Ozean Media wins the ‘Oscar of Political Advertising’ for Political Radio Spot
GAINESVILLE, FL – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – On Friday, April 5, 2013 Ozean Media was awarded a 2013 Pollie Award by the American Association of Political Consultants. The AAPC Pollie Awards recognize the best of the best in political communications for 2012.
The award was announced at the 21st Annual Pollie Awards & Conference held April 3-5 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington, DC.
The Pollie Awards are awarded annually to recognize excellence in political advertising, are billed by Esquire Magazine as the “Oscars of Political Consulting”, and the Pollie Awards are generally considered to be the most prestigious awards in the field of political campaign and public affairs industry.
“This Pollie Award is the fourth time in the past two election cycles that Ozean has received national recognition from our political consulting peers, and Ozean is greatly satisfied knowing that our agency is not only competing but winning on a national stage against DC & Tallahassee consultants,” said Alex Patton, owner of Ozean.
The Pollie was awarded for a radio commercial produced in conjunction with Push Button Productions of Orlando, FL for Jeff Siegmeister’s (Rep) victorious campaign for State Attorney for Florida’s third judicial circuit. Jeff Siegmeister became the first Republican elected to the third judicial circuit since reconstruction.
“When we first drafted the radio spot for Mr. Siegmeister, I got the impression that he thought we were certifiably insane. To his credit, Mr. Siegmeister placed his faith in Ozean’s political expertise and his trust allowed us to take creative risks that paid off in a victorious campaign,” continued Alex Patton.
“Ozean is not resting on our laurels, we are busy honing our skills to achieve our mission of “navigating to victory” for our clients in the coming election cycles,” concluded Alex Patton.
About Ozean Media
(https://ozeanmedia.com) – Ozean Media is a political consulting & digital media agency specializing in Republican candidates, conservative issue campaigns, and various trade associations.
About the American Association of Political Consultants
(www.theaapc.org/) – Association membership consists of political consultants, media consultants, pollsters, campaign managers, corporate public affairs officers, professors, fund-raisers, lobbyists, congressional staffers and vendors and is open to everyone associated with politics from the local level to the White House.
In a relatively new study released by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication titled “The ‘Nasty Effect:’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies”, an interesting theory emerges.
The study measures subjects’ understanding of a science topic after reading online comments posted on the story.
The study has wide ranging possible effects. As noted by others:
Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news. – NPR
In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.
Researchers found that even knowledge of science did not seem to mediate the effects of the comments. – JS Online
So basically, as political actors who are attempting to affect public opinion, the comments on a news article are almost, if not MORE important than the article itself.
My guess is this has a relationship to the social norm of highlighting the behavior one would like to see adopted and by making a thought public – no matter how vile the thought is – allows others to think that this thought is ‘normal’ and not out-of-line.
For politicians and campaigns, this study is important and your political efforts must now include rapid response to on-line articles whether newspaper, blogs, online TV stations, etc.
A 2008 study published by the American Political Science Association by Alan Gerber, Donald Green & Christopher Larimer lays out a convincing case of how social pressure can lead to increased voter turnout.
This study does exactly the type of large scale experiments that the GOP should be doing more of.
This study shows us that by using social norms (rules of conduct that are socially enforced) we can have a greater effect on voter turnout, with some words of caution.
In this experiment, conducted prior to the August 2006 primary election, 180,002 HH were used. HH were assigned to treatment groups and were sent one mailing 11 days prior to the election.
HH were randomly assigned to the control group or 1 of 4 treatment groups. Each treatment group had 20,000 HH and 99,999 were in the control group.
Each HH in a treatment group, received one of the four mailings. The control group received none.
All four treatment groups received the basic message of “DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY – VOTE”
Group 1 “Civic Duty” Group. This group is a baseline. It does little besides emphasizing civic duty.
Group 2 “Hawthorne” Group – Adds to Group 1 a mild form of social pressure. By adding a “Hawthorne effect” or “You are being studied”. It limited social pressure by promising researchers would neither contact nor disclose the results.
Group 3 “Self” Group – Adds more social pressure by informing recipients that who votes is public information and listing the recent voting records of each registered voter in the HH. It also put “VOTED” next to those that voted and a blank spaces to those HH members that had not.
Group 4 “Neighbors” Group – Adds even more social pressure by not only listing the HH voting records, but also the voting records of those living nearby. Like the “Self” mailer, the “Neighbors” tells the group that researchers are planning on updating the chart after the election.
The results
After the election, turnout was measured
Group
Turnout
Diff
Control Group
0.297
Civic Duty Group
0.315
0.018
Hawthorne Group
0.322
0.025
Self Group
0.345
0.048
Neighbors Group
0.378
0.081
The Neighbor group had a 8.1% increase in turnout over the control group.
This is impressive.
As the study states:
It is important to underscore the magnitude of these effects. The 8.1 percentage-point effect is not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls (Arceneaux, Gerber, and Green 2006; Nickerson 2006b) and rivals the effect of face-to face contact with canvassers conducting get-out-the vote campaigns (Arceneaux 2005; Gerber and Green 2000; Gerber, Green, and Green 2003).
The study does go on to say nicely that the “enforcement of norms is potentially costly” meaning, this technique REALLY pisses voters off.
Also for practitioners to keep in mind, we must ad partisanship into the equation and test; however, it is data worth considering. Read the entire study here.
