It may have been the most highly anticipated email/text in the history of digital marketing, but did Obama's decision to ditch television deliver the goods?

For politics in the age of mass media, the battle cry has long been television, television and more television. But in the 2008 presidential race, one candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, has made a deliberate effort to embrace digital, sometimes at the expense of traditional media. That change in tactics has helped Obama build a digitally linked network of supporters and raise unprecedented sums of money. But on Saturday, it also helped him build a new-style buzz machine around the announcement naming Sen. Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate. But it may not have gone off without a hitch, either.

For weeks leading up to the announcement, the Obama campaign told its supporters -- and the press -- to stand by their phones and computers for an email/text message that would name the candidate's choice for a running mate. While that decision whipped the media into a frenzy that eventually led them to scoop the official announcement, it also galvanized supporters and may have created a firestorm of viral buzz.

While the Obama campaign has refused to disclose how many emails and texts it sent, the campaign site saw an all-time high in traffic, which led to $1.8 million in donations by midday Saturday.

"[This was a] highly viral announcement," says Sean O'Neal, CMO of Datran Media, an email marketing specialist. "The recipients of the email and text campaign were able to immediately forward to a network of networks, and [the campaign] was likely fueled by a 'contest' to see who 'heard it first.'"

For O'Neal, and many digital marketers like him, the announcement is one of many signs indicating the growing power of digital. But while the digital campaign certainly delivered the buzz, it may have failed to deliver on its initial promise -- "Be the first to know."

According to the Los Angeles Times, many on the recipient list got their texts and emails late, and a handful never got the message. But that's not to say that the message didn't get out. In fact, many seemed to rejoice in the fact that journalists broke the news late on Friday night. "Old-fashioned journalism -- wordslingers working contacts inside the Obama campaign -- leaked the story in advance of your new-fangled text messaging. Score one for the old school," wrote Mitch Wagner in a column for InformationWeek.

But did that create a problem for the Obama campaign? Perhaps. To break through the clutter, email and text marketing messages need to be both urgent and portable, says RJ Taylor, product manager at ExactTarget. From a marketing perspective, that means users may hold email and text messages to a higher standard than less intrusive forms of advertising. But according to Taylor, those are issues that have to be determined before the campaign's launch, and in the case of the VP announcement, the Obama camp had clearly met, and exceeded, both thresholds for the delivery of a text- and email-based message.

Yet, the Obama campaign never did get to have its moment of one-to-one digital communications nirvana.

"The 'artificial exclusivity' of one-to-one marketing was undercut by the familiar means of traditional broadcasting," Tim Leberecht blogged on CNET. "The thunder of Web 2.0 campaigning was stolen by old-school TV news coverage. The utterly disciplined Obama campaign seemed to have lost control for a moment and experienced one of its rare glitches."

But if the Obama campaign under-delivered on its promise to subscribers, it may have only fumbled with a small number of voters. For Taylor, it's worth noting that text and email campaigns require a series of subscriber opt-ins. In effect, that means Obama was preaching to the choir. In this case, the larger audience -- one that likely never would have opted in for such a message -- was bombarded with a prolonged media blitz that had little to offer but stories about widespread anticipation.

For O'Neal, it was that widespread anticipation (a dividend the campaign enjoyed without having to pay for ads) that made the dissemination of this particular message a win for the Obama camp and digital, which he says is a channel that has clearly arrived.

But that's not how Derek Harding, CEO of Innovyx, an Omnicom-owned email agency, sees it. According to Harding, the email/text campaign wasn't a general endorsement of digital. Instead, it was a recognition of the effectiveness of email and text for reaching specific demographics, in this case young voters. But with Nielsen reporting that Obama has managed to stir up far more online buzz than his opponent, Sen. John McCain, we may see an election decided largely online. Unfortunately, for those accustomed to the instant-punditry of the digital age, that question will likely be answered in 2012, when two more candidates will have a chance to scrutinize -- and act upon -- the latest media offerings.         

Michael Estrin is deputy editor at iMediaConnection.