Rockin’ with the O
Sometimes you just have to dance. That’s the approach search marketing agency Oneupweb took when its Barack Obama yard signs kept disappearing from the company grounds, looted by an unseen enemy of the First Amendment.
The solution the Traverse City MI firm arrived at? A 30-foot projection of a dancing Obama thrown onto the walls of its building the night before Election Day.
Swipe that, Censor Boy>.
Lisa Wehr, Oneupweb’s founder, president and CEO, says the neighborhood of the company’s headquarters was a hotbed of Jon McCain signs, but that when her company put out Obama markers, they were stolen—not once or twice, but several times in the last few months.
“Meanwhile, we had been looking at some of the interesting projection campaigns that had been done for Halloween, and the viral spread they’d gotten,” she says. “So one on our marketing guys got hold of a projector, and we decided to outdo the sign thief.”
“After all, ‘one up’ is in our name,” she says.
The projection video was a looped clip of Sen. Obama dancing on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show. Oneupweb also produced a dramatized, Dragnet-ized version of the birth of the amazing 30-foot senator and posted it to YouTube. Find it here.
To escalate the sign race even further, Oneupweb posted 20 signs along its property border…right by a major local highway.
Told that it’s unusual to find a company offering such strong visible partisan support for a specific candidate, Wehr disagrees.
“Why would it matter to clients?” she asks. “It doesn’t change me, or the work we do. If someone’s going to judge us on the basis of political opinion, then they’re probably not a very good fit as a client.”
Of course, she adds, not everyone at privately-held Oneupweb is an Obama backer. “But almost all the tech guys and the marketing department are,” she laughs.
(Implication: If the sales folks don’t like it, let them get their own projector.)
And while the world’s most giant Obama might have started as an outsized response to petty vandalism, it may prove to have been a smart buzz-building move, too. Before speaking to me, Wehr says she was on the phone with CNN, which planned to include the company’s display in its Election Night coverage.
