"Don't Ask Someone to Work on a Romny App if They Hate Republicans"

Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica believes he's closed the case -- mumbling that some "staff" of the Romney campaign and "volunteers" coded the mess that was Orca -- and never really confirming anything or naming names. Obviously, the firms cited that received campaign money for their services answered that they were under an NDA and couldn't talk.

Funny how Obama's devs who were undoubtedly under an NDA as well could blab as much as they wanted about their work lol.

Another consultant handled by Targeted Victory was Rockfish Interactive, which Sean Gallagher reports was responsible for the failed VP notification app (see the pre-fail puff piece in Ad Age). At long last the coder of the failed app is noted -- and it wasn't that easy to find at first because Targeted Victory also featured the failed VP app on their website as if it were theirs. 

This reminds me of the way it's awfully hard sometimes to find the source of Russian news stories because the little papers are shamelessly copied by the larger papers and some big national paper may have utterly stolen from a little one and made it seem as if it were its own.

Zac spins the fail of the app by noting that the notification app was merely the shell for another piece of software that was later pushed to help people file Romney support messages on social media. Except...people like me don't want dopey pre-fabbed content from dweebs in a campaign -- if I want to write something in support of Romney's ideas I write it myself on Facebook or blogs. I never once clicked on the Facebook ads for Romney simply because my vote for Romney is not about the Republican Party and I don't want Facebook to start pushing that at me and making tht part of my digital footprint.

The spin on this app is that it still was in the top apps downloaded from the Apple store and still notified at least the Romney supporters who weren't "glued to Drudge 24/7" when the VP pick was made because they aren't necessarily news junkies but just want a personal notification.

Hmm, that's not good enough, because they promised it was going to be special. And why couldn't it be? Oh, maybe getting the outsourced shop in Arkansas coordinated with the social media shop in Alexandria, VA coordinated with the Bostin digital director...and then literally Paul Ryan and Romney themselves -- oh, maybe it was all too hard. Why? An app is a speedy thing. If they took their principle and had him stand at the mike at the right time, so to speak, it could have gone from Romney's lips to our ears before the Times. Truly. Why didn't it? What Romney got out of it was a big data haul with all our names and zip codes and maybe some donations. But we got a failed app. Just making a prettily designed app that works fast and downloads properly for people isn't enough; there has to be the content and the candidate connection, for real.

When you study Rockfish and it's story, you can instantly see the pattern I've kept highlighting -- the Romney decision to get boutique firms that have clients from Johnson and Johnson to Wal-mart -- and that perform on a political campaign like it's a brand of shampoo. The best that money can buy.

Interestingly -- FASCINATINGLY, given the arduous discussion at Ars Technica, in making this failed app for the big-spending Romney campaign, this company HASTENED to distance themselves from the Republican brand:

"This mobile app wasn't our idea," said Rockfish Founder Kenny Tomlin. "They wanted to do it and came to us to build it. Which we were excited about ... and they've been great to work with. But we have no intention of politics becoming a focus of our business; we're just a technology partner. We're not a digital strategy agency for the RNC."

Is it ANY WONDER when you have a guy like Kenny Tomlin who is distancing himself as fast as he can in print from Romney so as to keep all his business options only, that the app FAILED? And failed -- for all your literalists and Fiskers out there -- not necessarily because it wasn't pretty and downloadable and nominally worked, and not necessarily because Tomlin didn't support the GOP, but because nobody coordinated the day of show to get the job done right or to have interesting content in it after the flop and put the entire job in the context of campaigning with spirit.

Interestingly, Kenny Tomlin makes the exact points I've been making -- and admits -- big-time! -- that you need party enthusiasm or at least not sabotage:

In the current realm of political advertising, general-market agencies don't do much political work. One reason is that general-market agency employees might resist working for a candidate of a particular party. Another reason is that political campaigns find non-political ad agencies too slow to work with in the heat of a campaign.

"I wasn't worried about alienating employees because it's just a small team working on the business," said Mr. Tomlin. "I wasn't going to ask someone to work on a Mitt Romney mobile app if they hate Republicans. And just like every agency, there are brands and companies you work with that not everyone in the agency likes, but you find the people within who are passionate about it and put them on the business."

