Getting Political
If you are reading this at an office, try this out. It works best at offices full of mostly younger people, and it works especially well at places where the core business has little to do with current events. If you work at the New York Times for instance and do this, you will just look like a fool. If you work at a CPA network and your life has been consumed with nutraceuticals, this should work well. What you do is simply ask your co-workers what is taking place on November 2, 2010. Some reading will be able to answer without a moment’s hesitation. They might even ask, “who wouldn’t know the answer?” Oh, how I would love to ask this at one of the major industry gatherings just to see. It’s too bad that ad:tech takes place just after.
For those who don’t know the answer to what takes place on November 2, 2010, the answer is mid-term elections. That of course, brings up another question for some people – what are mid-term elections? A good layman explanation might be to compare mid-term elections to the Winter Olympics. They matter, but they don’t quite garner the same level of interest as the Summer Olympics. While they used to be held on the same years as the summer games, they are now staggered, just like mid-term elections. They are incredibly significant, but most secular politicos only think about the Presidential Election; that is to say if you don’t care much about the election process, you might pay attention to and vote in the Presidential election, but you wouldn’t think twice about mid-terms.
Some saying about glass houses and stones obligates us to point out that the above describes us to a tee. Were it not for a friend of DMConfidential looking to find a way to make a buck during this election season, we might have noticed the increased political ads but wouldn’t have been able to tell you what they were about. Ask us about Google Instant, and we’d have an opinion. Ask us about any of the congressional candidates and we would struggle to name one. For the first time in, perhaps forever, though, we may actually have to care. I don’t know about others, but when I thought of caring about politics, I tended to think about the volunteers I’d see on the streets working so fervently to make others see the light of their candidate. We saw that with Obama in 2008, and chances are we will not see that type of rallying for another generation.
Caring about politics, though, doesn’t have to resemble the type of emotional attachment more commonly found in sports. It can be dispassionate and purely logical. That’s the type of politics that isn’t likely to move you to vote, but it will have to. The fact is, that until now we’ve been spared. Politics has not collided with the operations of online advertising. Legislation has impacted how we do business, but it’s a different type of politics. It was legislation that curbed certain behaviors but didn’t crumple an ecosystem, e.g., CAN SPAM. That that has existed, too, has been largely reactive to very specific activities. All in all, the world of online advertising and performance based marketing online has been able to operate autonomously.
As Adage pointed out in its recent poll, “President Barack Obama inherited a bad economy — and there may not be much he can realistically do about it,” but the question they asked is one that needs to be asked. Is this administration bad for our industry? If you read last week’s article about the Sectors Under Siege, there is a common thread among all of the sectors facing industry altering changes – politics. From education to debt to healthcare and soon pay day loans, those driving the changes all fall along certain party lines. Those party lines are up for reshuffling on November 2, 2010. That’s what make these mid-terms a date that we should care about. This isn’t an emotional issue or even an historic one. It’s a business issue. In other words, is it time for us to actually care about politics?
We’ve struggled to come together as an industry before. Could this be the issue that unites us? As one head of a company in our space remarked to us, “For all affiliates we should be voting Republican this November….no matter what your political views, Republicans are good for the lead gen industry this quarter.” It sounds hard to believe, but it’s hard to argue with the logic. This is a new spot for our industry to be in. We’ve historically been among the more liberal in actions and beliefs. It has made so many a fan of the party that is in control today, but is it perhaps time for a change? Were our industry more organized, we would probably already be seeing multiple newsletters, multiple calls to action for us to get the word out and vote. Yet, we’re almost content to let our fate be dictated instead of us controlling it. Maybe this is the election that teaches us that we should be more organized. Regardless, it should be the last one where we aren’t able to able answer what happens that first Tuesday in November between Presidential elections.
