In August I wrote in a post about how the US Presidential elections are going to be a test of how the power of advertising is correlated to advertising budgets (reproduced below for easy reference).
Well the results are now out and happily the right man, in my opinion, is once again in the White House. Mitt Romney and friends (the super PACs) out spent Obama and friends roughly 3.5 to 2 in terms of television advertising. Every post-election analysis has attributed Obama's success to two factors. Obama's appeal to key demographics - women, younger people, Hispanics and Asians- and Obama campaign's "ground game" - a micro-analytics driven micro-marketing effort to get out the vote.
The lessons for marketers are clear. Ensure your product answers felt consumer needs and get out there and get in touch with the consumer where the consumer lives, works and shops. Yes advertising works but not beyond a threshold. Too much advertising, in today's world,is the sign of a lazy marketer caught up in yesterday's paradigm.
The Big Bucks School of Advertising's Coming Big Test
A US Supreme Court judgement has opened the doors for Big Money to spend big on political advertising (albeit marginally disguised) leading up to November's election of the US President.
Groups supporting Romney,the Republican nominee, are likely to outspend groups supporting Obama by a very large margin. I think of Romney as Retroactive Romney given his penchant to re-arrange everything in his past to suit the present and his notion of the future. And I am thunderstruck on how the Republicans are trying to sell a blatantly pro-rich agenda to the toiling masses.
There is no guarantee that the groups supporting Romney will come up with good advertising but the bucks will definitely be big. This will put the Big Bucks school of advertising to real test. The Big Bucks school believes that advertising works mainly through media pressure. Whether or not the advertising is good matters only marginally. Even if the product is bad, high-pressure advertising can get a very large number of people to try the product. Therefore when movie studios feel that a movie is a dud they increase the pre-release advertising pressure.
The Big Bucks school of advertising has come to dominate advertising circles. Does it work? The ones who know are not telling. Advertising and media people have, quite obviously, much invested in this school and will not admit to the inconvenient truth even if they know it. The marketing and corporate bosses will not own up to mistakes that have cost them big bucks.
The US Presidential campaign grips me for various reasons. One among them is that it will be a very public, undeniable test of the Big Bucks School of Advertising. If Romney wins the Big Bucks school of advertising wins and we can all spend the next four years watching a really bad movie unfold. If he loses will marketing and advertising circles reconsider and re-evaluate? Let's wait and see.
