BIG MONEY WINS ELECTIONS
If you ever wonder why the political oligopolies of power win every election in the USA and Canada, follow the money.
BIG MONEY WINS ELECTIONS
From an article in The Epoch Times entitled ‘Politicians Opt for New Tools to Reach Young Voters’, we learn ….
AdImpact, a firm that analyzes advertising data, predicts that $9.7 billion will be spent on political advertising in 2022 [in the USA].
How much will be spent on Canadian political advertising? Maybe 10% or about $1 billion? And it’s a sure bet that the major parties will benefit from the government subsidies and crony connections to be able to spend ~98% of that total. The remaining 15 to 20 minority political parties that register to run in elections will make up the remaining 2%.
How will he reach them [voters]?
Heath Garrett of Strategic Partners & Media makes political ads in Atlanta. He says that the answer used to be simple: television, the big gun in the political ad arsenal. Put your ads there, augment it with drive-time radio, throw in some flyers, yard signs, and door-knocking, and voila, you’ve reached people. Now, it’s more complicated. The big problem? Young people don’t watch television. And the group gets older and bigger every day.
“Those over the age of 50 we can find on broadcast or cable television,” said Garrett, a partner in Strategic Partners & Media. “Under the age of 50, we have to literally identify each household. What programming they’re watching on Hulu, YouTube, or through Facebook and Google searches. There’s a good chance they’ll never see an ad on the 6 o’clock news or primetime TV show.”
Target Marketing strategies
“You can target people more specifically now,” [Democratic strategist] Fred Hicks says said. “The advertisers’ goal, whether it’s TV or phone or computer, they’re trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible as many times as possible. The number of ways to do it grows every year. So the number of ways you have to do it grows every year too.”
“Suppose television ads are the heavy artillery of campaign warfare. In that case, data-driven use of social media and digital platforms might be compared to a division of highly skilled snipers aiming for individual voters”.
The tech platforms can do that. “YouTube knows who the 35- to 40-year-old women in Pittsburgh are. The ad buyer doesn’t have to know,” Robert Aho [a partner of a political consulting company] said. The platforms have enough data about users, like their ZIP codes and IP addresses, to find those people, and they can target ads directly to them. And just them.
Smart campaigns cut costs by adapting the same material to different media, Hicks said. He was asked by The Epoch Times how he would spend a million dollars budgeted for campaign advertising. “I would do 10 percent on digital and social media, spend 30 percent on mail, and the remainder on TV and radio.”
Campaigns can keep production costs down, Hicks said. “You produce a video one time. You strip the audio from the TV version and run it on the radio. You take the video and do a 15-second version or a five-second version for social media. And I can take the visuals and put them on the mailer. We get the most bang for our buck.”
President of the Libertarian Party of Canada resigns.
Today, I received the resignation of the President of the LPoC. Without stating his reasons for this decision, I suspect that they are similar to my own when I resigned as Chairman of the Ontario Libertarian Party in 2018 after our best election run in it’s 43 year history. There are too many obstacles for a small political party to overcome in order to win a sufficient number of seats in Congress/Parliament/Legislative Assembly to be able to make even the smallest dent in the Big Government institutions and crony relationships of the modern era.
The Libertarian formula for creating and sustaining a civil and prosperous society is the only one that I will ever accept. Any hope that this will ever be realized, however, lies with all voters. I left the Party Executive because there can be no hope of success when the Political Oligopoly owns or controls all of the public institutions and crony-captured corporations.
