Fire Them Now (eBook)

The 7 Lies Digital Marketers Sell...And the Truth about Political Strategie

Phillip Stutts (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
276 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-61961-885-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Your digital marketing firm is failing your business, not delivering on the kind of passion, commitment, and innovation they promised. To ensure that you're getting the best, you need to know how to demand better-by learning from the incredible strategies of the fast-paced arena of political marketing. In Fire Them Now, Phillip Stutts illuminates common failures within the digital marketing industry and explores the strategies and tactics used in politics that win for businesses. He examines why political marketers are producing some of the most successful marketing in the game-working with limited budgets and tight deadlines while demonstrating unwavering work ethic, adaptability, and proactivity. This eye-opening guide offers a new pathway for businesses to succeed in an ever-changing economy, providing the tools you'll need to challenge your current digital marketing agency. And if they can't deliver the win, Fire Them Now!

Textauszug

Chapter One

1. You Must Innovate Now

“Business has only two functions, marketing and innovation.”

Peter Drucker

Four days before Election Day 2000, a story broke about George W. Bush that had the potential to completely derail his candidacy in the critical last days before the voters made their choice for President. The last weekend of the race, it came out that, back when he was thirty years old, Bush had been arrested for a DUI.

Today, most people who even remember this story wonder why we all cared so much. Back then, though, this was a really big deal. It wasn’t just that, decades previously, Bush had been driving under the influence; what made it worse was that he hadn’t revealed this transgression before his campaign. He’d tried to sweep it under the rug.

Trust me: that never works.

I’ll never forget those final days after the story broke the weekend before Election Day. I was backstage in Las Cruces, New Mexico, alongside Dick Cheney and his aide. We watched news reports on the breaking DUI story together on one of the TV monitors huddled backstage of the rally venue. Today, it would have been more like the three of us getting simultaneous phone notifications of the tweets and Google Alerts pouring in, but back then, it was a breaking news story across all the major TV networks.

I asked Cheney if he’d known about the DUI. “No,” he replied. “I’m just finding out about it, too.”

The question on all of our minds was how it would affect Election Day. Al Gore’s campaign was executing a strong Get Out the Vote machine, and several states that shouldn’t have been close were now battlegrounds.

“I’m sure it’ll be all right,” Cheney said, his voice less confident than his words.

I’ll bet you already know what I’m going to say next. It wasn’t all right.

Yes, Bush still won the Presidency, but it took a knock-down, drag-out fight that eventually wound up being settled by the Supreme Court, all because the results were simply too close to call. Why was the election too close to call? Well, polls showed us that the DUI bombshell definitely contributed to the razor-thin margin. States in which Bush had a slight lead—key states, like Florida and New Mexico—shifted over that last weekend from clearly in our court to hanging in the balance.

Florida became the final battleground in what had become an ugly fight. I, along with countless other political operatives, lawyers, and campaign officials, were shipped to Florida to help on the recount team. When I say this was a battle, I’m not exaggerating. For an entire month, our team fought like hell.

Our directive was this: do whatever you have to do to block anything that’s not a clear vote for Al Gore. Gore’s team had the exact same strategy. For a month, both Bush and Gore recount teams scrutinized thousands of ballots, and battled over anything ambiguous. If a person had punched a ballot five times for all the Presidential candidates, Bush’s recount team screamed that it shouldn’t be discounted, and Gore’s team screamed that it was clearly a vote for Gore. Remember the whole “hanging chad” controversy? Imagine eating, breathing, and sleeping hanging chads 24/7. It was war.

In the end, as you know, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor in their decision on Bush v Gore, and Bush won Florida, and the election, by a margin of 537 votes out of 5,825,043 votes cast.

(By the way: think about that insanely slim margin of victory every time you consider skipping the polling station line on Election Day—yes, your vote matters.)

It was a victory, but it had nearly ended us. In the aftermath, there was one prevailing thought. We never want to go through that again.

The way forward was clear—we needed to innovate. We needed to study what had gone wrong and come up with new, creative methods for reaching voters for the reelection in four years. We wanted that reelection to be as painless as possible.

We asked ourselves: How could we innovate to make sure we were never put in that kind of position again?

You Win or You Die

Politics is unlike every other business on earth, but a political campaign is also like a startup business…on steroids.

On a political campaign, we often start with candidates who often have no money. We start with zero. We have to raise millions of dollars in a very short period of time, and then we have to spend every one of those millions of dollars in a small window of the campaign—usually ranging from ten to eighteen months. There’s no growth capital, no thought of a future investment beyond Election Day. We raise money, and then we spend it all—to win.

This means that every dollar has to count. We can’t waste a single penny. Talk about a lean startup mentality—if we deploy a strategy that bombs, we have to immediately pivot to a strategy that will be a winner.

We don’t have time to talk in endless circles or hold days of meetings. We move swiftly because there is no other choice. Election Day is our deadline, and it’s inescapable.

The testing that goes on inside a political campaign is intricate and epic. Every single concept has to be tested; every single audience has to be hit with a whole landscape of concepts to figure out what will reach the most voters the most effectively. We don’t have the luxury of coming up with ten concepts—two or three of which may be winners, and seven of which will fail—and spending a million dollars to try out all of them. We have to perform microtest after microtest to narrow down exactly what will work and put our money where it will count.

The world of corporate and small business marketing operates entirely differently. When a business client signs with a marketing firm, they typically sign a contract of a year or more; sometimes with a costly upfront hourly rate. For the business owner, the money they’re spending on their marketing firm is a total crapshoot. The strategy the marketing firm comes up with might work and achieve the business’s objectives, but it also might not. The marketing firm gets paid out on their contract either way. The marketing firm can do what it usually does with all of its clients: come up with a spread of strategies that test a wide field of audiences, but probably doesn’t specifically target any one audience with any efficiency. Simply put, there’s no motivation to win, only the obligation to fulfill the terms of the contract and execute a marketing strategy.

Lie #1: You Must Sign a Long-Term Contract

Traditional and digital marketing agencies often require unbreakable long-term contracts, which are set up so that they always win, even if their client doesn’t (anything over three months, by the way, should be considered a long-term contract). Sometimes these agencies even demand an up-front signing bonus for the “privilege” of hiring them.

That’s bullshit.

In politics, we take the opposite tack: the best political marketing firms think about the client’s outcome first, and back up their work with contracts that always go month-to-month. If our candidate isn’t happy with our performance, they can instantly end the contract. And if our candidate ends up losing, we lose, because we’re out of a job (and we’re less likely to be hired in the future). We prove ourselves every single day with the knowledge that if we’re not on track for our client’s win, we won’t get paid.

After the 2000 recount, we took apart everything we knew about voter outreach and rebuilt our strategies from the ground up. Before 2000, Democrats had dominated “get out the vote” organizing for decades; the close call in 2000 forced the Republican Party to change, innovate, and figure out a way to beat the Democrats at the game they’d been winning.

Out of the ashes of the “hanging chad” wars, the 72-Hour Program was born. This program focused on the last three days before Election Day, and everything that could be done to motivate and persuade voters in those final seventy-two hours. By the end of 2003, I found myself the National 72-Hour Director for the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. From Karl Rove to the operatives in the field, everyone imagined and tested everything that could possibly be tested about how voters are motivated to turn out and vote in the last three days of an election.

When was the last time you spent a year of your life focused on predicting, controlling, carefully planning, and executing what would happen over a single three-day period? Well, that’s what I did; twelve straight months of work went into executing the 72-Hour...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.4.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-61961-885-0 / 1619618850
• ISBN-13: 978-1-61961-885-5 / 9781619618855