ArchPundit

Merc Strategy:

 

For years, the traditional means of announcing a statewide political campaign in Illinois was the tried-and-true “fly-around” — an all-day (or multi-day) affair in which a candidate hops on a plane to do a series of press conferences and rallies in major cities around the state.

A fly-around has its place and we still may do one. Today, we effectively employed a different strategy.
Our firm was proud to spearhead the online component of the announcement of DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett’s campaign for Illinois Attorney General.

In fact — the online component was the centerpiece of the announcement.

We taped a brief, candidate announcement video (please see below) that we first sent to key Illinois blogs, followed by distribution via the Twittersphere.

We then emailed the video to our list of more than 25,000 voters in Illinois.

That was followed by the campaign press team pushing the story out to the traditional media — where the story spread quickly on news sites across the state.

We also simultaneously launched a new Facebook fan page for the campaign.
Bottom line: the online announcement allowed us to control the news, cost-effectively and directly reach voters across the state, create buzz, and drive news coverage.

A few years ago, the main tools of a campaign announcement were a plane, a car and a phone.

Today – we used YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Below is our announcement video. We prefer candid, casual videos — not even editing out small slips of the tongue — to ensure an authentic feel and to prevent the candidate from appearing stiff or stilted. We’re quite pleased with how it turned out:

 

The timing was still bizarre, but it appears otherwise Merc did a good job.