This year, Ozean’s top staff will be presenting their own “Year in Review of 2020” comprised of their top takes in three areas: Digital Media, Political Research, and Political Data.
This is Alex’s review of 2020 in political research, data, and digital media. Three topics that caught my attention during 2020 and none of them COVID related. Okay, some of them are COVID related.
Digital Media
The year of the virtual campaign. 2020 was…unique and forced change into how campaigns are run. It hastened the world of dispersed technologies for volunteers and staff (phone banks, text banks), temporarily changed response rates in polling, and hastened budget swings towards digital outreach.
I think we will look back at the 2020 campaign cycle as the cycle digital media came of age.
This year, digital media spends accounted for less than 75% of total political ad spend; however, digital media experienced explosive growth (most of it in smaller donor solicitations).
As digital marketers continue to experiment with using digital in persuasion messaging, we expect digital marketing budgets to continue to grow.
Political Research
In the journal of Political Psychology, an interesting experiment caught my eye this year.
The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment conduct by Emily P. Diamond of Duke University.
This was an interesting online experiment beginning the explore frame effects of messaging on highly polarized topics. In this case, the author explored framing effects of identities on climate change. Specifically, if a parental identity is primed before asking about climate change would it have an effect on political behaviors?
As the study concludes, “communicating messages when partisan identities are highly salient is likely to increase polarized responses, while communicating while nonpartisan identities are salient may be helpful in depolarizing responses.”
This gels with my belief that when an issue(s) is highly polarized, going directly at it in any partisan manner will likely get you nowhere – especially if you are attempting to persuade or change behaviors.
While, there is still much work to do this in this area such as researching how long these effects linger, if at all. I mean, as soon as a partisan identity takes over – you may be back to square one.
But for now, if you want to talk about highly partisan issues with an eye to persuade or change behaviors, you may need a trojan horse, ie or a different frame.
Political Data
Google announcing the phase out of third party cookies is my data story of the year, and it was announced at the beginning of 2020.
At the beginning of 2020, Google announced their timeline for phasing out third party cookies from Chrome.
Third party cookies are the little bits of data that companies put on your computer to “make ads more relevant” to the user….also known as “tracing them”. It is these little bits of data that allow digital agencies to target users on in individual manner.
While third party cookies have also been banned by Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, Chrome is well over half the browser market, so this is a major change to the entire digital landscape.
The death of the cookie has been whispered about for years, and we all kinda knew it was going to happen….just not exactly when.
Now we know: Google says it is a phased approach not to take full effect until 2022.
What does this mean for digital advertising? It means first-party data is at a premium, and this move is likely to strengthen the hand of the “walled gardens” of ad tech – like….google, facebook, microsoft.
But for now, we continue to monitor the changes and watch closely how the advertising industry adjusts to a soon to be cookie free world.
