Obama 2012 Campaign Launches With Digital Push
With about 19 months to go until the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama launched his reelection campaign with a YouTube video, an email blast and targeted texts Monday.
The YouTube video, “It Begins with Us,” hit the web Sunday and features putative real voters identified only by their first names. In perhaps a clue to how this campaign will differ in tone from the last one, the hope message has been leavened with an acknowledgement of the candidate’s limitations. “Unfortunately, President Obama is one person, plus he’s got a job. We’re paying him to do a job,” says Alice, a voter from Michigan. “So we can’t just say, ‘Hey, can you just take some time off and get us all energized?’” Another voter, identified as Ed from North Carolina, also admits that he doesn’t agree with Obama on everything. “But I respect him and I trust him,” Ed says.
The outreach also included an email blast and texts to supporters stating that the president intends to file papers with the Federal Election Commission Monday. The text links to Obama’s official site for his 2012 run. The campaign has also begun running ads on Facebook asking a personalized variation on the question, “You in yet?”
Obama’s 2008 run will be a hard act to follow. Obama for America, as the campaign was known, won two top prizes at the Cannes Lion International Advertising Awards in 2009 in part for the campaign’s pioneering use of social media, which included the My.BarackObama.com social network and signing up for Twitter (which was still in its infancy at the time).