The Problem of Reaching Swing Voters

The biggest issue for campaigns this cycle (besides the perennial challenge of staffing) has been reaching swing voters. It used to be 1,000 or heaven-forbid 1,500 gross ratings points would pretty much reach everyone.

Those good old days are gone. Now no amount of TV seems to be able to reach the low information and low engagement section of the electorate. I’ve recently been utilizing DeepRoot’s new Reach and Frequency tool to analyze this problem.

Reach is how many UNIQUE people are reached by advertising and frequency is how often on average those voters are reached. In the good old days we could assume that broadcast tv reached roughly 100% of people so if you wanted to reach them on average 10 times with an ad then you needed to buy 1,000 points.

But now that’s not the case, as we can see with the data from Deep Root.

We can look at the tv consumption habits of swing voters in Pennsylvania. Over a third of these voters watch little to no television, and then 15% essentially are unreachable on either streaming OR television! But the problem doesn’t stop there. The ‘super’ tv consumers are really skewing the average (mean) frequency numbers.

We can use DeepRoots tool to look at the TV creative in PA from the Trump campaign and their allies. In the last two week the average (mean) frequency is 49 impressions BUT that’s driven by the top decile of TV viewers.

Go back to high school stats here on when mean and median matter. The middle decile is only seeing about 34 impressions over the 2 weeks, and if we go further down we have 20% of the voters that saw 8 or less impressions from Team Trump and that’s with them spending huge amounts of money.

Campaigns have to adopt to reach these low tv and low streaming voters with going back to the basics of radio, mail, and text messaging to try to fill in these hard to reach folks.

The future is only getting more complicated. The days of saying okay 1,000 GRPS is enough is just not enough anymore. You need more GRPS, longer time periods, and more media to really reach the hardest to reach voters.

Note: Thanks again for the great team at DeepRoot for their awesome new tool and reach out to them if you want to demo it. Tell Jonathan Duke I sent you!