So, how do we “experiment about it”?
Curiosity > Performance
For most brands and marketers—those that don’t represent nonprofits or NGOs relying on politics to drive engagement—this is a choice time to act out of curiosity rather than pure performance goals; ask the question, “How does my brand fare, and how do my targets behave, during a gargantuan election period?”
Develop creative hypotheses that offshoot from this driving question, quantify how your run-of-business advertising performs amid election saturation, and understand that performance at as many levels as possible: industry, market, segment, product category, audience category, channel, etc. And even more importantly, extrapolate the deltas from these and less remarkable times in the market.
The more layers of circumstance that you quantify and normalize, the more you equip yourself to effectively strategize in the near and farther future. Empower your agency and technology partners to aid you in defining these research-spirited experiments.
Experiment with politics reprieve
Big elections in the U.S., namely the presidential, are deeply passionate and truly exhausting, often with contentious and negative sentiment. They affect consumers as humans and citizens and thus affect brands no matter the segments they cater to.
We all have an opportunity to be a source of reprieve and to create a neat set of hypotheses around it. Calm, the meditation and wellness app, nailed a channel-level test back in 2020 when they ran advertising on CNN on election night of the presidential race; this drove their ascent to the 68th most downloaded iPhone app (a 51 spot increase) and the most downloaded in its category. Calm’s relevance as a reprieve from politics was very high, and its value prop even higher, so this wasn’t a stretch for their brand.
This said, beware of being kitschy or forced, as this is more likely to produce net-negative brand sentiment than anything else. Make sure your most experienced creatives, brand marketers, community and customer care leaders, and agency partners are intimately involved if you experiment with politics reprieve for your brand.
The 2024 Paris Olympic Games
Experiment into the void
Billions around the world will be tuning into the Summer Games in Paris, from linear TV to clips, recaps, memes and more across channels and screens. In addition, NBCUniversal is set to easily break its Olympic Games advertising bookings of $1.2 billion. A variety of experiential, TV and streaming programs will be delayed, reduced or canceled in 2024 to defend against diverted attention to the Olympics, but these entities are likely overshooting their forecasts out of financial and performance caution. If you can find an opportunity in the void—the participants of canceled programming who likely won’t be glued to the Summer Games—experiment within it.