Jim Margolis on Obama’s Campaign

Last Friday I spoke at El Dia C at the 10th Anniversary of the Club de Creativos in Madrid together with Jim Margolis, a senior partner at GMMB, a Washington-based political consulting, advertising, and communications firm.

Jim was a key strategist in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and has worked for the campaigns of many Democratic senators. Margolis is the strategist behind the Barack Obama presidential campaign.

It was great to be able to meet and talk with Jim, he did a great presentation at the event focusing on some key strategic area’s that made this historical campaign a success. There has been lots of writing on the campaign but not really on the strategy behind.

The strategic imperatives before and during the entire the campaign were:

- Own “Change”
- Focus relentlessly on the economy
- Reassure voters about Obama

Some critical lessons learned:

- Know what you stand for
- Be disciplined and communicate a clear message
- Meet people where they are, build relationships and empower them
- Take risks
- Intergrated communication efforts and use technology
- Speed matters

One of the key layers of the online campaign was definately Chris Hughes (24). As one of four founders of Facebook, he left the company early 2007, to work on Obama’s new-media campaign.

Read this article in the New York Times in which Obama credits the Internet’s social networking tools with a “big part” of his primary season success:

“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”

Read also this recent interview in Fast Company on how Chris helped create the Barack Obama campaign:

“By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.”

The combined use of email, online donors, social networks, phone calls, web sites and video were all of great influence reaching out to the younger american citizens, in the end the key for the campaign’s success.

Also mentioned, the importance of Obama 08 iPhone app as a viral recruiting campaign tool.

I was in San Francisco when Obama won the elections and one of the details I thought were really great that evening was that all volunteers who helped during the campaign received a “Thank you!” sms message from Obama before he went on TV for his victory speech. It’s all in the little details if you ask me.

It was a very interesting and inspiring talk.

Thanks to the Club de Creativos team and expecially Philippe Rougier and Concha Wert for inviting me, it was a fun day! You can view my Flickr set of the day here.