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Were Lincoln Project commercials and ad buys effective?
Posted by on November 9, 2020 at 5:15 pmI hope to keep this thread as political neutral as possible but I’m interested in hearing from others who have experience in this space.
I’ve seen multiple people wonder if their ads were effective at all. My own opinion is both a yes and no.
Relative to most political ads, LP’s ads were far more creative combining both humor, snark, and relevancy. But do they hep to turnout the vote in a significant manner?
Directly? I’d say no. Indirectly, I do think they help. I compare them to companies who engage in brand advertising. Their job isn’t necessarily direct response but to help improve mindshare. They want to stay top of mind in the eyes of the consumer so that when it’s time to vote or donate, their organization is considered top of mind.
Their other goal, while not stated explicity, is to build their own internal list to do whatever they want down the road such as supporting other Republican initiatives or self-interest.
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7 Replies
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Very interested to hear more takes about this.
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As with any marketing, I think it depends on how “effective” is defined. In other words, what KPI is being used to determine the answer.
If the KPI was buzz, then they worked. Most times they released a new ad, it was covered in major news outlets. They were also shared fairly heavily on social media. (To be fair: I’m basing that last point on nothing but what I observed, I don’t have #s on shares, etc.)
The fact that the election when the direction LP wanted it to actually muddies the water a bit. I guess there would have to be polling to follow up on if people report being swayed by the ads. I haven’t seen polling along those lines, however, I’ve not looked.
But getting back to my original point: if LP is was measuring a KPI around “buzz,” then I’m sure they’d consider them effective.
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I’d look at it as a multiclick attribution thing. I saw the data from Arizona where I believe it said 100,000 voters in the Phoenix area voted straight republican other than for president and senator. So that’s saying something had them flip. Of course the Cindy McCain and Jeff flake endorsements would have had an impact as well. And presumably the John McCain attacks. In politics it’s not just one touch to persuade and best guess is Lincoln stuff was part of it. I suspect not a big part in the scheme of things. Would be ideal to see sharing by party.
Also – what this means to me is the narratives of “Arizona flipped to blue due to demographics” are at best not telling the whole story. I think it’s more accurate to say “Arizona is a red state that supported Biden” -
Coincidentally enough, AboveTheLaw just did a great write-up on this from a strategy (not media buyer) perspective titled: [The Lincoln Project Got Every. Damn. Thing. They. Wanted.](https://abovethelaw.com/2020/11/the-lincoln-project-got-every-damn-thing-they-wanted/)
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Without any data to go on, gut sense: I think it was highly, highly effective brand work, with the ultimate goal being whatever the OPPOSITE of brand lift is. Brand depression for team Trump, lol.
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I would agree with your assessment completely.
More so than individual donations, on the PPC side, it’s that end user demographic data / remarketing lists that has the real value for LP and the like. The “revenue” (if you will) can come from multiple streams, if you can prove you have a high value audience.
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I actually was involved in a political project, but not in the US.
We set up an incrementality test across different locations in reference to historic voter data and recent polling.
The uplift wasn’t as big as with product/brand centric campaigns, but there was still an average uplift of +20% votes in the target locations.
Not enough to make a significant difference in absolute numbers, but still proving that the concept of political ads work well.
But as you already said it all comes down to the message and targeting. I also expect Google to restrict targeting options for political ads in the near future.
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