What You Can and Can’t Do With Ads and Marketing

News media — newspapers, TV, radio — are about the least effective way to reach and influence local officials about nature protection and pollution control, at least according to the “Market Inventory and Needs Assessment for the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve,” conducted by Responsive Management in 2007. In this survey of “people who, in a professional or volunteer capacity, make decisions affecting the health of coastal resources,” the respondents reported that their top source of information was peers of one type or another — municipal engineers, professional contacts, environmental groups who come calling.

But if you ask everyday citizens tell you about where they get their information, it would be almost the opposite — media (still #1, but losing ground fast), Internet (still #2 but gaining ground fast), and then personal contacts of various kinds. Here’s what I think this means: online and media communications efforts should be directly aimed at citizens and voters, indirectly aimed at elected officials and other decisionmakers.

For example, if City Alderwoman Jones won’t make time on her schedule to meet with you personally about the upcoming pollution control law, run an ad in the local newspaper that tells the voters in her district that Alderman Jones is neglecting her responsibility to hear a balanced range of views about an upcoming pollution control law. It will certainly get her attention!

Do not run an ad that tells her what you would have told her in the meeting. If she’s anything like the officials interviewed for this study, this is not an effective way to get her to pay attention to this.

Click here to read the full report.

While we’re on the subject

You will be better able to interpret market research reports if you know how they are conducted. And you can get some first hand experience by signing up to take some surveys with the Ipsos i-Say Survey Panel.

As a panelist, you receive periodic invitations to take surveys on various topics. It’s not only free, they’ll thank you with various prizes and sweepstakes entries. But do it for the learning experience, not the chintzy prizes. It will open your eyes to see how serious communicators pre-test their messages before launching them. You can do it, too!

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