Lesson 5 focused on mobile marketing—a marketing technique that is becoming more mainstream as a result of the more than 200 million cell phone users in the U.S. (55 million of them under the age of 20).

Think back 50, 30, and even ten years ago…Did you ever imagine the now President-elect, Barack Obama, would announce his VP pick via a text message?

In my opinion, the Barack Obama campaign was one of the most clever campaigns I have ever witnessed.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Obama campaign’s text message announcing Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee’s running mate reached 2.9 million U.S. mobile subscribers, making it “on of the most important text messages” ever and “one of the most successful” branding efforts using mobile devices, said Nic Covey, director of insights for research firm Nielsen Mobile (Puzzanghera).

Despite the fact that false text messages appeared before the actual message was sent and news sources broke the news in advance, forcing actual text to be sent approximately five hours earlier than planned and in early morning hours when most supporters were probably sound asleep, Obama still came across as tech-savvy and empathetic to his young supporters.

"The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients," Covey said in a news release. "Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his VP pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cellphone numbers (Puzzanghera."

References:

Puzzanghera, Jim. “Obama’s VP text message reached 2.9 million people, Nielsen reports; No data on how many were awake when it arrived.” 26 Aug 2008. View the entire article here