According to the advertising professionals at Advertising Age, Barack Obama was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for his 2008 presidential campaign. He was the best of the best at getting his message out.
http://adage.com/...
Mr. Obama won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered here at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference. He edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com.
As one of the marketing professionals stated:
I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate.
Why was this marketing skill not utilized during the tortuous year of the health care debate to get real reform passed? Why did President Obama, instead of going to his base who worked so hard to get him elected and utilizing the momentum of his and the Congressional Democrats' win, instead make back door deals with the insurance industry and big pharma?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The result is that we have a watered-down "reform" bill which is already being gamed by the insurance industry that virtually wrote it, as nyceve describes:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Good marketing will work if the Democratic leadership wants it to. The Republicans have Frank Luntz and the corporate mainstream media, a formidable combination indeed. But the progressives have their own marketing expertise as proven by Obama's win, and people like George Lakoff to counter Luntz, if the DLC wanted to listen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
And we have the majority of the voters and are on the correct side of the issues that matter to poor and middle class people - health care, concentration of wealth, financial reform, global warming, job creation, sustainability, fair trade, to name just a few. The main thing is to develop policies that aren't watered down compromises that are next to useless, to appease the Republicans and Blue Dogs who won't vote for them anyway. Real, bold progressive policies will make marketing much more effective because they will have real selling points, and won't need to have time and energy go into masking the smell of capitulation.