Background

The campaign for the Referendum was organized in May in Romania as the Parliament suspended the Romanian President Traian Basescu. 322 members of the Parliament (from a total of 469) voted the suspending of the President because they felt threatened by his policy of fighting against their oligarchic system. By law, the Parliament cannot dismiss the President, they can only suspend him and organize a Referendum in order to let people decide if to dismiss him or not.

The referendum question was: ‘Do you agree to dismiss the President?’
YES = The President is dismissed; NO = The President stays
So we had to convince the people to give a negative vote, to vote NO.

General strategy:

Our campaign strategy was a victimizing campaign of Traian Basescu against the oligarchic group represented by the 322 members of the Parliament who voted for his suspension.

We focused our strategy on developing different methods to involve people in the campaign, to help them send the message further.

The main slogan of the entire campaign was ‘Show them that you have the power!’

So, there were actually 2 sides of the campaign: one conventional campaign based on the main messages of Traian Basescu (the media campaign) and one people generated campaign based on the tools we gave the electors on the Internet.

Referendum result:

In 2004, Traian Basescu was elected President in the second round with 51% of the total votes.
At the Referendum in 2007, Traian Basescu was reconfirmed by the people as the Romanian President with 75% of total votes. It was a great success as research studies made before the Referendum campaign started, were showing a 55% percentage in favor of Traian Basescu.

The execution: Ring Tone - ‘Hello... 322?’

As mass-media talked a lot about the 322 members who suspended the President, ‘the 322’ easily became an expression on everybody’s lips when referring to the Referendum.

We decided to profit from this situation and we created a ring tone, referring to ‘the 322’, that was downloadable from the Traian Basescu’s web site.

We created a sentence that was easy to remember and easy to sent through word of mouth as it rhymes in Romanian language.

Romanian: ‘Alo… 322? Vreau Presedintele inapoi!’

English Translation: ‘Hello…322? I want my President back!’

Listen to the ring tone:

Results:

More than 10.000 downloads of the audio files (2 voices; 3 audio formats per voice) during the campaign from the web site (source Google Analytics).

Little boy voice:
MP3 – 4098 downloads
OGG – 982 downloads
WMA – 949 downloads

Girl voice:
MP3 – 3076 downloads
OGG – 344 downloads
WMA – 647 downloads

A big viral effect was created as people downloaded this ring tone from the web site and sent it further from their mobile phones mainly through Bluetooth & MMS also.

The message exceeded the limits of digital and became one of the people’s favorite slogans in the campaign. It exceeded not only digital borders, but Romanian borders as it reached people in cities from other countries where sustaining meetings for Traian Basescu was held.

Photo: Castellon - Spain, Cluj - Romania, Craiova - Romania.
Or
Video: Castellon – Spain.