Apps
Despite the Obama campaign's apparent mobile donor triumph in August, the Romney campaign is hardly inept when it comes to mobile. The team has rolled out a steady barrage of apps this year: With Mitt, Mitt's VP, Romney-Ryan and, most recently, Mitt Events.
With Mitt, an iPhone app that allows people to take photos of events, add pro-Romney banners and easily post the images to Twitter and Facebook, is probably the best known, though not for a reason the Romney campaign was probably anticipating. The app infamously misspelled America as "Amercia," a gaffe that quickly went viral. Over time, the digital team added several updates for functionality, features and spelling corrections.
The Mitt's VP app simply announced Romney's choice for his vice presidential candidate. Despite being essentially a one-trick pony, the app was very popular. It had 200,000 downloads within the first 48 hours, and hundreds of thousands thereafter.
“The threshold to download the app is pretty high, relative to people's engagement on a campaign, relative to liking something on Twitter or Facebook."
"I think that the threshold to download the app is pretty high, relative to people's engagement on a campaign, relative to liking something on Twitter or Facebook," said Zac Moffatt, digital director of Romney's campaign. "We wanted to tie that action to something that really provided value, and we thought the VP announcement was that play for us."
The other two apps in the Romney-Ryan collection offer information about the candidates and their events, as well as ways to share content and order tickets to see the candidates speak.
Meanwhile, the centerpiece of the Obama campaign's mobile efforts is the Dashboard tool, the mobile component released earlier this summer. The Dashboard acts a sort of digital desk for supporters and volunteers, where they can search through options for getting involved with the campaign. The tool streamlines online and offline data, integrates existing social networks and localizes information and events according to the user's geographical area.
The team also put out the Obama for America app, which rolled out at the end of July and follows the innovative Obama '08 app from four years ago. It provides information to supporters regarding the president's policies, news, events, community activities, volunteer opportunities and information on how to register to vote.
"As we push through the few weeks [prior to] this election, our focus remains on helping to make grassroots organizing as easy and accessible as possible for the volunteers and supporters that are the heart and soul of this campaign," Adam Fetcher, an Obama campaign spokesperson, tells Mashable. "We’ve designed our online organizing tools to help break down the distinction between online and offline organizing. This isn’t about being flashy -- we’re giving people the tools they need to make the biggest possible difference between now and Election Day."
Advertising
Though Obama might be raising more money via mobile, Romney seems to be spending more aggressively on those platforms. Even though mobile advertising as an industry is still in its infancy, both campaigns have dabbled in using mobile to push across paid political messages. However, the Romney campaign appears to have the clear advantage.
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The Obama campaign recently made headlines for placing advertisements in Electronic Arts (EA) mobile games -- such as Battleship, Tetris and Scrabble, but the Romney campaign has used mobile advertising on Facebook and purchased ads on both Apple's iAds and Google's mobile platforms.
Both campaigns are using Google, but Romney is ahead in his use of iAds and is reportedly also working with Google to target Android users through ads specific to that platform.
"We've done an aggressive amount of advertising," Moffatt said. "We were the first with mobile advertising on Facebook, and I think we're one of the largest advertisers in the world now with Facebook Mobile."
Moffatt told the crowd at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that engagement through Facebook's mobile advertising platform has been much higher than with similar web ads. The Romney camp also used mobile advertising to boost download numbers of its mobile apps.
Mobile: A Campaign Imperative
A month before Election Day, it's unclear whether Obama or Romney will become the president of the United States for the next four years. But there's one thing we already know: Each campaign has set a mobile precedent for future political races.
The candidates' efforts to reach younger and tech-savvy voters over the past several months have proved useful, and perhaps necessary. Both camps have seen success thus far, but only in November will we be able to elect a winner.
Image courtesy of Alex Fitzpatrick
Illustration by Bob Al-Greene