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The major message that marketers should take away from the successful Obama presidential campaign is that Americans want genuineness and substance in marketing today, said Larry Grisolano, the director of paid media and opinion research for Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008. “People want to be communicated with, spoken to, like adults,” said Grisolano, who is now with political media firm AKPD in Chicago. Grisolano spoke with Marketing News during AMA’s Mplanet conference Tuesday.

Marketers today must seek to satisfy genuine consumer needs and bring meaning to the messages they deliver about their brands, Grisolano said during an interview at the Mplanet Studio in Orlando.

The Obama campaign team sensed a dissatisfaction with politics and politicians in America and so decided to define its campaign as a different sort of political effort, he explained. Once the Obama brand had been defined as one standing for change, subsequent decisions – such as not engaging in negative campaigning – flowed directly from that brand definition, Grisolano said.

Asked by a marketing blogger what lessons the campaign had in regard to targeting younger consumers, Grisolano advised speaking to younger consumers in their own language and again came back to genuineness, saying “keep it real with a young audience.”