During this presidential campaign, we saw young strategists from Obama’s team embrace the Internet, showing the world what a great tool it is to “promote and market” a presidential candidate. It was also strategically used for the first time to reach small donors online, and CakeMail was a part of it!
We saw the more than 2 million ‘friends’ of Barack Obama on Facebook, and the‘only’ 600 000 for McCain. We also understood how you could build a base of more than 100 000 followers on Twitter, those for Barack Obama, and around 2000 for McCain. YouTube clips and other artistic interpretations of the presidential campaign were everywhere online). Just one example of this is “The Obama Mix” created by DJ Z-Trip, licensed under Creative Commons and distributed freely over the Internet.
For a presidential campaign the amount of money raised may help determine the outcome of the election. The greatest impact in this case was how the Internet was innovatively used to secure a large part of the $639 million USD raised by Obama’s team. The Obama Team chose to opt-out of the traditional public system and rely on private donations, split almost equally between small online donors and bigger donors.
With a strong online strategy and presence, we saw how “An Obama Minute”, was able to reach small donors online for the first time. The CakeMail platform was chosen to manage the email marketing for this project, as well as other email marketing operations that cannot be disclosed at this time.
It’s really exciting to think that CakeMail, along with all the others that have been part of this campaign, has gained so much from this experience and is now part of online history!
