Last night Barack Obama’s campaign set up what folks in the TV biz call a “roadblock” – running paid programming simultaneously on almost every major network and several big cable nets. Viewers who were determined to avoid Senator Obama could run the roadblock Smokey and The Bandit style by steering a course through the narrow openings on the few outlets that weren’t running the ad or could simply turn off the television and curl up with a good book (Dreams from My Father, perhaps?)

For the roughly 30 million people who did watch last night Obama’s message was obvious: vote for me.  Still that number represented only 20% of all households – less than watched any of the debates according to Nielsen.  What is evident is that even after the broadcast was over interest in the Obamamercial was extremely high – from those that watched and wanted to see commentary and reaction, those that didn’t watch because they couldn’t and wanted a chance to see it too, those that for whatever reason were unaware of the program or it’s airtime, and even those who chose not to watch and were ready to see it commented on after the fact.

Take a look at this Google Trends chart from10:24 PM ET last night – 2 hours after the broadcast ended. Keep in mind that the data was roughly an hour old so presumably this is reflecting the searchscape at about an hour after airing:

Let there be no doubt. What was aired last night was marketing – an infomercial – and offline marketing has a direct effect on search behavior.  It seems obvious right?  And yet many brands and marketers continue to insist on walling off their various efforts or integrating strategy in a reactive way after the fact.

As has been stated here, there, and everywhere in the Internets, Obama’s campaign has been fantastic on message discipline and marketing savvy. Their use of search is exactly what ought to be done by any brand that has a marketing presence across multiple platforms.

They had ads set up to run which sent searchers back to Obama’s website to donate and watch (or re-watch) the video. They also had the video up and ready to go on YouTube so that searchers could easily find it there immediately after the broadcast was over.

The one thing that was missing was a final piece to convert that attention into intention. It would have been nice to see some of the voting resources Obama mentions on the landing pages for his ads. Once you “catch” these users at the point of searching, you want to be able to funnel them somewhere meaningful to you and to them.

It’s hard to see from the searches themselves that any specific piece of policy broke through – the event itself was the biggest driver of searches.

This is one of the most important ways to use search engine and website metrics – you can see what people are taking away from your offline campaign and get a sense of its efficacy. Did your message get out, who did you drive traffic from and where were they located?

So listen up marketing types!  Marketing is not a TV campaign or a search campaign or an outdoor billboard campaign or a print campaign. It’s one campaign.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, ECommerce, Google, Online Video, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To, Search: News, Search: Video, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.