Decidedly Different: the Branding of the Novick Senate Campaign
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 by Steve NovickI’m still not sure what “branding” is, but I do know that it matters. According to The Oregonian, my campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Oregon—although ultimately unsuccessful—was good at it. In its profile piece on me, the paper said:
“Win or lose, Novick has created a political brand for himself. His political ads have gone viral on the Internet and you can’t go to a Democratic event without seeing people wearing ‘votehook.com’ buttons.”
Now, again, we lost, so apparently branding isn’t everything. But I think it’s fair to say that we did better than expected. As a first-time candidate running against the speaker of the State House, I was outspent by roughly 2-to-1, and lost 45 percent to 42 percent. Compared to other recent “progressive underdog vs. moneyed establishment candidate” Northwest races, that’s not bad. In 2000, Maria Cantwell outspent progressive underdog Deborah Senn in Washington’s Senate primary by about 2-to-1—and won the race by an even larger margin.
What kind of brand did we create, and how did it relate to my substantive positions? Well, like thousands of other candidates before me, I ran as a “different kind of politician” who wasn’t going to play “politics as usual.” My version of being “different” and “unusual” consisted of being a plainspoken, truth-telling progressive sort who wasn’t going to pretend we can have everything for nothing.
We also had four ads—“To tell the truth,” “Beer with Steve,” “Pull the plug” and an endorsement ad—the first two emphasizing the “different” angle by playing on my physical uniqueness: I’m 4 feet 9 inches tall with a left hand made of stainless steel.
“To tell the truth” followed the form of an old TV show, with three guys reciting biographical details (Steve fighting polluters, etc.) and pretending to be me, followed by me in person (in a shot that emphasized my shortness) saying, “I don’t look like a typical politician, but I won’t act like one either. I will fight for the little guy.”
We ran $60,000 worth of that ad—a pittance in a statewide race—in January, four months before the vote (way before most campaigns would start advertising). It served our purpose of jump-starting the campaign, generating a pile of earned media coverage (including a front-page story in The Oregonian) and establishing the brand. And it won us the early lead in the polls—although, with both candidates largely unknown, the vast majority was still undecided.
These ads emphasized my “brand” as a different kind of politician. And on the campaign trail, I talked about the rich people I’d met who were willing to pay Social Security taxes on all their income, the doctors who were willing to make less money. I talked about the power company that successfully encouraged conservation by putting smiley faces on the electric bills of households that used less electricity than average.
We have good reason to think that we did best among the people who paid the closest attention to the race. For example, we won most of the newspaper endorsements—unusual for the nonestablishment candidate against a legislative leader.
But of course, a large number of voters don’t obsessively read or watch political news: They learn about candidates through advertising. So we had to convey the guts of what I was saying in 30-second ads.
So, in the end, what worked and what didn’t? Well, we won in Portland. We won in Benton County, which is largely Corvallis, a relatively affluent college town. We won a notably liberal coastal county. We lost everywhere else.
Clearly a huge financial advantage is hard to overcome. We had to focus most of our resources on the Portland market, which is the biggest and most expensive. We didn’t have much left over for the Eugene market—and we got killed there, even though Eugene’s a liberal place and I grew up in that county. Nor did we put much into the Medford/Ashland market. As a result, we lost Ashland, even though ideologically and temperamentally that liberal enclave should have been ours.
But we successfully identified me as a “different” candidate. I wasn’t just a generic Democrat against another generic Democrat. I was the little guy with a left hook who promised to be different. We did better than you’d normally expect if you were outspent 2-to-1. Normally, if you’re drowned in money, you’re drowned in votes, too.
We ran a campaign that did about as well as it could among newspaper readers and people who were just really ready for something different. What we failed to do was let issue-oriented (rather than personality-oriented) voters who DON’T read the paper all the time know how much I cared about the issues that matter to them.
So the bottom line is: Branding matters. Humor helps. Not every consumer responds to the same message.
And money matters too.
I traveled to Washington, D.C., last week for an advocacy conference that included two days of whirlwind visits to Capitol Hill, meeting with nearly 25 members of Congress.