Oh. Is that how you do it, Kenny? Really? Say, I have the forums just for you: Ars Technica. Go and talk to all the brains there who will tell you that you shouldn't approach this issue with such discrimination! Why, you should explain that you don't understand their funny squeamishness and ridiculous political correctness! You should tell them that you would handle the obvious problem of coders and digital artists not liking candidates by not giving them the job. You get why you can't give them the job.

Well if you have to segregate your staff that way and make some of them drink out of different water fountains, how can you be sure the entire shop pulls together to get the job done? OH YOU CAN'T BECAUSE IT FAILED.   Who's the person in your shop that *does* hate Republicans that you have to keep these jobs away from them? Do we have to worry? (And what do you know about the AMERCIA accident?)

BTW note the shifting narrative from Moffatt -- in his story version post-election to Ars Technica, and in other interviews, he claimed everything had to be farmed out due to time constraints and the decision not to go inhouse but consultant. But in this story, he talks about developing his own team nonetheless:

Mr. Moffatt explained that after Mr. Romney all but secured the Republican nomination in April, the campaign team had to ramp up pretty quickly. It's since built its own engineering team that can handle most tasks, but when they were considering outside agencies capable of working fast, Rockfish's name was brought up by a digital adviser.

Whatever Kenny Tomlin's gingerly approach to political sensitivities, there is some indication that the very reason at least *some* of the leaders of Rockfish got this gig is that they *did* care about the Republican Party.

Rockfish’s role came from a key local connection to the Republican party. Tim Schigel, co-founder of ShareThis and a former partner at downtown’s Blue Chip Venture Company, leads digital efforts for the Republican National Committee and works closely with leaders of Romney’s campaign.

“We needed to move fast with a trusted partner,” Schigel said. “I know the Rockfish team well. They have development experience and great background working with brands. Campaigns can learn from brand marketers, and brand marketers can learn from campaigns.”

Schigel joined the digital team in October 2011, and has helped the committee build a social media presence. In April, he helped launch the Social Victory Center, an application driving engagement on Facebook.

So while Tomlin didn't seem to have the comfort level with a political account, he at least let this fish land at Rockfish through the other guy. His job biography contains absolutely nothing about political campaigns of any kind; he admits in his interview that he learned on the job about things like, um, timelines.

Tomlin went to the GOP convention and on election day made a flat comment on Twitter (see above). Kenny appears to have donated $1000 to the GOP.

Good! At least we're not staring at a profile of Al Gore's dev, but to debate my own thesis (and I always do), possibly GOP enthusiasm coupled even with high tech prowess (Rockfish is widely admired and glowingly cited in the industry) isn't enough to prevent fail-whales.

Meanwhile, Dave Knox, Rockfish's chief marketing executive, is studying why Obama won.  He has been involved with President Obama's Start-Up America program as co-founder of the Brandery, an accelerator for entrepreurs. Let anyone think we have a smoking gun here like seeing Dave Sirkin, Obama 2008 director of analytics in the Romney shop, note that Star-Up America is on paper at least just one of those generic government business promotion things that may be fairly bi-partisan.

For other  reasons, I was critical of Start-Up America because it looked like Big IT and Big Government were just getting together to create the illusion of funding small business (start-up entrepreneurs) that they then eat up or trade around among each other like baubles without creating a viable independent sector. The TechStars network as you can see very vividly here at TechCrunch is just part of spreading that "betterworld" ideology around to "solve problems" that the world "needs". I never have to argue how ideologues weld their ideology into tech when there are helpful articles like that in TechCrunch.

Here's a description of Dave's group in it:

The Brandery is now a member of the TechStars Network, a newly launched White House-sponsored alliance of independently owned and operated startup accelerator programs from dozens of cities across the United States and around the world.

This network of gov 2.0 techies and Obama's own White House geeks is supposed to create "25,000 new economy jobs" by 2015. I'm hugely skeptical of these "app engineer jobs" which are tremendously inflated by Google loyal paid-for analysts and I'm skeptical that this program is a job-generator for anyone but a small in-group of gov 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Even so, Rockfish appears to be a company that stands along without government contracts and has real clients and has been in business for a number of years. And Dave my not be completely in the tank with Obama. Still, my guess is that Dave may be lost to the Republican cause sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, Kenny gets it about the staff -- they can't hate Republicans.