If you lived in Toledo last fall, it got to the point where you just couldn't take it anymore. Too many TV ads, too much mail, too many phone calls. I'm referring to political communications — politicians and groups trying to win votes. Between March and late September of 2004 — even before the busy last month of the presidential campaign — Toledo voters were subjected to 14,273 television ads on the presidential candidates alone. The Washington Post quoted numb Toledo voters as saying, "I'm just immune to it" and "There's just so many of them that they kind of blur together."Of course, it wasn't just the people of Toledo who felt this way. A total of 1,950,737 political TV spots aired in the nation's top 100 markets last year. That's 677 solid days of 30-second spots (source: TNSMI/CMAG).It's not going to get any quieter out there — or any easier for politicians and marketers to reach the voting and buying public. Audiences are more and more fragmented every year. People watch the handful of broadcast networks less and the hundreds of cable channels more. Since 1980, audiences for the broadcast networks' evening newscasts have fallen by more than half. These trends toward fragmented audiences account for the striking fact that American Express spent only 35% of its advertising budget on TV in 2004, down from 80% just ten years ago.This means that, like American Express, unions, grassroots organizations and political campaigns increasingly need to focus on reaching and mobilizing candidates with precision and laser-like focus. That often means communicating with individual voters on a one-to-one basis. Fundamentally, there are two ways to do that. One is door-to-door canvassing, which can be very effective but can also be difficult to organize, and expensive and inefficient when done on a large scale. Phones are the other mechanism. True, just like all those TV ads, they can irritate people, especially when they interrupt dinner. But, done correctly, they can persuade voters and move them to the polls.My firm, Winning Connections, knows a bit about what does and doesn't work when it comes to phone campaigns. We conducted twenty million phone calls during the fall campaign in 2004, and we monitor research on phone effectiveness as well as commission our own studies. We know, first of all, that people are more open to political phone calls than regular telemarketing calls (source: Lake, Snell, Perry & Associates survey). Second, live calls that spur a two-way conversation between the caller and voter can have a big impact on an election:Donald Green, Yale professor of political science and co-author ofThere is a challenge, of course, in engaging voters' attention with a phone call. It's just a fact that people generally don't like taking phone calls from people they don't know personally. That's why it's not just what you say, but how you say it that's important:Janet Grenzke, Ph.D., and Mark Watts, Ph.D.,, Dec. 2004Based on information from voting records, membership lists, polling data and other sources, phone scripts can be customized to address those "self-interests." So, in reaching out to voters individually with meaningful messages, it's clear that phones used intelligently are a critical tool in any group or candidate's campaign arsenal.The bottom line is that, even in our advanced technological age, it's still important to engage people in conversation if you want them to take action.Grant Perry is Vice President for Strategic Development and Communications at Winning Connections, a Washington, DC-based political consulting firm. This is part one of his two-part report on trends in political communication.
© 2005 Labor Research Association
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