Chris mentioned the challenge of getting young voters to vote, and the topic also came up in Stéphane Dion's latest Facebook Q&A video.
I work in a college marketing department where we're competing for the attention of young people (from 15 or so on up) with other colleges and universities. About a year ago we launched our "We Do That [TM]" campaign, featuring, among lots of other things, this webmercial which ran both on TV and on our website (front page at the time):
Chris (a university student) liked the webmercial and commented:
I think we should have them focus solely on certain issues. Like have one on the Liberal environmental plan, and another on the economic policy etc.. That way we can make short, effective and above all else POSITIVE, videos.
Deb liked the webmercial but wasn't sure about whether they would "encourage people to choose Stephane Dion."
Good question... My thinking about the webmercial is that it's a way of getting the attention of young people. Catch their interest, and introduce them to the party thru a series of short vids, targeted at a couple of issues, as Chris suggests. A lot of young people care passionately about the environment, so that would be a good place to begin.
The first ad would start with the message - "You care about the environment. YOU have the power to make a difference. " Then add more substance in subsequent ads. A mysterious, keep-them-asking-for-more approach, so they WANT to see the ads.
A campaign targeted at 18-24 year-olds would have a lot of positive spill-over impact on older voters as well.
Oh yeah, and our "We Do That [TM]" campaign has won zillions of awards.
2 comments:
Good idea to get this out there. Maybe the Liberal communications team will see this and get busy.
I think its a good way to get the message out there on each topic of interest.
Not that I don't think positive ads will work but it was more that I wondered about Chris's comment on how well negative ads work for the younger voters. This was very disturbing to me that he was saying that younger voters attribute the negative qualities to the victim of the ad and won't vote for them.
We can hope this ad idea will work but maybe we also need a brilliant new way to challenge negative ads too. BUT I don't advocate going negative for us. In my opinion, we don't want to go the way of the southern neighbour.
Hey Deb, thanks for dropping by.
Negative ads concern me too. But unfortunately I think we've seen from the polls that they do have an impact even if just subconsciously. You keep getting barraged with negative messages and some of it's going to sink in.
The webmercial is a way of "changing the channel" and showing young people that politics doesn't have to be negative - and that somebody's going to the effort of talking to them where they are. If they're alert and paying attention, the negative ads won't have as much chance to do their subliminal damage.
But there are a lot of things competing for people's attention - we have to get them to pay attention to us even if just for 30 seconds at a time. Then we can show them that the federal Liberal party has a lot of great policies for things they care about - like climate change and the environment in general - and is actually listening to them too. (Dion is very passionate about accessibility to postsecondary education too, another high-interest issue for young people.)
One of the benefits of the "webmercial" is that it can be used in a lot of media - traditional TV, Internet venues of course like youtube, facebook, myspace, blogs, traditional websites, and even movie theatres.
(I think we showed the Fanshawe webmercial in theatres.)
My guess is that the Flash webmercial would be less expensive to produce than a traditional ad. And by keeping it positive we're staying on the high road - where all of us want to be.
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