The Obama Marketing Machine Keeps Rolling

The election is over, but Obama's "big data" juggernaut keeps rolling. Al Urbanski, a senior writer at "Direct Marketing News," marvels at the barrage of e-mail messages he has gotten from the Obama team post-election. "It's like the election never ended. He and his people still have their lists, their website and their e-mail machine cranking. Obama & Co. remains a going concern," comments Urbanski. Regular e-mails now seek to enlist support for the President's agenda -- his new product launches, so to speak -- while barackobama.com still solicits contributions (to settle campaign debt) and gathers data to grow the Democrats' 40 million-name political database. The White House "marketing" team is calling on retail marketing strategies to keep that data working for them, apparently. Urbanski quotes Jimmy Duval, head of product management at Magento, an Ebay-owned platform that manages Obama's website as well as sites for Nike, Office Max, etc.: "They're using common retail strategies. This person bought a poster; let's sell her an inaugural item. Forget exit polls; this is what actually happened. It will be interesting to see how Obama will parlay this information into the next election." For the complete Urbanski article, go to http://www.dmnews.com/marketing-obama-co/article/278459/