Politicians are often weary of allocating a substantial part of their budget to online marketing, fearing that this medium fails to reach older voters. In this week’s MSHC Insights, Michael Bassik, Vice President of Interactive Marketing, uncovers data to the contrary:
eMarketer recently wrote that only one or two percent of political advertising budgets will be spent online this election cycle “compared with 50% to 80% on broadcast TV advertising.” [1] One of the reasons I often hear for such discrepancies is the internet’s inability to reach older voters.
Well, it’s time we dispelled the internet’s demographic myth.
Just last week, a Burst Media Study found that people over age 55 spend as much time online as adults between 35 and 44 – and more time online than adults between 45 and 54. [2]
And a recent study from JupiterResearch and Ipsos Insight found that adults over 55 spend more hours online than any other age group. In fact, those over 55 spend fully four more hours online each week than adults between 18 and 24. [3] [4]
It’s time for campaigns to recognize the internet for what it is – a mass-medium capable of reaching voters in every target demographic. By using standard online targeting capabilities – namely “demo-targeting” – campaigns can and should begin to reach older voters online to improve the reach, frequency and impact of their traditional advertising efforts.
In the midst of the hoopla surrounding this year’s presidential campaign, we’re going to shift the focus of the discussion to the state and local level. In this week’s MSHC Insights, Dean Levitan, Partner at MSHC, highlights the nuances of reaching down ballot voters:
In American politics, so much is made about the exceptions. Everyone focuses on what worked in the Presidential race, or a big US Senate campaign, or maybe a gubernatorial contest.
But that misses the bulk of political races.
Most of American democracy takes place on the state and local level. Your speeches will be heard by only a few, your political maneuverings judged by only the faithful observers. Most importantly, there won’t ever be an army of media mavens salivating every time you make a move. Instead, you, the local campaign, much more than the big races, will rely on your paid communications to get the point across.
And that’s where our Party continuously cuts corners.
It seems that many consultants and political hacks think that communications for the smaller races should be formulaic, disconnected from the locality and basically slapped together in the “most cost-effective way” possible. Why? Because who pays attention, right?
Wrong. We need to stop looking at the quantity of voters and start noticing the quality of voters in local elections. The folks that vote in local elections are the true believers, the passionate ones. They are the polity that cares about their politics, and they want to be heard. The smaller the race, the truer this is. And it would do us well to start focusing on this customer a little more.
Since TV is too expensive for many of these campaigns, mail tends to be the main form of communication. When we start to design mail for these races, we need to think less about what the big issues are and more about the candidates themselves – who they are, what makes them tick, and why they do or do not connect with the majority of their district.
The mail needs to be personal and local. It must focus on the place where the character of the campaign meets the concerns of the constituency. It should be a program designed in a way that only this candidate in this election could fit the mail pieces. The personalization of the messaging must match the personal motivation of the voter. They are taking their time to vote in a small election that gets little attention. Clearly something matters to them. This is not peer pressure voting or the big event, these are diehard democrats, and they care more than a casual voter.
With the Presidential Campaign leading the electoral way this year, its easy to chalk up the small races to the usual mantra of “they get no attention, so what we do matters little. It’s only the partisans that will care.” And to some extent that is true. But also think of it this way; if you vote in an election where little to no public debate occurs, where you have to seek out the information, doesn’t the quality of the candidacy matter even more to you?
In this week’s installment of MSHC’s Insights, MSHC Interactive Media Buyer Jenny Myers compares two cheap and easy ways to spread your message and drive site traffic:
With the rising popularity of services like Google AdWords and BlogAds.com, advertising online has never been more affordable or user-friendly. AdWords has opened the world of search engine marketing to include anyone with internet access. BlogAds has made reaching the influential blog audience easier than ever by aggregating some of the nation’s top blogs to allow anyone with a picture, some words (and of course a decent budget) to reach online influentials. Both AdWords and BlogAds can be relatively cheap and high- impact if campaigns are well-planned from a contextual standpoint. But which system is more attractive from a cost-benefit analysis perspective?
