“I look at politics as shaping culture … we have a premier marketer in the White House,” said Bruce I. Newman, associate marketing professor at DePaul University.
Newman headed a roundtable yesterday morning on “Branding in Political Cyberspace: The Impact of the Starr Report on Internet Marketing” during Chicago Direct Marketing Days.
The professor, a former advisor to the Clinton White House on communication strategy, and author of a 1994 book, “Marketing of the President,” said President Clinton understands how to communicate with his constituents in ways DMers could learn from.
The Web was the tool of one of the President’s greatest embarrassments when the Starr report was launched online. However, that act gave DMers something to thank Bill Clinton for, said Newman. “The Starr report legitimized the Internet as a place to go for information. Now, what’s it going to take to make the Internet legitimate as a marketing tool?”
The major hurdle to that legitimacy is building a brand online in which consumers feel safe calling up and ordering on. Amazon.com, for example, is succeeding at that, but it still only represents 3% of book sales overall, Newman observed.
Clinton had that beat with a job approval rating of 70% yesterday. He’s adept at building his brand, by keeping people focused on what he wants them to think, Newman explained.
The cyber-politics of the Starr report online brought the public beyond the point where they can ignore the Internet as a trusted source of information. As participant Jerry Kraft, account executive of Alan Drey Co. Inc., Chicago, said when the participants were asked what they thought about the Starr report online: “I thought [it’s] a more unbiased version of events, rather than a daily newspaper that is biased to one political party or another.”
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