Over the course of the last 18 years, Majority Strategies has seen the political advertising industry undergo significant change …
Changes we’ve proudly been a large part of and even helped lead.
Targeting Then
Years ago, we were extremely limited in our ability to target. Geographical boundaries were really our only way of selecting a group of voters.
Vote history was a luxury. It wasn’t catalogued, forcing you to send a campaign staffer to all of the local boards of election to retrieve paper copies, then manually typed them into a database if you wanted to pull selects.
Targeting Now
In the early 2000s, microtargeting massively changed political advertising and the ability to reach select groups of voters.
Gone were the days of targeting solely on geography.
The sheer volume of political, consumer and modeling data we have available now is mind blowing, allowing us to get granular with our targeting.
If you want to reach women aged 35-55 in 6 zip codes who are married, have 2 children, support life, oppose Obamacare, read magazines and shop at Kroger, we can pull that.
Now with our mobile technology, we can target voters on their smartphones and tablets, too, just as we do with voter contact mail.
Technology Then
Back when Majority Strategies began, most of our customer service was conducted by phone and fax.
We spent hours on the phones every day, talking to clients, taking changes and discussing strategy and next steps.
The fax never stopped ringing, and we went through reams of fax paper daily. It was an intern’s job just to man the fax machine, as clients faxed us changes at all hours of the day.
In those days, we had one Ethernet line for each side of the office – and too many people to count vying to use it. “I’m going online!” could be heard up and down the hall as people grabbed the line and dialed up service. Email was limited, but we used it when we could.
Files were sent to printers on CDs, creating hours of work every night for our production team as approved mail pieces were loaded and burned onto discs to be shipped via FedEx or even plane to printers across the country.
Technology Now
Today, our office phone rarely rings, but we’re busier than ever. Technology has changed customer service, replacing phone calls with emails, faxes with texts and CDs with Clouds.
We communicate faster and more efficiently with our clients today thanks to these technological advances.
We’re faster on the production side, too, with FTP sites, Clouds and email replacing CDs, FedEx and airlines. Our printers have access to our art within minutes today, providing us with an even greater ability to respond as quickly as our clients need to react.
Design Then
We’re proud to have helped lead the design-side changes within the political advertising industry over the last 18 years, looking at political voter contact mail as advertising and not just something candidates “had” to do.
The message matters, but the design, writing and creativity plays a big role in delivering that message. We’ve always known that.
Like other ad firms at the time, we started with PageMaker, which allowed for the basics in layout and design.
PageMaker was quickly replaced it with Quark in the late 1990s. Quark was the go-to for quite some time, aided by advances in Photoshop that allowed for greater creativity.
Design Today
Today InDesign and Photoshop have taken Quark’s place, and After Effects has been added into the mix as one of the best software programs to create the animated GIFs and cinemagraphs that are revolutionizing the mobile advertising industry.
Everything is faster. Everything is sharper.