2009 Industry Prediction: Digital Marketing Goes to Washington

Obama's use of technology and social media has been widely credited with his ability to connect with U.S. citizens and to raise an unprecedented amount of money ultimatly resulting in his historic presidential win.  As Business Week stated "[Obama] leveraged his website, the blogosphere, and even user-generated content (remember Obama Girl) and video games to engage not just donors and volunteers but all citizens." There is no doubt that future presidential candidates will elicit outside agencies with the directive to employ the "Obama online community networking model" to mobilize their constituency, but what is the near-term impact to the digtital marketing industry? 

Recognizing that change must come to Washington, Obama has already promised to appoint a Technology Czar to ensure that the Government is appropriately investing in next generation technology.  Obama's vision of a friendlier and more responsive government should be seen as very good news for the digital marketing industry.  Here's why:  The Government has long invested in technology infrastructure projects, which is why today you see D.C. and Northern Virginia riddled with technology consulting firms.  Though, as most of us know in the digital marketing industry, the "back-end," though an enabler, is transparent to the end user.  What matters most to the consumer (and to the average U.S. citizen) is their experience; were they able to complete the task that they set-out to do with as little frustration as possible.  From a marketing perspective, we take this further by ensuring that the consumer experience reflects the brand's positioning and provides a consistent stop along the customer journey.  In our industry we continuously seek to optimize the consumer experience; employing testing techniques such as heuristics, split and multivariate tests, concept and usability testing, focus groups, etc.  We think beyond the core consumer experience and seek to create a brand web or distributed presence that touches  consumers across all channels (both paid and unpaid) with a consistent message.  Simply put, we want to get noticed, while at the same time we continuously seek to demonstrate value to our target consumers.  I don't need to tell you that accomplishing this is difficult to do today given the short attention span and high expectations of the digital consumer. 

That said, the U.S. Government and it's various agencies do not have the expertise to effectively leverage the new media environment to accomplish their goals all on their own.  Just having a website no longer does the job, as Obama clearly demonstrated to McCain during the 2008 campaign.  If you combine the above with Obama's recently announced economic stimulus plan set to kick-off shortly after his inauguration, it doesn't take much to connect the dots:  Beginning in 2009, digital marketing agencies are headed to Washington D.C.  Sure you can argue that they're already there; AKQA, Arnold & Wunderman/RTCRM all have offices in the area, but given Obama's new mandate it won't be long before many more digital marketing agencies infiltrate the newest digital marketing frontier; our nation's capital. 

Comments

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For digital industries this news of Government investing in responsive technologies could be a positive note as huge investment could be retained through it .

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Brand positioning is the key to generate revenues from the target customers in order to provide consistent stop along the customer journey.