“If I’d had just five minutes with Hillary, it could all have been different,” said an exasperated Cal Morton, vice president, Interlinked Media, the agency that ran Hillary Clinton’s mobile campaign (such as it was).
We were discussing the campaign ran by Barak Obama, President of the United States and mobile-marketing pin-up of the year. It touched a nerve.
Interlinked had wanted to take Hillary’s mobile campaign way beyond basic SMS alerts.
Working on their own initiative, Morton and his team developed a mobile site for Hillary, designed to encourage sign-ups, and a SMS-based social-networking platform. The latter was a cross between Facebook and Twitter, but had been built with a 60-year-old former first lady in mind.
Hillary launched the SMS alert service at a press conference in New York on May 14th, 2007, but the mobile site and many of the applications Interlinked wanted to launch never saw the light of day.
The campaign team just didn’t ‘get’ mobile. But Morton knew Hillary would understand: “She’s an intelligent woman – if I’d just had five minutes…she’d have got it and made the rest of the team climb on board.”
Of course, it’s all hypothetical now – from now on political campaigns will be properly mobile.
But it left mobiThinking wondering: does this happen in business too? How many brands are missing out on mobile, because the evangelist can’t get the ear of the CEO?
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