Brand marketers must follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign to succeed in producing personalised communications with customers, claims Harper Reed, the technology and data guru behind Obama’s campaign.
Reed made the comments at the announcement of his first live UK speaking engagement in April, at the Direct Marketing Association’s Technology Summit.
Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina appointed Reed to spearhead the pioneering project to crunch huge chunks of Democrat voting data and produce sophisticated profiling techniques that brought the President closer to his supporters and potential supporters than ever before.
Reed assembled a team of developers from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter to produce a data platform codenamed ‘Narwhal’ to give the President the edge over his rival, Mitt Romney.
In total the campaign raised $1bn in donations from 4.4 million donors, including $690m online.
Narwhal helped create a social network for supporters who organised 358,000 events, made 125,646,575 campaigning phone calls, and mobilised 600,000 Facebook fans to recruit five million more active users to support the campaign. Sophisticated TV audience modelling helped to buy 20,000 more TV ads than Romney’s campaign for $100m less.
Reed fast made a name for himself in November last year being photographed hugging Obama on election night after he won the Presidency for a second term.
Commenting on the implications for brand communications, Reed said: “The Obama campaign was the product of the smartest people in the room producing tools to put together a detailed picture of every one of Obama’s millions of supporters. From there we were able to understand what interested them, what was important to them and what would motivate them to donate, vote and persuade others to vote for Obama.
“We worked out how to get Obama to speak one-to-one with tens of millions of voters in ways that have never been achieved before. This has redefined how campaigns should be run and redefined how all brands should communicate with their customers. I’m pleased to have been invited to the UK by the DMA for my first live speaking engagement to share what I’ve learned with brand communicators.”
Harper Reed will be joined by speakers from 4oD, Cranfield University and the DMA at the DMA Technology Summit, which is sponsored by Neolane, on 30 April in Euston.
