Nielsen: 'Obama Text' Reached 2.9 Million

Source: CBS News/CNET

Campaign Stunt Announcing His VP Pick Deemed A Success Even Though Press Beat Him To The News

(CNET) Let's say Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama sent every one of those "here's my V.P." text messages from his own cell phone. And let's say his mean, nasty carrier charged him 10 cents for each one. According to Nielsen's numbers, his bill would've been $290,000 -- that's because the statistics firm says that the SMS campaign stunt reached 2.9 million people.

The company's Nielsen Mobile division did the math, monitoring approximately 40,000 SMS short-code lines in the U.S. and coming up with the final tally of 2.9 million.

"The VP message was sent in the late hours of Friday night and is, by many accounts, the single largest mobile marketing event in the U.S. to date," a release from Nielsen read. The initiative has been moderately criticized because it ultimately didn't work: the press reported that Obama had chosen Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential pick before anyone had had the chance to hit the "send" button on that fateful text message.

But Nielsen says that doesn't matter.

"While much has been said of the timing and the scoop by news outlets, Obama's V.P. text-message still ranks as one of the most important text messages even sent and one of the most successful brand engagements using mobile media," Nielsen's report read, adding that an estimated 116 million American use text messaging actively.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/26/tech/cnettechnews/main4384289.shtml

got the text. Interesting.

It's also too bad we will never know who is responsible. I bet there are some good guesses though.

Why was it a big deal that the choice leaked? If the email was sent out at 3:00 am, how many people were up at that time of the night to receive the email anyway?

rather than read about it on the internet the next morning. The entire point was to honestly let the supporters know first, otherwise it was simply a PR stunt. That supporters were looking forward to knowing first is a personal touch and should not be a difficult concept to understand.

to get the text msg out to supporters first, but CNN scooped them by a few hours. Obama's team can't be responsible for what CNN does, but I'm not sure about the decision to wait a few more hours to release the text msg.

If I was going to guess, I was say that the technological challenges to sending out 3 million text messages is NON trivial (meaning they couldn't simply move it forward with any ease); also, as far as I can tell, the 3AM text message was coordinated with Obama's website going live with the Biden announcement as well.

So... it seems like the Obama camp made an honest attempt to get the text message to their supporters FIRST... but CNN jumped the gun. At that point, the decision was made to let the messages and website update proceed as planned, simply because changing everything was nearly impossible, given the technological requirements.

Just my opinion...

I got my text at 3:30 am. And yes, I woke up to look at it then. :-)

I got the confirmation message immediately after texting "VP", but I never got the text on Saturday morning.