Archive for October, 2006
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Why Candidates Watch What You Buy
AdWeek has an article about micro-targeting - the political strategy of using lifestyle data (magazine subscriptions, shopping habits, etc.) to target and communicate with voters. I am quoted.
My first quote is about the value of micro-targeting:
“You are now targeting based on behavior,” says Brian Reich, a senior strategic consultant at Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, a Washington public affairs shop that handles lobbying and ballot initiatives. “You understand a lot more about a person based on how they spend their time and money, rather than on how they identify themselves.”
My second quote is about the difference in approach to elections demonstrated by the Republicans and the Democrats:
The Democrats’ data-gathering strategy pales in comparison. Prior to this year, some states lost or discarded voter data between elections, according to the DNC. And unlike Republicans, who handpick candidates early on and develop corresponding campaign messages before the upcoming race, Democrats often find themselves playing catchup— waiting until a candidate gets the party nomination, then figuring out how to sell him or her to the voters.
The disparity between these arrangements is obvious. “If you wait until [a nomination] to tell people you have to mobilize, you have a problem,” argued Reich. The Democrats are now in a scramble—and the stakes are high. Many political observers are predicting that the GOP may lose its lock on both houses of Congress. But for that to happen, the Democrats must win 15 seats in the House and six in the Senate.
I have never tried hid my frustration with the Democratic Party and its use of technology. I wrote an article for Personal Democracy after the 2004 cycle about the mistakes I felt the Democrats had made in developing their database for example. And while the Democrats have made a much larger commitment than many expected over the past two years, I think the Republicans are are still far ahead of the Democrats, and have a more practical approach to the use of technology to support their election activities.
The Democrats will probably win big next week — take control of the House, maybe the Senate as well. Still, the Democrats will lose some close seats because the Republican message and turnout machines are using technology in a more focused and efficient way. They have identified the most important political activities and found ways to use technology to support their efforts - whether its targeting and message delivery, opposition research, Get-Out-The-Vote or similar. In other words, technology is not the story.
If the Democrats do win big, the message that more needs to be done will likely be lost… the focus will be on the President’s failures in Iraq or the corrupt practices of the Republican leadership in Congress. Political experts and the media give credit to liberal bloggers, or the few candidates who found a way to tap MySpace or YouTube with changing the face of politics. And while there is some truth to that, and they all deserve some credit for pushing this discussion forward, there is more to the conversation.
Democrats continue to invest in technology, and I believe they are closing the gap that exists between them and the Republicans in this area. But, there is still a fundamental difference in the philsophies of the two parties — and until Democrats position technology as an element of the campaign, and not the story itself, the Republicans will continue to have an advantage.
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links for 2006-10-31
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Media companies are of two minds about Internet video-sharing site YouTube, which rocketed to fame by letting users share homemade videos along with copyrighted clips from movies, TV shows and music videos. They are unsure of whether YouTube is a friend o
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MSNBC.com will begin carrying news and commentary from start-up political social networking site HotSoup.com under a new deal between the companies slated to be announced today. The partnership also calls for MSNBC.com to begin distributing its RSS feeds
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Everybody worries about cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, but most people don’t have any idea what their long-term risk for developing a serious health problem really is. The best place to find out is a Web site called www.yourdiseaserisk.com.
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links for 2006-10-30
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Increasing numbers of people looking for political news are going online — with more than a third now saying they check the Internet for such information. That group is more likely to be younger, better educated and male than the population in general,
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From the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to here at home, soldiers blogging about military life are under the watchful eye of some of their own.
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A handful of companies are building flexible online networks that can host content, serve up ads and dish out interactive features. While “viral” video-sharing sites such as YouTube focus on individual clips — many pirated — these new Internet TV platfo
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Al Gore may have failed to carry his home state of Tennessee as a Presidential candidate, but the former Vice President is all the rage in . . . Belgium. The country has even named a tax after him.
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On Thursday, Time Inc. Chief Executive Ann Moore went before the board of parent company Time Warner Inc. with an Internet strategy that concentrates resources on Sports Illustrated, People and the company’s business magazines — the titles seen as having
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Internet companies have had great success selling advertising space, in part because the effectiveness of those ads is supposedly so easily measured. But marketers, even as they continue to push more of their ad budgets online, are starting to ask for bet
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Nintendo has positioned Wii, its new video game console to be released on Nov. 19, as a system that will appeal not just to hard-core gamers, but also to older adults who may be more comfortable with Pong than Grand Theft Auto.
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Critics in England have attacked plans by the BBC to sell advertising on its Web site. Now some of those critics inside the BBC are redoubling their efforts.
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Beginning today, The Hollywood Reporter will add an advertising portal called For Your Consideration Studio Showcase (hollywoodreporter.com/fyc), named after the discreet advisory, “For your consideration,” that typically appears atop Oscar-season ads
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SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture
I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States. I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic. I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.
Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ‘’The Next Society.’ The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better. He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio.
Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world. Here are my (rough) notes:
- The media industry is in crisis. Stories are covered and then disappear. Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span. The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters. And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.
- The web has created a hostile world for advertising. As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services. It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction. That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.
- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system. Why? It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most. That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.” People are finding they don’t want more stuff. They want more fulfillment from their lives. How do they know?
Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret? Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep). If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?
