What we’re reading in June
The political world is heating up with look backs at 2020, new tactics, new data and fresh new perspectives. Here are some of the recent articles that have fascinated us.
VACCINE GOTV
Colorado is using political firms like our friends at Winning Connections to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates across the state. Healthier Colorado, an advocacy organization with experience managing ballot initiatives, developed the vaccine turnout campaign and partnered with Gov. Jared Polis’s administration.
ANOTHER RECESSION FOR MILLENIALS
The Atlantic’s Annie Lowry writes, “[T]oday’s economic conditions are not just holding Millennials back. They’re stratifying them, leading to unequal experiences within the generation as well as between it and other cohorts.”
DIGITAL AD REPORT
Tech for Campaigns’ 2020 Digital Ad Report has been released. They find that the political digital advertising spend grew 4.6x from 2018 to 2020, outpacing the growth in federal election spending over the same period, which grew 2.4x. However, the digital ad spend is still less than 20% of total spend.
THOSE LAUNCH VIDEOS
Our friend Matt “Mudcat” Arnold at Ampersand discusses the need (or not) for launching your campaign with a video in Campaigns & Elections. CN4’s Parker Butterworth covered two different styles of launch videos as well: link here for that one.
MARKET SIZE
Howard Homonoff writes in Forbes about the size of the political ad market. In the 2019-2020 election cycle, total political advertising spending reached $8.5 billion across TV, radio and digital media. That doesn’t count direct mail, phones or other types of media like billboards or yard signs and likely doesn’t count all spending, which is exceedingly hard to track.
HOW DID YOU GET MY NUMBER
Voters in the New York municipal elections got bombarded, and they aren’t happy, Annie McDonnough writes here.
CLEAN UP OUR OWN HOUSE
Although Democrats like to call out Republicans for trying to suppress voting, the states they control in the Northeast (like President Biden’s Delaware) make casting a ballot more difficult than anywhere else.
TWITTER GETTING READY TO GIVE US DATA
Twitter is studying the biases within its algorithms as part of a new effort to try to understand how its machine learning tools can cause unintended consequences, and the company says it plans to publicly share some of its findings.
BRANDING PARTIES
Alexander Coppock, Donald Green and Ethan Porter write in Politico about studies they’ve done to increase the brand of political parties – and the effects of that brand on the electorate.
We learned a lot from 2020 and are already taking these lessons and building data-driven strategies for our clients in 2021 and beyond. If your political project needs compelling media with innovative strategies, reply to this email or give me a call at 303-746-8876.