AdWords bases its prices on a live-bidding, cost-per-click model in which advertisers choose the search keywords alongside which their ads will run. Advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks through their ad to the advertiser’s site. The benefit of this system is that advertisers can monitor every action taken during the campaign, while the actual costs incurred through the system can’t be accurately estimated prior to launch; there is the freedom to re-work click bids and budget levels at any point throughout the campaign.
Daily monitoring is recommended for campaigns with tight budgets and very specific goals. The success of the campaign is based on basic online advertising metrics: impressions, clicks, click-through percentages. However, this reporting can be segmented on a campaign-wide, keyword-specific, or ad-specific basis for campaign optimization. One drawback is that there’s no way to gauge what type of audience is seeing and interacting with your ads. Finally, the creative is simply a text link with a maximum of 95 characters. This limit gives much less creative freedom than almost any other advertising format.
BlogAds charges an up-front flat fee based on each blog’s popularity and traffic. High-traffic sites like PerezHilton.com and DailyKos.com offer multiple placements with rates in the $5,000-$20,000 range for one week with a guarantee of at least 5,000,000 impressions. Lower-traffic sites are can start at a rate as low as $10 for one week with a guarantee of at least 4,000 impressions per week. BlogAds’ creative formats allow for one static (gif or jpeg) or flash image, accompanied by up to 300 characters of text. This format gives users the ability to deliver a much clearer image and message than AdWords’ format. And fixed pricing also leaves little to the budgeting imagination.
BlogAds’ metrics for success are similar to AdWords’ in offering reporting consisting of impressions, clicks, and click-through percentages. Campaign optimization is only necessary if multiple creative concepts are running for one campaign. BlogAds excels at offering an analysis of the audience that an advertiser is reaching for multiple blogs in a particular “hive,” or demographic group (politics, parenting, LGBT interests, etc.) or even each blog individually. It’s safe to say that by advertising on blogs, you’re reaching an influential, intelligent, and socially proactive audience.
Both advertising platforms are relatively similar – low prices, high reach, basic measures of success, and high popularity. However, BlogAds offers a more unique destination for advertisers to showcase their message creatively with an ad that’s more visually appealing and intriguing than a text link. The user’s ability to see costs up-front, to identify a key audience, and to skip daily monitoring makes the BlogAds ad package more effective than AdWords’.
This week’s MSHC Insights post by Joel Rivlin, MSHC Senior Targeting Analyst, covers tried-and-true get out the vote strategies:
In MSHC Insights: Mobilization and Persuasion, we explained the logic of why effective, efficient campaigns need to use and also differentiate between persuasion and mobilization strategies. Now we will discuss strategies for getting your supporters to cast a vote.
Mobilization targeting, also known as get out the vote (GOTV), is different from persuasion targeting. With GOTV, the campaign is looking for supporters who may need some prodding to turn out on Election Day. If someone needs to be persuaded who the better candidate is, they should not be the target of mobilization programs (unless they are first targeted by a persuasion campaign). In addition, it is not only inefficient to mobilize those who support your opponent, but it is also counterproductive. By confusing persuasion and mobilization strategies, you could be helping your opponent win. Before embarking on any GOTV activities, you must be meticulous in deciding who to target.
In states that have partisan registration, identifying your own partisans is often the best place to start when looking for your supporters. Partisan registration is only the first step in an effective GOTV campaign. For states without partisan registration, it is far harder to identify partisans. Knowing which party’s ballot an individual chose in a primary in such state is a good measure of partisanship, but as primary turnout is so much lower than general election turnout, this method only gives insights into the partisanship of part of the electorate.
Another way to identify your supporters is through voter ID programs. These can be done through the phone or by door canvassing and using paid staff or volunteers. You can also identify supporters by using microtargeting models of either partisanship or specific candidate support. Even in states with partisan registration, it is often worth investing in an ID or modeling program as many partisans vote against their party registration and many independents vote as if they are partisans. Similarly, candidates who are able to attract support of their opponent’s partisans may want to ID or model their supporters in a way that can find their supporters among their opponent’s partisans.
IDing and microtarging allow you to include in your GOTV lists those independents that are already supporters, and exclude any of your own partisans who may be undecided or who support your opponent.