I was having lunch with a client this past week, and I was told in no uncertain terms of a mutual acquaintance that does not like me personally.
In fact, it was expressed to me that this person hates the living daylights out of my guts. Let’s set aside the fact that he and I have never had a conversation and have most likely have said ‘hello’ to each other twice in passing. (Let’s also set aside that I am a extremely lovable & loyal guy.)
It was explained to me that he hates my guts because he doesn’t like that “Alex Patton engages in negative campaigning.”
This conversation was running through my head as I went home and re-read a classic book by Al Ries and Jack Trout, “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind”.
I last read the book about 5 years ago, but you could tell from my scribbles in the margins and markup, I liked the book.
I think my favorite line from the book:
“culture and refinement may be admirable qualities, but not in advertising.”
Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, pg 69
I often think about that quote and the book when working with political clients.
Here is another quote from the book that seems appropriate:
“to climb on his or her product ladder, you must relate your brand to the brands already in the prospect’s mind.”
Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, pg 69
This is especially true when a candidate is challenging an incumbent.
Let’s relate a campaign to a business endeavor, since so many business people think they have the political answers.
The situation is you are a challenger to an incumbent or brand leader. You, the challenger, are now going after market share in the voters mind. A space that we can assume the incumbent is the market leader with at some point receiving at least 50% plus 1 market share.
What to do?
I have seen way too many candidates make the childish, amateurish mistake of challenging the brand leader for market share and attempt do it without mentioning the brand leader.
A candidate can not write a campaign speech not mentioning the incumbent and not comparing yourself directly to the incumbent. It is a recipe for a complete disaster. After all, if a challenger is no different, then the consumer will remain with the market leader.
If a candidate is challenging the incumbent,”you must relate your brand already in the prospect’s mind” otherwise a candidate best be prepared to spend ungodly amounts of money in an endeavor still likely to have a low probability chance of dislodging the market leader.
If a candidate does not have the confidence to position him/her self against the brand leader and explain how he/she is different, the challenger will never break through the clutter and noise of a campaign. A challenger will say a lot, yet at the same time say absolutely nothing.
A challenger will campaign and most likely run a campaign that he/she finds to be “cultured and refined”. Congratulations, you just got your butt kicked. Please, enjoy the opera.
Let’s be clear, I do not take joy in negative campaigning nor do I use it in every campaign. However, when the situation calls for it, we will not hesitate to perform our duties for our clients to help them navigate to victory.
And you know what? I am okay with that.
PS. And to prove that I am such a lovable guy, I will be sending a copy of the book to some of my ‘favorite’ unsuccessful candidates, maybe they can read it and re-tool for their next run.
“Overall, Republicans earn a C and Democrats an F in twitter usage; however, when we grade on a curve Florida’s Republican officials perform better than the Democratic officials. The good news is there is room for dramatic improvement,” said Alex Patton (@alex_patton), the study’s author.
Questions:
The study researched over a two week period set out to answer the following questions:
Are Florida’s elected officials using Twitter?
Is there a digital divide that separates Republican and Democrat elected officials in Florida?
How are Florida’s elected officials using Twitter?
Which of Florida’s elected officials could be considered to be embracing Twitter?
Are there recommendations to be made to Florida’s elected officials in their use of Twitter?
The study represents the most comprehensive look at twitter usage of Florida’s elected officials, aggregating data from multiple sources and comparing the data to twitter superstars such as the University of Florida, President Obama, and Justin Bieber.
Findings of Study:
As a whole, Florida’s elected officials are using Twitter in greater percentages than the general public.
Florida’s elected Republican officials are using social media more than Florida’s elected Democrat officials – 57% of Republican elected officials are active users (defined as at least 1 status update in past 7 days) to 34% of Democrat elected officials.
Republican elected officials are doing significantly better than Democrat elected officials using twitter.
If not for Florida’s Democratic Congressional Delegation — more specifically @DWStweets who alone accounts for 85% of the number of followers for Democrat elected officials — Florida’s Democrat elected officials would have little social media reach.
Florida’s elected officials score well on influence, on authority; however,
Florida’s elected officials score very low on outreach.
A handful of Florida’s elected officials are embracing Twitter. They are:
category
Twitter name
name
district
party
USREP
@RepDennisRoss
Dennis Ross
15
Republican
USREP
@DWStweets
D Wasserman Schultz
23
Democrat
USREP
@treyradel
Trey Radel
19
Republican
STSEN
@Rob_Bradley
Rob Bradley
7
Republican
STSEN
@DwightBullard
Dwight Bullard
39
Democrat
STREP
@sethmckeel
Seth McKeel
40
Republican
STREP
@repclayingram
Clay Ingram
1
Republican
STREP
@JimmyPatronis
Jimmy Patronis
6
Republican
STREP
@mattgaetz
Matt Gaetz
4
Republican
STREP
@jasonbrodeur
Jason Brodeur
28
Republican
“Bottom line, when you look at how Florida’s politicians are actually using Twitter, they are forgetting the ‘social’ in social media. The vast majority of Florida’s elected officials appear to be misunderstanding or misusing Twitter by using it as primarily as a broadcast media channel,” continues Mr. Patton.
“For Florida’s elected officials to truly realize the power of Twitter and social media, they must embrace the social part by talking with people, not only talking to people,” concludes Alex Patton.
The study, an executive summary, the study’s methodology, and complete data-set are available for download below.
All are invited to comment on the report using the Twitter hashtag #socialgrade.
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