Assessing How the Media and the Obama Administration Align on Social Issues

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

As we approach the midterm elections, everyone is in a reflective mood. We are assessing how the new Administration has performed and what the future should politically hold.  Just what has the Administration of Change meant for the country? Noral participated in its own assessment with key influentials at television stations.

In the National Media Survey of Television Community Service Directors, we asked over 100 media directors what their opinions were of the impact of the Obama Administration on various social issues important to their communities.  They are, after all, the individuals most in touch with the needs of their viewers.  It’s their “job” to know what is important.  So it’s insightful to know how they feel about the Administration.

Drum roll, please……….

They overwhelmingly had a positive picture.  The highest positive rankings are for the Administration’s performance on Education, Kids, Health, and Family issues. Their lowest performance ratings were on the Economy and Veterans & Military issues.  They felt relatively no impact had been made on Arts & Theater and, sadly, Drugs & Alcohol as well.

Health ratings were especially interesting in that they ran both hot and cold among media directors.  The Health issue got some of the most positive ratings but also some clear negative results.  One can only surmise this is a residual from the complicated, protracted and divisive health care reform debate.

Comparable to Health, the Environment and Energy Conservation got hit with some negative evaluations.  Given that the survey ran congruently to this country’s worst environmental nightmare, the Gulf oil spill, it’s probably no wonder.  The spill may not be the “fault” of the Administration, but again, our media directors didn’t feel that warmly about the Administration with regard to the environment, nonetheless.

One final note: There was an interesting correlation between media directors’ perceptions of the issues their stations should support, from a public service standpoint, and the Administration’s impact on the issues.  Perhaps no better testimony to the Administration’s impact may be that the media rate their stations’ most important issues directly in line with the issues the Administration has most impacted.  Can one conclude that the Administration has successfully impacted the media perception of issue relevance?

I leave the reader to draw their own conclusion.  After all, it is a democracy!   Let’s all be sure to go to the polls, to make our own individual assessments count.

Posted in Government, Market Research, Research, Surveys | No Comments »

Lessons from Green Marketing for PSA’s

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Frito-Lay’s SunChips green branding campaign was an award winner again this month, adding Warc’s prize for Ideas and Evidence in marketing to its war chest of win’s. It’s not surprising.  It took green marketing to a whole new level of excellence.

They started with a remarkable capital investment in making their product in a more environmentally friendly way.  They added a 50-acre — that’s right, acre — solar plant to their factory so that SunChips could be made with solar energy.  That was followed with the launch of the industry’s first compostable packaging.

Most of us would think that level of clear, purposeful commitment to sustainability would be enough to make SunChips an instant market success. But not so fast.

This was all happening in a recession.  And as the director of The Futures Company, Fran Walton, has noted, “the inconvenient truth has gone to the background…as consumers turn away from fears about the future of the planet and towards more everyday, domestic worries.”  Manufacturing and packaging innovations are removed from the more “me and my world” issues driving consumers’ purchase decisions. The innovations had to be made relevant for people.

They achieved this by making the innovations “tangible” with some very unique creative executions; utilizing “solar power” in a newspaper ad that had to be held to the light to read it completely, or showing a time-lapsed video of the decomposing bag in a tv advertisement; and by leveraging two important best-practice learnings in the campaign messaging:

1) A healthy purchase (or action) equates to a healthy consumer, a healthy family, a healthy home, and a healthy planet. People increasingly understand and appreciate that a product can be good for them and good for the planet too.  Their definition of “health” has expanded.

2) Value, even in a recession, isn’t based on price alone. Consumers get value also from buying products (or taking actions) that align with things that are important to them; things they believe in. Marketers can add value by aligning with strongly held core values and beliefs common to a target audience.

We believe these learnings apply to social marketing as well as brand marketing.  Instead of encouraging the purchase of a product like SunChips, social marketers provide motivation for difficult behavior change.  In environmental campaigns, for example, that could mean aligning the health of you and your family to environmentally friendly behavior and action.

Secondly, social campaigns need to worry about closing the “value action gap” between a strongly held belief or value and the realization that one’s behaviors may not be living up to that value.  Many social marketing campaigns can be effective by demonstrating to a target audience their “value action gap,” raising some level of cognitive dissonance over the inconsistency between their behavior and what they hold important, and then leading them  to a positive resolution.

So congratulations to Frito-Lay and Juniper Parks!  And for those who want to better understand how to develop social marketing messaging with the SunChip best practice lessons in mind, please visit Noral’s PSA page.

Posted in Branding, Food, Integrated Marketing, Marketing, Sectors, Social Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

The Potential of Web Analytics and Why We Love Cookies

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I don’t often have the need to read about — let alone want to celebrate — an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regulation change. Thank goodness there are more interesting things in life.  But last month was an exception.

In case you missed it, federal agencies conducting social marketing and public education campaigns with a web component now have an improved opportunity to analyze how their campaigns are working.  Thanks to the OMB, Federal websites can deploy “persistent cookies.”

Not to be confused with the insatiable Cookie Monster within us all, “persistent cookies” are actually pieces of text that are stored by a web browser on your computer’s hard-drive.  Software can synthesize this information about your computer’s web activity and that of other computers.  By tracking cookies, collectively, across all computers, we can assess how a marketing campaign is working digitally and determine how to improve our marketing efforts.

Web analytics is a term used to describe just that: the measurement and analysis of digital channels (websites, social media and email) for the purpose of understanding and improving an organization’s online user experience.  It is, nowadays, an online marketing best practice, compulsory for commercial marketers. It should be equally important for federal and social marketing campaigns.

