Advance08: Arianna Huffington, Mark Penn and Cyrus Krohn

Arianna Huffington interviewing Cyrus Krohn (Director, RNC eCampaign Division) and Mark Penn (CEO Worldwide, Burson Marsteller)

Arianna just asked if there were any Hungarians in the audience because she’s not good at ducking eggs - haha. That won’t make sense if you didn’t see the news today.

Branding has moved more increasingly to center on campaigns. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Shock and Awe - worked as a brand. The Republican brand has nowhere to go but up. Arianna says that if the Republican party was dog food it would have been taken of the shelf.

Cyrus Krohn is up first to talk about Winning Elections - Winning Brands.
The RNC has a database called Voter Vault that they use for direct mail and lists. It’s been dormant otherwise. Cyrus wants to take the db and use it for micro-targeting voters that consume data in different ways. They used it to support Bobby Jindal’s run for Governor. Jindal campaign took multi phase approach:
- could they register voters online more easily
- could they manage absentee voting more effectively and efficiently
- 75% of voters they reached out to voted

They set up a Valentines day ecard website that got over 700K users and people averaged 2 cards per session. They then used that data to follow up and solicit funds or tell people about the RNC Facebook page.

The RNC has stepped in to Web 2.0 with www.canweask.com - more data capture. You can submit text or video questions and forward it to friends. 50K unique visitors used the site in the first 24 hours. Cyrus is closing by showing an anti Obama commercial from the CanWeAsk website.

Next up is Mark Penn.
Mark opens by stating that Cyrus’ add is too negative to be effective.

We are becoming a society that is making new choices that are breaking down religion and class that used to divide us. The groups are small but having a large impact. Two groups to mention are:
- The Long Attention Spanners - These folks are opposite of ADD. The internet is dominated by people who read and read and absorb information. The average best seller has grown over 100 pages in length and the most popular movie in American was over 3 hours long.
- The Impressionable Elites - Elites are swayed but personality, while regular voters are focused on health care plans, job and college affordability (election issues). Some news outlets are adding personality reporters to their rosters to capture this new data.

These groups are examples of people that are changing the model. One example is when the Hillary Clinton campaign Mark was working on went to Texas they tried new ads. One ad they ran was all stock footage and was very affordable to produce but it asked a question and brought in lots of search engine traffic. The commercial became spoofed on SNL and received broad coverage and became part of popular culture. A little stock footage, creativity and the web can help you create $50million worth of coverage. Commercials simply asked questions but they asked the right question.

Arinna is trying to make the argument that the commercials simply appealed to fear. Mark says the ads actually stimulate a question and cause people to research and debate.