Part 2: Create and Test a Message
An old advertising joke puts the Pepsi and Coke brands side by side, meant to demonstrate how Pepsi has tried to remake itself while Coke has remained iconic for over a century. While this isn’t entirely accurate — Coca Cola has changed its brand imagery over the years— it helps illustrate how the advertising world has approached iteration and ideation over the last few decades. People ask me if my job is “like Mad Men” all the time (the most-asked question is whether I make “those annoying pop-up ads”) and I have to explain to them that modern advertising is a lot different than what they see on television.
The truth is that we no longer live in the Mad Men world, where you find one message and stick to it. I’ve written about the differences in messaging during the last election. For the purposes of political campaigning, the Presidential election has to exist in isolation; no other type of election focuses so intently on a candidate’s personality or brand. Every other type of political race in America, from the Senate on down, is going to hinge on a largely iterative set of micro-messages, targeted at voters based on demographics, behaviors, and interests. Simply put, campaign managers need to be more Pepsi, and less Coke.
Creating a new set of ads requires two things, an idea of which group you’d like to reach and the message you’re trying to convey. From there you iterate — you make a number of versions of your ad, swapping out pieces of text or imagery, to test a few different ideas and determine which one resonates with your audience. When you’re satisfied with your options, you set the ad to run and after a few hours or days you analyze the results, use the data to generate new versions of the winning ad, and so forth . This is a process anyone who’s worked in digital advertising is all too familiar with. The not-so-big secret is that this works in politics, and it works well.
Polls and studies tell campaign staff who they should be targeting. The same data can help identify which issues each demographic group finds compelling. From there, a smart campaign can assemble dozens of different ad types and styles, targeted at each audience. As with traditional advertising, social media is about putting your message in front of people at a time when it can be most effective; voter registration, GOTV, opposition campaigns and protests, these are all ripe for social media advertising. Too many campaigns depend on “going viral” or “earned media” by disseminating a message and expecting the faithful to share it among their social circles. This ignores both the way Facebook actually works and the powerful tools that social platforms provide to ensure that your message reaches people you wouldn’t normally reach, which is the goal in any down-ticket election.
Facebook has changed its algorithm many times over the last few years, and one of the most influential changes that has been written about extensively in the wake of the 2016 election is the “echo chamber” created when posts are shown only to people who Facebook believes will interact with them — in other words, your liberal posts will be more likely to show up in the news feeds of your liberal friends because Facebook believes you’re more likely to interact with liberal content, and Facebook cares very much about interaction. Interaction is one of the most important metrics at Facebook, because as a public company they need to show shareholders that people are using the platform, and the best way to do this is via user engagement statistics. Previously the key was user growth, but as Facebook becomes more and more ubiquitous, the company has been forced to shift to engagement (which also drives ad revenue) to show value. They put their finger on the scale by showing you content they are fairly confident you will linger over or click on. This creates the dreaded feedback loop for political campaigns hoping to reach people organically — all their followers and faithful end up sharing the same post with each other.
The way around this is to pay for advertising. Create dozens or hundreds of ads with messaging targeted at “top level” demographic groups — age, ZIP code, gender — and determine which messages perform the best based on your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). From there, tailor ongoing messaging and engagement campaigns throughout key points of the election cycle. Most critically, listen to the data, not conventional wisdom or past heuristics. Your audience will tell you what your message should be, if you’re listening.