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How Many Times Does A Policy-Maker Need To See Your Message?

One of the hardest decisions to make when designing a public affairs campaign is deciding how many impressions to deliver to each target. There's no one-sized fits all answer to this question, but in today's short read, we suggest some ways to arrive at your unique answer.

Let's First Be Clear What Your Goal Is

To answer how many ads to deliver, let's first be crystal on what your goal is, because we often hear confusion on this point.

The goal of a public affairs campaign is not to create recall as it is in other forms of advertising. So throw out metrics you might hear like the "rule of 7," which are about creating brand awareness, or perhaps increasing name I.D. for a candidate.

The goal is not necessarily even to persuade politicians of the merits of your point. Businesses with public affairs challenges often mistakenly hold this belief—the wishful thinking that if you simply convince politicians that you're right on the policy, they will enact it. We'd have much better laws in this world if things were that simple.

Policy may be part of the calculus when a politician goes to vote, but what we're concerned with in a public affairs campaign is politics, much more than policy. So the precise goal of a public affairs campaign is to tip the balance of the politics on your issue. In other words, the true underlying question in determining how many impressions to deliver is: "how many impressions will tip the balance on my issue?"

The answer to that question will depend on numerous inputs such as:

• How politically charged is your topic?
• Has your ask failed before?
• How far ahead or behind are you to begin with?
• Who is the opposition and how well-funded and connected are they?
• How well-executed is your campaign and the opposition's?
• How expensive is your ask to taxpayers?
• How scarce are government dollars in the current budget environment?
• How many competing priorities does the government body have?
• How powerful are your bill sponsors or the opposition's?
• How strong is your coalition and the opposition's?

 . . . and countless other both concrete and subjective inputs that create the full political picture of your issue.

Ok, But Are There Rules of Thumb?

Having hopefully convinced you that each campaign is a snowflake, are there any useful rules of thumb to determine how many ad impressions you need to win?

We find little to draw on in the literature about recall or awareness in advertising, because as we've said, those are not the goals. 

But as a benchmark, we find it interesting to observe what commercial advertisers do in the real world in low funnel sales situations. After all, these campaigns are focused on something much more than recall or persuasion. They are campaigns to convert a sale. And aren't we all just trying to convert sales of different types? Some of us sell microwaves and some of us sell legislation—but we're all trying to get a buyer to vote, either with their wallet, or literally. And here's how commercial advertisers approach this question:

• E-commerce and retail merchants like Amazon, Walmart, and Temu target 10-30 ads per day, per customer.
• Subscription companies like HelloFresh or Dollar Shave Club target 10-25 ads per day per user.
• High-ticket consumer electronics brands like Apple, Peloton, and Samsung target 15-30 ads per day.
• Car companies target 50 or more ads per day per lead.

These companies spend billions as industries every year refining their advertising strategies—far more than any public affairs campaign in the world.  And they are voting with their pocketbooks that these are the right impression goals to target.

Now ask yourself—what's more valuable, a big screen TV, or your legislation? 

And remember something else as well. Unlike in commercial advertising, our targets in public affairs campaigns are irreplaceable. There's only one Speaker to let your bill up for a vote. There's only one Governor to sign it. There's only one Cabinet Secretary who regulates your client. But there are countless other organizations competing for those decision-makers' attention, both political and commercial advertisers.

Toyota has tens of millions of people it can sell its cars to. How many ads do you think it would deliver if there were only one person who could buy a Prius?

All of this speaks to being as precise as possible with your public affairs strategies to reach decision-makers the maximum number of times you can afford to. Spraying and praying is not a strategy. It's recipe for failure when you're trying to tip the balance in a zero sum game. 

We'll continue to unpack those precision strategies each week in this newsletter. And we thank you for continuing to read along.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱  Think about what you're currently in the market to purchase and watch how many times you receive ads for products or services in that category. 

🔱  Review your most recent ad report for impressions per target (frequency), and ask yourself if it's enough to tip the balance given the full spectrum of the politics on your issue.

🔱  Focus your next campaign on maximizing impressions to your key targets. Scrub for waste in your strategies to run up this frequency as high as possible.

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