Are We All Wrong All The Time?
February 13, 2024Everyone has biases.
It’s not something we can change. But when it comes to developing effective campaigns, bias is something we have to challenge. Otherwise, bias inevitably leads to assumptions that affect how campaigns are developed, delivered, and perceived by the people we want to engage to secure progressive change across Canada.
Everything that makes us, us, will shape our bias–whether our race, class, gender, life experiences, etc. We at PB need to be honest about that when shaping the right campaign strategy to win progressive fights. But clients working on the front lines come to us with biases too. That’s why I love testing.
Testing is a great way to sense-check our assumptions with target audiences. It also helps us to identify new audiences and understand how secondary audiences may react to a campaign that wasn’t designed for them, so that we know whether we’re creating wider support or opposition around a key issue. Or testing can be useful to find out who will be most receptive to any one campaign message, and who we should then target using paid media advertising.
Here are some examples to explain what I mean:
Identifying new audiences: Healthcare privatization and conservative audiences
An Ontario-based public service union came to us because they wanted to mobilize members of the public concerned about the privatization of health care. This was set against Premier Doug Ford’s conservative mandate and his government’s ongoing efforts to neutralize voter concerns around the threats to health care with his key message: “You will never use your credit card to pay for health care, you will always use your OHIP card to access services.” While effective in pacifying voters, this message ignores the reality healthcare workers and patients already face.
Even though health care was and continues to be a top issue for Ontario voters generally, especially women, the campaign sought to challenge the apathy of 30-50-year-old middle-class, educated voters. The creative concept we developed was designed to plant and foster discomfort to drive home the point that free healthcare should not be taken for granted. Discomfort, as an emotion we could generate through creative content, had the potential to leverage opinions not just in support of public health care but against privatization.
Understanding the challenges in reaching this audience and setting our campaign apart from the sea of sameness in health care and labour advertising, our client agreed to submit the video for testing. The results were phenomenal. Not only did the overall results show statistically significant positive shifts in public opinion for universal public health care (+3.5 points), the organization (+2.9 points), and union membership (+3.3 points), but the breakdown revealed that ads positively engaged more than the intended audience.
Support for public health care shifted positively to a high, statistically significant degree amongst male audiences (+5 points) as well as politically moderate (+3.7 points), right-wing (+5.9 points), and very right-wing audiences (+8.6 points). These are not audience segments that usually engage highly with pro-public healthcare or anti-privatization messaging.
The results allowed us to expand the campaign’s paid media targeting and engage one of Premier Ford’s key voter segments on a vital issue for our client and Ontario residents.
Understanding secondary audiences: BC LNG and First Nations audiences
We partnered with an environmental not-for-profit organization in 2023 to raise awareness of the threat “Liquified Natural Gas” (LNG)–a fracked gas–poses to the climate in British Columbia and beyond. Most British Columbians are largely unaware that BC sits on one of the world’s largest gas reserves: the Montney Play. They have been misled into thinking BC LNG is a “bridge fuel” aiding the province’s and country’s transition to a clean economy. The organization wanted to start shifting that narrative ahead of the 2024 BC provincial elections, knowing that BC MLAs, particularly government MLAs, would be particularly vulnerable to their constituents’ opinions over the next year as they seek re-election.
That said, there were important secondary audiences to be mindful of as we developed the project strategy. One of them was First Nations communities in BC. They are direct stakeholders in the LNG industry for two reasons. One is that the Montney Play gas reserve in northeast BC extends over multiple Nation’s lands and waterways. The second is a legal case led by Blueberry River First Nation against the government which recognized the role of First Nations in projects on their lands, ensuring they are influential stakeholders of any project. The LNG industry brings in boom-and-bust jobs that aren’t sustainable, but economic reconciliation and the need for economic development in remote parts of the province are central to conversations between industry, governments, and First Nations communities that this campaign needed to navigate.
While the campaign’s target audience was built to engage voters in the ridings of specific MLAs who could influence BC government policy as well as those in vulnerable seats, testing allowed us to gather insights on how secondary audiences were reacting to the campaign videos–including First Nations. We learned that the campaign successfully shifted our target audience’s opinion as intended, while also generating a statistically significant positive shift in opinion amongst First Nation, Inuit and Metis viewers to see LNG as a threat (+6.3 points).
This result allowed us to deliver the paid media outreach of the campaign with confidence knowing that it would not raise opposition from a key stakeholder audience, and could likely advance the campaign’s messaging goals within that secondary audience should they see the ads.
Finding the right message: Leveraging members’ voices at the bargaining table
We partnered with a union local in Alberta representing grocery retail workers. They entered into bargaining earlier this year and wanted to secure a fair deal–specifically, wage increases for members. Retail workers already work in a low-pay industry but also continue to face skyrocketing costs in grocery stores resulting from inflation and corporate greed. Many of the workers couldn’t shop where they worked and felt demotivated about the opportunities that could be generated at the bargaining table with management.
The strategy we developed sought to leverage members’ voices to attract customers’ support for workers. Customer pressure would be a massive lever for workers to pull at the bargaining table that could support the unit’s bargaining committee’s goal to secure a better pay offer from management.
We tested three different variations of the videos to identify which would best engage different segments of the grocery chain’s clientele. That testing revealed that ‘anti-store brand’ messaging, leaning into framing management as the villain, was the most successful version. Other videos instead leaned into messaging around fairness, and another leaned into messaging more clearly elevating workers’ perspectives. Specifically, the ‘anti-store brand’ video decreased favourability in the retail chain to the highest degree (-12 points) while also generating statistically significant support for increasing workers’ wages (+5.2 points).
The testing results also revealed that the ‘anti-store brand’ messaging was effective across political opinions, income levels, and geographic settings in Alberta. But the testing results also revealed which segments within those audiences were most convinced by the messaging and which channels they might see ads on. As a result, we were able to refine the paid media plan and deliver the ads on Meta, YouTube, digital programmatic, as well as traditional TV where it would reach hundreds of thousands of retail shoppers in Alberta. In the end, union members secured a pay rise at the bargaining table.
So, to conclude: assumptions need to be tested over and over again. Even if they are confirmed, knowing that you are spending your campaign budget wisely is a good result.
But, more often than not, testing reveals hidden truths about the audiences we’re targeting, the channels we should use to reach them, and the creative content we show them to push forward the progressive issues that matter.