Obama, Romney Plan to Use Mobile Giving

For the first time in a presidential race, U.S. consumers will be able to donate to their candidate of choice with their mobile phones. All they'll have to do is text a keyword to a short code for a predetermined amount, and the donation is charged on their phone bill -- a method that recently has worked well for many charitable fundraisers. SMS donations for the presidential candidates had been approved by federal regulators earlier in the summer but were held up by the wireless carriers as they sought legal protections over fraud and profitability. Both the campaigns for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are reportedly planning to enable text-to-give strategies soon. However, it is still unknown what percentage of each mobile donation will go to carriers and aggregators as a fee for providing the text messaging services. For more, see the news story at http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2012/08/28/obama-romney-campaigns-drive-donations-via-text

For Ad Success, Let Your Heart Rule Your Head

For advertising success, marketers may need to go with their hearts not their heads. Orlando Wood, who serves as managing director of BrainJuicer Labs, argues, "We’ve found that emotional response [to an ad] was a better indicator of the business effects than any of the traditional advertising measures, such as message understood, clarity of branding or persuasion." And that translates into higher ROI. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has done work showing that emotional advertising is more profitable than rationally conceived marketing, Wood points out. BrainJuicer Labs' own research shows that consumers who respond well emotionally to ads are more likely to provide brand share gain and less likely to be price sensitive. Positive emotional response also helps ads go viral, with higher pass-along in social media. Lesson? Most people would rather go with their guts than strain their brains. And it's not just a b-to-c success strategy. It can work for b-to-b and nonprofit campaigns. However, cause-related pitches have more leeway to use negative emotions to generate pass-along, Wood adds, a theory likely to be applied this election season. See the chiefmarketer.com story at http://chiefmarketer.com/social-marketing/marketers-should-let-their-emotions-get-better-them