Case Study: Obama! A Modern US President! (Musical Spoof)

Communications Challenge

Actor Ronnie Butler, Jr., has done several musical skits as President Obama and sought to further develop his skills as a producer, writer and director by creating a short musical spoof. His primary goal was growing in his understanding of every aspect of the artistic and production process. As his publicist I encouraged timing on the production to maximize its exposure during the 2010 mid-term elections and provided political consulting as he developed lyrics.

Success

Launched in the first week of October, initial efforts to promote the video through liberal blogs were met with some resistance by those who were frustrated with the President. By re-focusing efforts to target African-American political, cultural, and lifestyle blogs, the video found a more receptive audience and gained a solid base of support, then found its way back to broader audiences through persistent viral efforts using Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms. The video broke through, landing on the Huffington Post Comedy and Political pages. From that, the video was picked up by mainstream political media and featured on The O'Reilly Factor, CNN's Situation Room, in The Nation, The Washington Post and many more. Andrew Sullivan said in The Atlantic, "Personally, I find the message in the video hard to beat." Roger Ebert tweeted about it and entertainment media such as Variety and GawkerTV picked it up, as did several local TV and radio news stations around the country.

The video reached more than 1.5 million people in three weeks across two You Tube platforms, and resulted in many new creative collaborations for Mr. Butler.