George Ajjan is an international political strategist and commentator.

In addition to advising candidates as a campaign strategist on a global basis, Mr. Ajjan is often sought out as a television pundit, hired by Sky News to offer prime-time commentary both from London and New York studios for the 2008 US Presidential election.

Mr. Ajjan was born and raised in the state of New Jersey and graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in 1998. After 3 years of management experience at Procter & Gamble, he earned an MBA from the London Business School in 2003.

Since his congressional run in 2004, he has played an active role in US campaigns, assisting candidates at the local, county, state, and federal levels. Internationally, Mr. Ajjan has led numerous projects spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Explore this website and his full bio to learn more about George Ajjan.
 

2.9.08

Serving a cause lesser than web design expertise

As was my custom last week, I logged on this morning in London to view the videos from last night's convention. First, I went to the RNC main site. No obvious link to the convention site. So I went back and found the actual convention site.

Looks good on the surface. I click on "Videos". It immediately begins playing Laura Bush standing in front the crowd, being applauded for a long while, and then talking about Gustav. No idea who introduced her or how.

Then I try to find the entire video log of speeches, play by play of the convention. I find something that resembles it, but all they have are the videotaped addresses of the 4 GOP Gulf-state Governors, the Laura Bush clip I already saw, and Cindy McCain's address.

I click on the Cindy McCain one, it was a very short clip, lasting less than 4 minutes, and focusing only on the hurricane. The crowd looked pretty full to me - did they really bother to assemble for such little content, or is the media plan of the RNC team WAY below standard? This does not make me happy.

Secondly, on the Dem site, there was a dedicated, very high-quality video player, which, though it required installation of 2 plug-ins (at least for Firefox on the Mac it did) was well worth it, because the quality was outstanding. The GOP opted for YouTube. Now I'm a fan of YouTube as everyone who reads this site knows. And I use it regularly to promote my activities. But I'm not the Republican Party at a national level.

The clips looked to be of poor quality, and for lack of a better word, "cheesy". Granted, it is easy to embed Cindy McCain's charity appeal (see below), which wasn't the case on the Democrats' site. But watching it felt like just any other mediocre YouTube video.

Finally, I click on each day on the main page, and Tuesday through Thursday are identical, not updated. The theme for each day "Serving a Cause Great than Self Interest" (sic - no hyphen), is the same. Amateur hour.

And all I was worried about was that the Democrats would have a better house band?!?! My party had better suss this out immediately.