Once you have identified your supporters, work out which supporters will vote only with some encouragement. Some voters will turn out regardless of any campaign efforts, and others will never vote even if they are bombarded with mail, phone calls and offers of rides to the polls.
Vote history is a strong indicator of who is somewhat likely to vote, but we have found that vote history alone is not enough. Some people who are newly registered will be missed by looking only at voting history, and, for all registered voters, there are a range of other factors beyond their vote history which can give insights into an individual’s likelihood of voting. These factors include the nature of the election and demographic indicators like an individual’s age, education, race, and marital status. MSHC’s turnout models give each registered voter a score from 0 to 100 that predicts their probability of voting in an election. On this scale, we would normally suggest targeting supporters with scores of between 40 and 70 for the most efficient use of GOTV budgets.
The reality is that almost all campaigns need a mix of mobilization and persuasion strategies. Some voter contact can accomplish both these goals, but more often campaigns need to separate both their messages and targets according to these different campaign strategies.
Looks like it’s that time of the cycle. JibJab is back with a new animation making fun of just about everyone involved with the presidential election. Funny stuff, take a look.
This week’s MSHC Insights post by Jason Miller, an MSHC Account Executive on the direct mail side of the firm, covers the key challenge in our business - engaging the audience:
One of the biggest obstacles we face in direct mail is identifying the best ways to engage our audience. Unlike television advertisements, mail requires its recipient to make a choice: to read or not to read. And because recipients must elect to read our piece, the design needs to be accessible, interesting and relevant to our message and strategy.
Our audience looks at visuals first and reads text second. And if we don’t nail the visuals, we can’t possibly expect that they’ll bother reading our text. As Hal likes to postulate, a great visual can turn a mediocre piece into an award winner. The best visuals are those that communicate our message without words. They do the heavy lifting by engaging our readers and doing the talking for us.
But, as we know, there’s more to a great mail piece than compelling visuals. Once we catch our reader’s attention, we need to make sure we’re saying something that’s worth reading.
In a direct mail campaign, issues and topics may change from piece to piece. But while issues and topics are variable, the mail should have a recurring strategic theme that’s constant. For example, if our underlying strategy is to connect our opponent to George W. Bush, we may do a piece on health care and a piece on the war in Iraq. While these are two very different topics, our strategic objective is to help our reader conclude that our opponent is just another George W. Bush yes-man. The issues might change, but our job is to be disciplined enough to connect them back to the broader message we’re working to convey.
In direct mail, the real magic doesn’t happen until we link the visuals in our mail with our strategic theme. The visuals we choose can tie the myriad issues we’re covering back to our overarching strategic objective and give us the flexibility to carry the visual theme (or some variation of it) across our mail campaign. Using a recurrent visual theme can make the delivery of our message much more effective. Well-crafted visual themes can make even the harshest attacks seem light and entertaining. And, if they’re used correctly, they can give our audience something to look forward to in our next mailer.
Of course, there are a lot of different ways to make effective mail, and different circumstances merit different tactics – as the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. But combining message discipline with a compelling, recurring visual thematic is an effective formula for getting your mail noticed.
Today’s MSHC Insights post is from Interactive Account Executive, Mike Hutchinson (yes, he of Pump My Ride fame - see below). Mike would like to call attention to a new phenomenon in online advertising - ad blocking software:
Is Adblock Plus, one of the most popular free add-ons to the alternative web browser, Mozilla Firefox, the end of the internet? Probably not, but Adblock Plus does challenge fundamental assumptions of the online economy, just as it poses problems both big and small for publishers and advertisers.
Adblock Plus works by blocking the requests sites make from ad servers when they load a new page, allowing all the content and usability of a site to remain intact, only without the soothing LowerMyBills.com ad or the (sometimes) relevant Google text ads being shown.
Presently, Firefox is used by about one in six to view sites online. In the big picture the loss of a few million sets of eyeballs out of about a billion is not devastating. However, the use of Firefox continues to increase just as the number of those who use Adblock Plus does. According to recently released data from Addons.Mozilla.org, there have been almost 14 million downloads (averaging over 60,000 per day) of Adblock Plus with a total of over 3 million daily active users of the software. (Wladimir Palant, who incidentally created Adblock Plus, writes extensively on how exactly these statistics are gathered here.
