The man credited with masterminding Barack Obama’s marketing campaign has been airing rather surprising views at Cannes. David Plouffe’s comments were reported in the Financial Times’ Tech blog, where he talks about the value of “old school” marketing techniques that focus on the message being delivered by channels such as email and television, and supported by social media tools as “part of the arsenal” in Obama’s campaign. He stresses it was the unconventional way in which channels were used, rather than the use of the channels themselves, that delivered the results.

“The real drivers for us were old school – they were email and they were web,” he said. The legacy of that email campaign is that the Obama administration can still communicate with 10m Americans – “directly, not through a media filter”, said Plouffe, at a time when people trust media less and value personal recommendations more. “That may not be as sexy as a TV ad or a press conference, but I can’t think of anything more valuable than [staying in email contact with supporters],” he said. “There is nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being.”

This is eminently applicable to B2B comms, where the channel choice can often be overstressed in its importance versus the message. In the same way, Plouffe highlights the importance of the supporters being able to “move the message” through any channel of their choosing (Twitter, web, Facebook, email) but the overriding factor in the campaign design being the message itself.  Definitely a consideration for campaign design at the moment: consider how the message might be “moved” by its recipients, and how you can facilitate that process through the way the information is delivered in the first instance.