- How can we change the world? He offered two directives:
1) Operate in your zone of personal genius. Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that. At the center of that innermost circle is a blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion. That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.
2) Hire a coach to help you get there. They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need. The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.
- The way we work is changing. You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot. You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.
- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think. Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.
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links for 2006-10-29
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Just a few years ago, Google was a bit player on Madison Avenue. It specialized in tiny text ads shown alongside search results and in the margins of thousands of Web sites that partner with Google. But recently Google has moved beyond search, reaching o
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Yes, it’s true that consumers are moving from newspapers to newspaper Web sites (and beyond) for their daily fix of current events and information for living — movie listings, commuter help, classifieds. And there’s no sign that that trend will change an
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Shut Up & Run the Ads
I wrote a post yesterday discussing the marketing efforts behind Shut Up & Sing, the new documentary about the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of President Bush. You didn’t see it? Nobody did. My computer froze up and I lost the text before I was able to put it up online. Too bad — when I wrote it yesterday morning, this was a small story and my analysis looked really solid. Now its a big story and I am late to the conversation. Alas.
So what are people talking about?
The documentary tracks the fallout that resulted after lead singer, Natalie Maines, said she was “ashamed” that President Bush was from Texas, the Chicks’ home state. The comment prompted a boycott of the Chicks’ music by conservatives and opened up a discussion about freedom of speech among scholars and those in the music industry. Time passed, things died down. But now, the documentary has brought the controversy back to the fore — and with a new twist.
A handful of media venues have refused to run advertising promoting the movie. The LA Times covered it yesterday. There was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning. And the Washington Post summed it up this way:
It all started earlier this week when Weinstein submitted ads for its new Barbara Kopple documentary “Shut Up & Sing” to the broadcast networks for review by their standards and practices departments.
NBC said it “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”
CW said it “does not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”
Weinstein said: “Eureka!”
And on Thursday evening, it sent out a news release headlined:
“In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and the CW Television Networks Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech.”
“It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,” bemoaned Weinstein Co. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein.
“The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American,” he added.
As I see it, this hubub was not only anticipated by Harvey Weinstein and his team, it was a key part of their promotional strategy. How else would you get coverage for a small-budget documentary film in today’s big-budget Hollywood movie promotion craziness? We have a very tense election cycle coming to an end just two weeks from now, and a national media that is feasting on any criticism of the war, or the President, they can find. All you had to do was light the fire.
Of course, now the networks are in a no-win situation now — if they don’t run the ads, the press continues to cover the story (helping the movie gain traction, and the stations look selectively moral), and if they do run the ads, they look like they caved. I think they should run the ads - networks would benefit greatly by becoming a part of the political dialogue and letting the population decide on its own. Be fair, show ads promoting and criticizing the movie if that opportunity exists, but don’t limit one perspective from being heard because you are afraid of your audience.
Give credit to Weinstein and Co. for recognizing the opportunity to use the news cycle to promote their movie. It is not a new strategy — MoveOn got into a similar fight with CBS around the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, and I have had clients whose online ads that venues have refused to run because of an arbitrary content standard. In both cases press coverage resulted and the message ultimately got to the target audience. I don’t think it will work for any movie or event, but its a strategy that more organizations should understand and pursue.
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links for 2006-10-28
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links for 2006-10-27
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Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome is returning home for some well-earned R&R. Viewers who want to know more will be directed to www.gnomewatch.com, where mock-sightings of the gnome will be posted.
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Three Wendy’s commercials, masquerading as videos and posted on YouTube, are drawing some ire — and lots of visits — from the site’s outspoken fan base.
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Web searches for “second life” soared 73% for the week ending Oct. 21, compared to the week ending Oct. 14. Visits to the Second Life Web site also more than doubled from the week ending Oct. 7 to the week ending Oct. 21.
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Candidates Click Into Interactive Tactics
My CEO, Dan Solomon, has an op-ed in today’s Media Daily News. It begins:
SINCE THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, we have seen a seismic shift in the online world–a transition that took political campaigns and advocacy organizations from a dependence on text-heavy, “static” Web sites and vaulted them into the dynamic world of blogs and vlogs, RSS feeds and news aggregators, social networks, video and photo-sharing, mashups and video e-mail.
Political campaigns, both issue- and candidate-based, are experimenting with the new interactive tools, and trying to figure out how to turn clicks into loyal followers and convert energy into action. Not every technology that is available to candidates is a good fit–and campaigns and other issue-oriented groups traditionally trail the consumer marketing world when it comes to trying new things. But, with the communications landscape changing and audience expectations rising, the need to adapt is clear.
Four of these new technologies seem to hold the greatest promise and deserve a closer look for those wishing to have their message in the mainstream–or even a small rivulet of community thought: social networks, video, mobile and mapping.
Read the whole essay…
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links for 2006-10-26
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Social-networking Web sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com have helped link millions of friends. But now they have a new enemy: 20-year-old Jenny Thompson.
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Elton John, Bill Cosby, the Pillsbury Doughboy and a NASCAR driving simulator are among the highlights at this year’s AARP convention and expo, rolling into the Anaheim Convention Center today. About 25,000 graying baby boomers and other vintage humans a
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Most mothers prefer receiving information about brands from other moms or friends - a huge 91 percent prefer easy-to-find brands that other moms have recommended. Moreover, online advertising has huge potential to reach them, according to new research.
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