While commercial marketers worry about how they fill their online shopping carts, Federal agencies and social marketing campaigns have an even bigger worry.  They need to worry about their progress in moving people towards behavior change: a long and complicated journey. Relative to the shopping cart, there may be many more “clicks” along the path of building awareness, changing attitudes and generating action.  It’s good to know what’s happening along the way, address what works and doesn’t work and make sure that every visitor is at least a little closer to your behavior goal, not frustrated by a failed website visit or disappointing experience.

More specifically, if you are a Federal agency using web components as part of a social marketing and public service campaign, what exactly might you learn with web analytics?   Here’s a just a short sampling:

· You can track the trend in overall penetration of a social marketing campaign.  Top-line web analytics metrics like website visits are a proxy for the reach of a campaign (especially one that consistently mentions web addresses in the creative).

· You can learn what parts of the website are getting used, how they work to further engage people or result in them leaving the site.  Web analytic reports show common entry and exit pages (where people start and end their visits) and the navigation paths in between.

· You can figure out which media or outreach channels are working for you by driving traffic to the website and ranking their effectiveness. Web analytics helps you to compare visits and conversions from, say, social media versus email, and within the social media channel Facebook versus Twitter. (You can even track offline efforts that use vanity URLs to drive viewers to the website.)

· You can find out how to improve visitors’ experiences and drive them beyond the home page into key areas of the site.  For example, the web analytics technique “split testing” (where different visitors are shown slightly different content) can compare the impact of specific messages and improve landing pages.

As a case in point, Noral used our public health client’s web analytics data to measure the number of monthly visits before the campaign, then compared subsequent efforts against that baseline.  The software’s reports also helped us choose — based on metrics like bounce rate, time per visit, and pages per visit — the best landing pages for web surfers who encountered the campaign online via its syndication feed (RSS), social media profiles, and search engine marketing (SEM).  To validate the campaign’s investment in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, we performed custom analysis of web analytics data to confirm that visitors enticed by search engine ads were engaging with website content as hoped.

If you’re not using web analytics, the OMB has given the green light.   A good first place to start is by checking out your options for web analytics software, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends Analytics OnDemand, and Omniture SiteCatalyst.  But after you‘ve read all you can about cookies (and had a few  to digest), check out Noral’s web capabilities and our GSA contract to deliver web-based marketing services to Federal clients.

Posted in Government, Health Marketing, Marketing, Sectors, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media, Uncategorized, Web, Websites | 1 Comment »

Top of the radio hit parade: Health PSAs

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Here we go with the top issues of the radio community service directors this week: the most mentioned and highest-ranking concerns from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico, hot off the charts of the National Media Survey of Radio Community Service Directors!

Getting right down to the nitty gritty on the hit parade, the numero-uno chart topper is the health of radio listeners.  This was the consensus of the 100+ radio community service directors surveyed across the United States.  Health came in as the most important specific issue for stations to support and the issue they most wanted our government to take on with public service advertising.

After mentioning diseases affecting their communities, radio media directors flipped their focus to human behaviors associated with health.  These ranged from a person acting on a prevention-related service (e.g., vaccinations) to modifying lifestyle choices (e.g., eating healthy).

The findings underscore the very consequential role that public service advertising plays with respect to health.  While human behavior is hard to change, it is possible, and public service campaigns are a proven means to that end.

But that’s not where the positive news end.  The hits just keep on coming!  Not only do radio media directors believe public service advertising is very or extremely useful, 12% project a rise in the time allotted for PSAs.  A further 82 out of 97 predict that PSA time will remain stable, even in these continued tough economic times.

So, in the immortal words of Casey Kasem, “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars. And keep your radio tuned right where it is.”

Along with listening to America’s Top 40, we now have another reason to stay tuned:  Our radio stations are committed to solving the health and social issues affecting our lives and those we love.  That’s a “hit” that’s likely to be holding steady on our charts for quite some time to come.

Posted in Health, Health Marketing, Market Research, Marketing, PSAs, Research, Sectors, Social Marketing, Social Media, Surveys | 1 Comment »

A Nudge to the U.S. Federal Government on Communications and Behavior Change

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Not wanting to sound pro-big government, but after reading the U.K. Central Office of Information (COI) “Communications and behavior change” I’m left marveling the benefits of such an integrating government body.  The COI acts essentially as the U.K. government’s marketing department, supporting the communication needs of their government departments and agencies.  It leaves the U.S. federal government Public Affairs and Communications operation looking widely untamed, disorganized and inefficient, by comparison.

The COI has done us all a favor, U.S. and U.K. alike, by reviewing the existing literature on behavior theory and change models with the hope of distilling some principles and practices that would guide future public sector communication efforts.   After all, on both sides of the pond, “fixing” some of the countries’ most difficult and expensive problems requires people to change behavior.  And both governments turn to communications to affect that behavior change.

Developing effective communication efforts to achieve this goal, however, is no easy task. In behavior theory, it is now generally accepted that people don’t always make “rational,” beneficial decisions.  So we can’t just put forth the information important for sound decision making and assume they will accept and incorporate it into their lives.  And that’s where the work of the COI comes in.

We might argue over aspects of the COI’s five-step process for behavior change communications planning.  But the aim of the effort is unassailable:  attempting to bring greater consistency, efficiency and effectiveness to the entirety of the government’s communications efforts is a good thing.  Oh that it were possible in the U.S. as well. The closest we’ve come is the GAO report on PSA prevalence and activity within the federal agency, and even that was a one-off report, now dated.

Recognizing we’re a long way off from a U.S. version of a COI, perhaps a nudge to the COI is better placed: a nudge to continue this instructive work for the benefit of the wider communications community.   And with such good guidance, we as communication planners can act a little more “rationally” in the decisions we make, ourselves, when developing public sector communication plans.

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Posted in Government, Marketing, Social Marketing | No Comments »

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