“I would describe the 2016 battle for the White House as "social media marketing expertise" versus "the economists". Four hundred economists were anti-Trump (19 of them have Nobel prizes), all the traditional media appear to be pro the Democratic Party, yet Trump wins with $20 billon less in donation money than Hilary. That’s the power of social media marketing! It wasn’t about traditional media. Trump did 22 live-streams last month! He is definitely the biggest internet celebrity of all.

I happened to have the chief analytics officer of Obama’s 2012 campaign, Andrew Claster, as a guest speaker when I taught in the US. He mentioned that for every word on social media, they would run sentiment analysis to predict the vote and determine how to allocate their budget. For example, Obama was seen with George Clooney for fundraising. Why? Because social media analytics showed that Obama needed votes from middle-aged, wealthy California women. Obama’s campaign managers took note, based on info from People magazine, that Clooney is very appealing to this group of women. They then successfully arranged for Obama and Clooney to appear together. They raised a lot of money from this pairing. No wonder Advertising Age later called Obama "advertiser of the year". 

But Trump has taken it a step further.

Trump is marketing, he is branding, he’s social media, he’s against ‘elite Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley millionaires’. This potent combination is the key to his success.” 

~ CEIBS Assistant Professor of Marketing Lin Chen