Latas Produces Most Innovative Mailer of the Season

Jeff Latas has set a new bar for political communication with his DVD mailer. Other campaigns have used mass produced DVDs before, but not on such a tight over-all budget, or on such a scale. Generally, campaign DVDs have been distributed to supporters as part of a house party strategy, or for use at public meetings. No campaign I’m aware of has relied so heavily on this method of distributing rich media to get its message out.

Likely more people will learn about Jeff via this DV mailer than will via any of his TV or radio ads. The Latas campaign expects over 50,000 media impressions from this mailer. I assume that means that 25-30K pieces were actually mailed. That’s far more impressions than votes expected to be cast in the CD 8 Democratic primary.

It really is a simple matter of necessity: Jeff doesn’t have the money to buy lots of air time, so he must rely much more heavily on this direct mail work-around to get his media seens than the wealthier campaigns of Giffords and Weiss. The key is to make those mailers much more compelling and convincing than direct mail usually can be (frankly, most of it ends up rather quickly in the recycle bin).

The big question, and the gamble at the heart of this mailer, is whether those high-value voters who are the focus of this mailing are going to be more persuaded by Jeff’s approach than by the more traditional media placements of his rivals. A lot of that will depend on whether people actually use the discs. Over 80% of households with televisions have DVD compatible playback devices (including game consoles and computers), so the ability to use the disc is quite high; the question is if there is the will. I think the novelty of the approach will produce a fairly high level of usage.

If Jeff significantly out-performs the 10-15% of the vote that campaign polls are currently showing, or if he wins, it will be a major triumph for the strategy of skirting the major media outlets that have so inflated the cost of campaigning. If campaigns learn that a rich media mailer not only gets used by voters, but convinces them to vote for a candidate, this approach could quickly become the norm.

The piece certainly could have been done better, with better production values and better organization (for instance, three of the main menu choices lead to the same piece of video), but the overall impression is simple and user friendly. One can imagine a raft of additional useful features which could be included in such a media piece. The disc could have been dual mastered with an audio only track for use in car stereos. It could have been mastered with a separate computer file structure with mp3 and mp4 files for mobile use and free distribution, to encourage viral spread. It could have contained a flash, HTML, or Powerpoint presentation (the latter would be very typical of Jeff’s style) for more detailed position presentations. The videos could have included one to two minute spots on each of Jeff’s most important themes, instead of one longish peice with less complete coverage. Most importantly, the disc could have contained links and files to assist the voter with early voting, locating their polling place, and requesting voting assistance or further information or campaign contact. Such features all add complexity to the user interface, which introduces new problems, but such UI problems will undoubtedly be overcome by future campaigns. But on the whole, such ideas are just the inevitable refinements of a new campaign tool finally coming to maturity.

In the very near future, I think the first piece of media a campaign will start working on may be a DVD mailer such as this one. Or a party could use this tool to more effectively promote its entire slate of canidates in a coordinated campaign. It brings a nearly unlimited amount of rich media content directly to supporters and undecideds much more cost-effectively than is possible in any other way except via the internet. This mailer cost a total of about $1.20 per mailer according to the Latas campaign. That is an excellent cost per voter, especially if you factor in multiple voters per household and any sort of hand-to-hand distribution.  The internet has the draw-back that generally the voter has to be prompted to actively seek your site out. With a DVD mailer, you can move any content you like directly to the voter in a widely used format and in a package that has high percieved value. The result may be a felicitous combination of the impact of broadcast media with the cost of direct mail and the richness and potential interactivity of internet communication.

Whether it was Ross Lampert the Latas campaign manager, or the Latas’ themselves, or someone else who decided on making this DVD the centerpeice of the Latas media campaign, I say "good job, and good luck."