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September 05, 2008

Obama Turns to Infomercial. Here's McCain's Best Move Now.

You've all no doubt heard that Barack Obama is testing an infomercial, which you can view here, as part of his presidential campaigning. He's not the first - Ross Perot did this when he ran for president back in 1992 - but he is the most recent.

This is fascinating on a number of fronts.

First if you watch the news coverage of Obama's use of an infomercial, you'll see how completely misunderstood the "infomercial" is by the supposedly smarter-than-thou news journalists.

In this clip, the reporter refers to the "late night infomercial", says Obama is going after "insomniacs" and keeps wondering why he chose a certain small network to air his show on. If you were humble enough to do your homework you'd learn that infomercials air at all times of the day, they reach many more people than just insomniacs, and the selection of airtime bought is based on many factors none of which are "has the news media heard of this network?".

And this article at Adage.com is subtitled "Maybe He's Trying to Win the Insomniac Vote". Even a magazine that's focused on the advertising world is completely ignorant when it comes to long form (aka infomercial) advertising. It's fascinating that direct response advertising is still misunderstood. Maybe it's because the media outlets know that direct response removes inefficiencies from the advertising process and holds them accountable for producing measurable value greater than what they charge to advertisers. Better, then, to keep looking down their noses at it.

What's more hilarious is that what the super smart news media is missing: If Obama gets the right people working with him on his direct response advertising, he will have a major weapon in his arsenal - a way to reach millions and millions of people EXTREMELY cost effectively with his message ... where he's not competing with McCain. It's wide open, undefended territory - the same territory, by the way, that has generated billions of dollars in sales for many businesses. If Obama has the right people, they'll be able to test different messages, track their effectiveness, and communicate to different people based on the issues that are important to them. He could target swing state voters and saturate them with his message.

So what should Maverick McCain's move be in response to this? For one, he'd better get a long form TV commercial developed, and he'd be well advised to get a solid direct response marketing team working for him on that campaign. But that'll only match Obama, not beat him. Maverick McCain will have to have more guts than to stop at copying Obama.

If McCain wants to outflank Obama's DRTV move, his best move is to go into direct response radio. Let's look at the many reasons: a) Obama isn't there - neither candidate is using direct response radio - and therefore it's wide open territory that'll be uncontested, b) DR radio is a whole new audience, not typically overlapping with TV, c) because you're using direct response techniques you get enormous bang for your buck, reaching huge number of people with high frequency for limited dollars, d) you can target geographically and demographically with direct response radio (think swing states). The fact is, because of its fundamental characteristics radio advertising is perfect for political advertisers.

Posted by Jeff Small & Brett Astor at 06:15 PM | Permalink