I Want the Leads! The Glen Garry Leads!

It seems that online political advertising is here to stay.  That’s not really a revelation since, the Internet is increasingly the primary mode of media communication. Best Practices for Online Political Advertising  has some interesting articles about the subject.

What I’d like to focus on a bit is sales, because when we cut all of the fat off this thing, political advertising is just Sales 101.  Different political machines are trying to get you to buy their product, which, in this case is a politician.  And as any good salesman knows, good leads lead to more conversions. 

Lead generation seems to be big business now in the political sphere.  The more you can micro-target the right leads, the more success you will have getting votes.  But bartering and trading leads seems disingenuous.  If I put my name on a list it’s because I am interested in that product.  I really don’t want my information sold to someone else.  If we want to talk about best practices, political organization should stop selling/sharing information to each other.

In the Best Practices piece, Karen Jagoda quotes Nick Nyman, CEO of Dynamic Logic, “…Consumers, needing ways to deal with [the] advertising onslaught, have developed mental and technical firewalls to help filter it all. Keeping that context in mind, the challenge for online advertisers is to understand what techniques are likely to penetrate these fire-walls to engage consumers.”

I see this as a problem.  If I put a firewall up, I don’t want someone to slyly figure out how to penetrate it.  That’s exactly what gave the salesman of yesterday such a bad rap.  It’s why we have bad associations with car dealerships—and why Carmax has been so successful (no pushy salemen).

So what’s the solution?  If I’m a politician, how can I best the message out without buying leads and acting like a salesman?  Well, let’s look back to the commercial sector for some more clues.  Companies that are having incredible success are doing so because they have incredible products.  Apple has a cool music player.  Google has lots of information.  Carmax has inexpensive cars without pushy salesman.  Each of these companies also have great websites.  When you need the product, you go to the website; you have a good experience; you tell your friends.

The political solution is to be a great politician, get great SEO optimization and a killer website.  Those who want to find you will.  Those who don’t want to find you, don’t need to be bothered by you.  This might seem to fly in the face of traditional marketing, but if you stay in the press (hopefully in a good way) people will hear about you on their terms, which is what they want.  People don’t want to be force-fed political speak.  And there’s nothing more disingenuous that a smiling pol on an internet banner ad.