e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Obama Attack on Romney Over Bain Capital(ism) has Online Reinforcement

May 14th, 2012

Lots of online talk today about the Obama campaign’s new two-minute(!) anti-Romney attack ad airing in battleground states. Here’s the video, and note the RomneyEconomics.com website promoted via a custom overlay:

This video is apparently the online-optimized version; I assume the TV ad (part of a $25,000,000 Obama buy) mentions the website as well, perhaps right before the “I approve this message” line. I bring this point up because of the integrated nature of the anti-Romney message: the site strongly reinforces the ad with details about Bain Capital’s involvement with companies that later laid off workers, via a sliding set of screens similar in presentation to what we saw in the “Life of Julia” infographic. Plus, each story has a mouseover-controlled timeline and is individually sharable on Facebook and Twitter. To top it off, the site has a share-your-own-story feature to further encourage supporters to get involved.

Regardless of what you think about the substance of the Romney Economics critique, this is good work all around: robust online engagement to capitalize (hah!) on offline promotion. We should see more of this kind of integration in the months to come, assuming people are doing their jobs.

Update: Mere moments after I published this piece, the first DNC email arrived promoting RomneyEconomics.com…yet more integration.

– cpd