitor your program execution for quick response to changes in customer response and resource priorities, is basic marketing fundamentals. Adding the focus on how you are going to capture the data required to monitor accurately is difficult at times and in many cases does not get the attention needed to actually add value.

I have just decided to call these fundamentals, “Hitting my foul shots” and to place a higher priority on them within the business. I would love to create a list of overlooked fundamentals from the CMOs in the group so please add you most important piece of advise to other CMOs in this area.