We are going to start digging into some data as this week’s MSHC Insights post comes to us from our Targeting department. Joel Rivlin, Senior Targeting Analyst, has laid out the two decisions that every voter makes and what that means for campaign strategy:
Consciously or unconsciously, every registered voter makes TWO distinct electoral decisions before each election. The first decision is whether they are going to vote. The second decision is which candidate they prefer.
Whether these decisions are conscious or not (the decision not to vote is usually not a deliberate decision as much as a lack of interest or engagement in a campaign), it is useful to view voters through this prism to differentiate the persuasion and mobilization sides of campaigns.
For many voters, one or both of these decisions are decided well in advance of the election. Some people always vote, and barring a bout of pneumonia or a death in the family, there is nothing that will keep them from casting their ballots. Other people are simply not interested in politics and will never vote – regardless of the amount of media attention, television ads, door knocks, phone calls or offers of rides to the polls the campaigns produce.
Similarly, some people will always prefer the Democratic or Republican candidate, regardless of the particular nature of a candidate or the campaign and are committed to their decision
The table below shows how voters can be divided between these two decisions. Many of those who always vote or never vote may be undecided on their candidate support (boxes 4 and 6). Many of those who are unwavering in their candidate preferences are undecided as to whether or not they will vote (boxes 2 and 8 ). Some may be undecided both on their decisions to vote and who they support (box 5).
Time for another MSHC Insights post. This week’s is a quick look at advocacy campaigns and it’s written by Joe Fuld, partner, campaign expert, and generally the happiest guy in the office.
After being involved in political direct mail campaigns for the last ten years, my slow but steady introduction into advocacy campaigns over the last four has provided some surprising insights. I have learned that some of the core techniques that are hallmarks of political persuasion mail—defined, demographically driven targets and short, to the point mail with strong calls to action—have gotten strong results in advocacy campaigns. I have also learned that while I have always been a huge fan of photographically-driven mail, type-driven mail pieces can work very well for our advocacy clients.
Integration across mediums in these campaigns is a must. During our advocacy campaigns we have used internet, phones, mail, print, grassroots, patch-through calls and outdoor advertising as ways to successfully engage constituents. There are case studies on some of my favorite campaigns, like the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network Red Bra campaign on this site. In that effort, we blended phone calls, internet, grassroots and print campaigns with great results. Integration has become such a necessity because our target audience is not reachable through just one means of communication. For older voters, mail and phones are still a strong medium. But to reach younger activists, online tools have proved to be very effective. Outdoor billboards and collateral have also allowed us to reach people in places that they would not expect. We did a great bathroom campaign for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network that reached bar patrons to inform them of the implementation of a new smoke free law. These campaigns allow us to take targeting in a different direction and we enjoy the challenge.
Our MSHC Insights post this week is a continuation of our earlier post on Direct Mail Creative Principles. Today Kate Petty, MSHC’s Body Copy Manager, covers two intertwined principles: relevance and photography:
1. Establish relevance.
Maybe this guideline is as obvious as “put a stamp on you mailer,” but a surprising amount of direct mail gets trashed for not being relevant. A piece must pertain to the personal lives of its audience. To give your direct mail that magic ingredient, “relevance,” you have to address concerns that your audience shares, using language to which they respond, and showing images with which they identify.
Take the following two covers, sent by the AFL-CIO to its members, as example:
Anyone who’s spent their day worrying about bills – there’s one, maybe two Americans that can relate – is going to take a second look at these covers. The difference between these mailers and bad mailers is that these focus on people, instead of asking the audience to think about politicians, or unions, or clichés. The photographs are believable, self-evident, and emotionally charged. And the headlines cut straight to important issues without stylistic frills - healthcare costs; making ends meet.
Financial concerns are bounced around Capitol Hill daily, but to get voters to listen mailers have to position that issue, or any issue, in a personal context.
Check out our view on photography and some more examples after the jump.
