Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has again won a major advertising award.  A month before winning the presidency, he won Advertising Age’s annual “Marketer of the Year” for 2008. Now, his campaign manager, David Plouffe, has won Brandweek’s “Marketer of the Year” for 2009. What better commentary on the state of contemporary American society could there be?  Our president is a master marketer, or more precisely, employs a team of master marketers.  In a society that is dedicated to worshiping at the altar of consumerism, perhaps it’s unsurprising that this is the case, but it still is shocking to me.  Once I began researching for this article, I really was surprised at the extent to which “Brand Obama” has penetrated our national consciousness.

His logo and posters have become iconic.  His slogan, “Yes we can” is everywhere– it’s also a marketer’s dream.  It’s devoid of any clarity or substance, and yet it makes you feel good, possibly empowered.  “Just do it”, anyone?  Actually, his campaign beat out the Nike campaign (and even Apple!) for top honors.  You can go to mybarackobama.com and sign for immediate updates from Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, and several other web 2.0 services. You can get Obama on your mobile phone by texting “hope” to 62262– it’s just as easy as voting for the next American Idol! The media is relentlessly focused on what Michelle Obama is wearing next, and there is at least one blog offering daily updates on her clothing choices (“Follow the fashion of Mrs. O.:What and Whom she’s wearing”). For those who are tuned-in, you can even do Ecstasy tablets shaped like Obama. One wonders where does politics end and the cult of personality begin?

From a Wall Street Journal Magazine profile of Desiree Rogers, former marketing executive and current White House social secretary:

Brand Obama is a marketer’s dream, says Michael Sitrick, chairman of Sitrick and Company, a public-relations firm that specializes in handling sensitive situations and has worked with billionaire Ron Burkle and socialite Paris Hilton. Rogers and the rest of the Obama team have an idyllic American family to work with “straight out of a 1950s sitcom,” Sitrick says. They “really get it from a public-relations perspective.” Not since Jacqueline Kennedy redecorated the White House and used it as a showcase for arts and culture, which helped create the Camelot mystique, has a first family so captured popular fascination, first-lady historian Myra Gutin says.

I think Noam Chomsky addressed it rather well after the Obama campaign won the Advertising Age award:

In commercial advertising, as everybody knows, everybody who’s ever, say, looked at a television program, the advertising is not intended to provide information about the product, right? I don’t have to go on about that; it’s obvious. The point of the advertising is to delude people with imagery and, you know, tales of a football player or a sexy actress who, you know, drives to the moon in a car or something like that. But it’s certainly not to inform people. In fact, it’s to keep people uninformed. The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who’ve suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure—you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate, they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers—you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, invective, you know, body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there.

The controversial Chris Hedges takes it one step further in an article entitled “Buying Brand Obama”, arguing that “Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.”  And it’s almost indisputable when you start to consider it: Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, Ronald Reagan… which are politicians and which are entertainers?  Is there even a difference anymore?  Every time that I think I’ve seen the final, most ridiculous example of this type of overlap, I’m wrong.  Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is apparently challenging Chris Dodd for his Senate seat.

Obama’s campaign was extremely tightly controlled, leading the New York Times to report that the campaign’s restrictive policies “appear to conflict with the candidate’s stated desire to be unusually transparent and open”.  This story came in the wake of news reports that the Obama campaign had prohibited two Muslim women from sitting behind the candidate at a campaign stop because they were wearing traditional headscarves and the campaign was battling the erroneous perception that Obama was a secret Muslim.

But I suppose that this is politics in the age of television.  Why shouldn’t we buy politicians with the same ease that we buy groceries?  Perhaps soon we can–my local paper reported on upcoming experiments that will allow voters to cast their ballots in the grocery store.  The name of their article was “Democracy in Aisle 3“. I can’t begin to express how that saddens me.