Commercial Success: How Obama’s Media Campaign Influenced the Election

Larry Grisolano has 30 years of experience as a political professional and is currently a Partner at AKPD Message and Media. In 2011, Larry served as Director of Paid Media for the Obama-Biden reelection campaign and from 2007 to 2008 Larry also served as Director of Paid Media and Opinion Research for Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008. In these roles, Grisolano managed message delivery, creative development, and strategic placement of the campaign’s $400 million paid media campaign. Larry earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in political science from The University of Iowa. He studied business management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Comparing the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign of 1992 to the most recent Obama-Biden race for the White House, what role do you think the growing change in demographics has played in the evolution of campaign strategy for the Democratic Party?

One thing that stayed the same was the very healthy gender gap that was in President Clinton’s favor. This remained a key part of our strategy. One thing that was different was our ability to tap into “Reagan Democrats.” Traditionally, this was a group of working-class whites that were economically aligned with the Democratic Party. However, they had conservative cultural attitudes that aligned with the Republican Party. President Reagan won their hearts in the 1980 and 1984 elections, which was a big change for the Democratic Party. In 1992, President Clinton was skillful at winning them back with a populist Democratic philosophy. In fact, we picked up a greater share of that vote than is the Democratic base line, but this is becoming a harder thing for us to access. In the present day, the big game changer is that the Hispanic population has grown by huge percentage since 1992, which had a big impact on the most recent election.

The Obama campaign did particularly well with Hispanic, Asian American, and African American voters. How does strategy change when focusing on emerging populations like Latinos versus populations that have shown an historical alliance like African Americans?

One of the big differences, especially with Hispanics, is the language separator. As a result, these voters are tuned into different places on the television and radio dials. This also has a certain galvanizing effect within the community, allowing them to move as a block because they have cultural characteristics in common. This plays a big role in how you reach out as a campaign to those communities. On the other hand, African Americans have always been a very loyal constituency, therefore the Democratic Party acknowledges the importance of continuing to reach out to both nurture and show respect for the relationship. Our high turnout levels with those groups were certainly a result of President Obama’s dedicated outreach efforts.

Why do you think that the Obama campaign was able to overcome accusations that he mismanaged the economy, while Romney lost the war on women and fell short with the 47 percent?

We overcame the economic question by first evaluating several different theories. One theory was that President Obama did a better job than people were giving him credit for, so maybe we could lean harder into our accomplishments. Our research supported this and we did use this approach in the campaign to an extent, but we knew that alone would not be enough – people would only buy so much into this when they saw economic despair around them. We ultimately focused on the fact that people were more concerned with the 30-year decline in the middle class living standard than they were with the slow recovery from the 2008 recession. We did further research to learn what this symbolized to people and how to tap into the great emotions that surrounded it.

Once we adopted this strategy, the economic discussion became a battle of definition with the other side. The Romney campaign wanted the focus to be on Obama’s stewardship. We defined it differently to focus on this 30 year pattern where people have lost faith in the American dream. We emphasized that President Obama had taken steps to rebuild that, but the bigger question was whom would you trust with that project going forward. In doing so, we avoided the thankless task of trying to defend something that people were still very anxious about. Second, we talked about something that they cared even more about; we were where the market was. Third, it introduced many questions about Romney and his record. We wanted to enter this as evidence in the race.

With the exception of the Bush vs. Kerry race, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992. Do you think that this indicates a growing disconnect with the general public? Will there be opportunity for Republicans to turn this perception around in 2016?

I’m very skeptical of premature obituaries of the Republican Party. My sense is that politics provides the opportunity to evolve and reinvent. However, there are impediments to reinvention in the Republican Party. Some of these impediments include the institutional nature of the nomination process and the uncompromising nature of certain parts of their constituency, which contributes to the demographic problem that you mentioned. However, my sense is that there is a growing opinion that there needs to be some kind of reform. It might be a painful, slow process, and I’m not necessarily sure that it can get done immediately. I think there will be an evolution before there will be a death of the Republican Party.

According to The Washington Post, the Romney-focused ads ran by the Obama campaign were considered more effective by voters than those ran by the Romney campaign. How do you derive a strategy for deciding which negative ads will have a positive spin with your target market?

The first thing we do is we establish a broad message channel. The broad message channel that we committed ourselves to was the question of which candidate would better rebuild the middle class. By starting there, I think that we were in a place where people were getting something they wanted to hear on something they were demanding. The second thing is the tonal issue that you have with negative ads. If people view the ads as over the top slam jobs, they will tune them out before absorbing the information that you want to convey. As such, when testing our ads, we ask questions like “would you tune this ad out” and “did this ad convey any new information to you?” If the ad does not provide any new information, then it is ineffective. Likewise we ask “is this ad believable?” In doing so, we’re constantly probing for whether we’re breaking through the skepticism that people have about advertising in general, political ads in particular, and negative ads on top of everything else. We grow our credibility by deliberately and methodically producing ads that are successful in those dimensions.

It’s been said that technological advances have taken the emphasis away from what will be on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow, to what is happening right now. As a campaign strategist, how do you work around that to make sure your target population is getting the information that you think is most salient?

At one time, it was possible to sync up advertising with daily news programming, but the process has since changed. For example, one of the spots that the campaign put together was about Romney’s record in Massachusetts. Given that many people were not familiar with his track record as governor, we gave our own spin on how we thought he did. We then generated news coverage through press operations. We had hoped to keep that conversation sustained over the course of a television flight, which is currently about 10 days. However, because the news cycle changes more rapidly than the advertising cycle, we were not able to sustain a simultaneous conversation between our advertising and news efforts.

Regardless of this fact, in advertising you have to keep your ads up over a certain amount of time so as to reach a diverse set of audiences with different viewing schedules. For instance, some people may only watch television on Wednesdays, while others watch on Fridays. As such, the 10-day cycle is still important. However, this does result in things being out of sync. In this specific case, the news cycle had already been through a number of topics on Romney before our Massachusetts ad finished its cycle.

The United States Postal Service has been constantly working to make their operations more efficient; most recently, they discussed plans to limit Saturday delivery service which was estimated to save them $2 billion. Given your experience in direct mail campaigning, how do you see this segment trending going forward? And what are some technological channels that can be explored in bridging that gap?

Direct mail is interesting in that people have been predicting its end for a very long time. It feels like a primitive medium in our electronic age. Additionally, the direct mail delivery mechanism has inherent inefficiencies and costs. Nonetheless, there is something about opening your mailbox that people still value. In our research, we found many voters attributed great value to snail mail given all the spam they receive on electronic media. As such, I don’t think it’s on as short of a lifespan as one would intuitively think.

There are other delivery mechanisms that are growing rapidly. Social media has provided a way to get your message out to people that might care. There is also great value in search and contextual advertising. For example, if someone hears that President Obama did poorly in the first debate, you want to be sure that you’re displaying information that tells your side of the story when they attempt to search on it. One area of opportunity is with cell phones. A lot of people in underserved communities access the Internet directly from their handhelds. Advertisers are very interested in interacting through this medium. Cable is also interesting. Many people use advanced cable boxes, which provide great flexibility for interactivity. Additionally, there are also opportunities with those who download content on their television through an Xbox, Wii, or Roku. I think that one of the real premiums with all of these media is that media planners can start to further customize how information is being delivered to their target markets.

Feature Photo: cc/(Todd Benson)