I have worked on more than 100 campaigns in my career since I started my advertising agency in 1974. However, the more I do campaigns, the more sophisticated they become.
Television has always garnered the largest share of a campaign budget. TV data help determine the proper media mix to reach the desired demographics. Nielsen tools were used in my first campaign, and such data still play a role.
The mistake most media planners make when handling political campaigns is not having enough gross rating points for their message to penetrate the audience. Our rule of thumb is we want the voter to see a message at least 12 times before moving on to another message. Most buyers dump a message before the public has fully comprehended it.
During the recent re-election campaign for Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, my media buyer, my son Russell Letizia, studied Nielsen research every day. Having worked on multiple campaigns, he was able to match our polling data with viewer profiles. We knew our target voter was a woman over 50. So we looked for shows that gave us the largest audience at the lowest cost per rating point.
In addition, we learned early that our opponent was heavily targeting Republican voters. We knew to neutralize those voters and relied on shows like Fox News.
One of the strategic decisions we made using several sources of data came during the final weeks of the campaign, after we saw that our opponent was beating us with Republican voters by a substantial margin, but we were winning Democrats by an equally large margin. We could see our pathway to victory was to turn Republicans to our side, discourage them from our opponent and get our Democrats to vote.
We were able to accomplish both by spending $100,000 on television ads during the final week of the campaign — $50,000 during the final three days alone, which accounted for a large win on Election Day. Additionally, a series of issues-tested mailers helped assure our success.
Two weeks before Election Day, internal polling numbers showed the race dead even. As I later found out from consultants on the other side, they saw the same numbers. Having this information gave us the insight to make crucial moves.
It was my job, along with co-campaign manager Bradley Meyer, to monitor the campaign’s cash flow daily to make sure we could do everything we originally budgeted. Had we spent foolishly early in the campaign, it would have prevented us from doing the things we needed to do to win.
At the end of the day, a good campaign hinges on having a good business plan and using science and data, along with good, sound business judgment. But, most importantly, you must have a good candidate.