Senator Barak Obama‘s presidential campaign made mobile history over the weekend by sending out 2.9 million SMS messages announcing Senator Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential candidate. It is the first presidential campaign to make a major announcement via SMS, and it is also perhaps the largest mobile marketing campaign ever in the US.

The election in 2004 clearly marked the arrival of the internet as an important and necessary tool for political campaigning in the US. It seems a safe bet that from now on mobile will also be a critical channel for candidates to communicate with the voting public.

The Obama campaign has been very actively using the mobile channel to communicate with supporters, the first candidate to do so. (Read about the Obama mobile site in Mobile Marketing Comes to US Politics

Although exact numbers were not released by the Obama campaign, Nielsen Mobile estimated that 2.9 million people received the text message. Nielsen Mobile monitors shortcode marketing through an opt-in panel that reports on the billing activity for more than 40,000 subscriber lines in the US.

In another example of how Obama has made good use of mobile, the campaign was able to alert its supporters to the August 7th AFL-CIO Presidential Forum and broadcast on MSNBC. During and following the event they also used mobile to solicit feedback and get questions from supporters about the Senator’s position on issues that were debated.


According to Nic Covey, Director of Insights at Nielsen Mobile, “The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients. Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his VP pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cell phone numbers.”