The Entertainment Gathering

He’s going to talk about something outside of work, Real Networks. A joint effort of the Glaser Progress Foundation and the Center for American Progress.

They want to treat “progressive” like a brand that is nutured and managed, just like any other brand. They want to educate Americans about what it means to be a progressive.

He wants to change the political paradigm in America to Liberal/Conservative to Progressive/Conservative, and create a durable progressive majority.

Several phases, first learned what Americans think about Progressive. Create some test ads and run them. Then shared all the data. Finally scale it up.

They found the Liberal brand is quite tarnished, but Progressive isn’t as well known. They felt there was a huge opportunity to educate Americans on the meaning of progressive. They tried 30 second TV ads as an education vehicle, used Zimmerman Markman Agency, and ran them in Columbus, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. Did focus groups, 15 scripts, shot 8 concepts, showed them to online focus groups, picked the 3 winning campaigns, and ran one in each market. This was all about a month ago.

He’s showing the commercials, which are available on Youtube.

The early resultss were favorable, it increased progressive self identification, they were regarded more favorably. They spent 500k over 3 weeks in Indianapolis. They ran a lot, 90% of the population saw the ad 5x a week, recall was 11-23%, which is low. Two reasons: it came out of the blue, no context, and the Tivo effect.

They put the ads on the internet about 2 weeks ago, have been viewed over 500,000 times. MoveOn did a vote on which their users would like to see more of, and the Mac/PC spoof got fewer votes than Pro/Con video. MoveOn is going to run the winning ad nationally on CNN.