• ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER

The party’s just begun, and perhaps it’s already over.

With conventions over and with less than two months left before the elections, Romney and Obama choose opposing strategies for their campaigns. According to Obama, the time of 30-seconds commercials is over. There is no need to drown viewers with messages of pessimism and negativity. On the other side, Romney is loading a machine gun of commercials and is getting ready for the final fireworks in the eleven swing states – the undecided states that will decide the elections.

Obama’s strategy is more of an obliged path than a choice. In the previous issues of Bill we have already stressed that these elections are “doped” (as never before in history) by “major donors” – that 0.7% of the country that can write checks for a million dollars (or  even 100 millions – see Mr Adelson, the king of Las Vegas). Major donors decided that their candidate is Mitt Romney, the Mormon entrepreneur, and abandoned Obama, whom they had supported in 2008. Among  them there is Goldman Sachs. Four years ago, employees at Goldman Sachs gave 75% of their campaign contributions to Obama, while only 30% went to the Democrats this year.

Can you buy the elections with commercials? This is the question we should ask ourselves everyday – not only when Obama strives to raise funds for a couple of months.

New York Mayor Bloomberg, 20th in the ranking of the richest men in the world, is on his third term and in his last campaign literally buried the rival with commercials. Is there a chance for Mr. Smith to go to Washington? Very few. But Obama’s own biography and the background of the people who performed on stage at the convention seems to say that this chance exists. The claim of “humble beginnings” has been a refrain of both the Republican and the Democratic infomercials. So much focus has been put on this aspect that Ryan and Romney went so far as mentioning summer jobs in fast foods or recalling their time in the dorm in an attempt to “impoverish” their wealthy backgrounds. What we fail to understand is why they do not exploit it as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Kennedy did.

But money will not buy these elections. After five months in which Romney managed to raise more funds, Obama recovered in August and did even better during the convention. At the end Obama raised more money than his rival but spent much of them to contain Romney’s growing approval numbers.

So we are back to the 2008 Obama “business plan”, which is now in the hands of “the fixer” (as the Americans call him) Jim Messina, head of the campaign. Money started to flow, thanks to ten-dollar crowdsourcing as well as a million dollars worthy ideas. Just think of the “FIRED UP, READY TO GO” mantra, heard from a short movie aired at the Democratic National convention, that set on fire Obama’s people. With this injection of enthusiasm Obama gained a lot of supporters, especially among the young, the same who opened the doors of the White House to the Obama family in 2008.

To the young are adding Latinos – eleven million people who were once called “illegal immigrants” and now are called “dreamers”, thanks to the new immigration policy. Dreamers who can’t vote but have an extraordinary network of relatives, friends, and colleagues who can. Most Latinos were pro Obama already in 2008, but now they can make a difference in Florida, Colorado and in other  Republican areas. El Sueno Americano meets the American Dream and, together, can decide the future. It’s the first time we hear Spanish (sometimes it’s just a few words, sometimes it’s a whole ad in Spanish language) in political commercials.

Colorado Springs is the first target market of such commercials in the country, while Cincinnati, Ohio, is the second one. Rumours say that commercials aired 30 times in a single day in these cities. These markets are saturated and maybe should get a break in favour of New York, where ads are unseen because Obama’s victory is taken for granted here. This targeted approach is showing us  a new map of the country. It shows places where Latinos can play a decisive role. It’s on this emerging demographic group that is being tested a hybridization of commercial marketing and political advertising. New marketing companies are being born that cross consumers data with political market – a research about consumers with specific political preferences. Data are derived combining zip codes with keywords searched on the Internet in specific areas as well as from voters registration (which is mandatory in the US).

Sensible areas in the undecided states are attacked by political marketing in the same way commercial marketing used to do in the past with paper mail. All about us is known today: who we are, what we consume, and – perhaps – even who we will vote for on Nov. 6.