Obama Wins Ad Age’s ‘Marketer Of The Year’
Every year hundreds of the biggest marketers, agency heads, and all manner of people involved in advertising get together at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. And every year, they vote on the best advertiser of that particular year. This year Barack Obama won with a pretty substantial 36% of the vote, beating out the two runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Nike, Coors and Sen. John McCain filled out the bottom of the vote.
“I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions “To see what he’s done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it’s created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It’s very easy for people to participate.”
Linda Clarizio, president of AOL’s Platform A, said of Barack Obama, “I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president.”
But some people weren’t particularly happy about getting politics involved in the voting. Mark Kaline, recently appointed global media director of Kimberly-Clark Corp., said. “Quite frankly, because political advertising kind of goes against a lot of what ANA stands for, I don’t think it belongs in the voting. … A lot of political advertising is false and misleading, and marketers at this conference don’t expect to see that kind of stuff.”
Here are the results:
Obama 36.1%
Apple 27.3%
Zappos 14.1%
Nike 9.4%
Coors 8.7%
McCain 4.5%