Adam Radwanski
It is something on which strategists and communications experts with all of Canada's political parties can agree: They need to get better at online advertising.
That's because their favourite method for reaching voters for the better part of the past half-century, television advertising, is rapidly declining in effectiveness. With the notable exception of live sports viewers, for whose attention the parties fight tooth-and-nail, a good number of Canadians are now PVRing their favourite shows and skipping over the commercials. That's assuming they have cable at all, which particularly in urban centres is becoming less of a given – mostly because younger Canadians are consuming more of their media online.
But capturing the attention of online audiences is not something that comes naturally to the political class. And to understand why that is, it's instructive to look at the list, released earlier this week by Google, of which YouTube ads Canadians watched the most in 2014.
With the exception of two ads featuring cute and cuddly animals (puppies in one, a kitten in the other), most of these ads are notable for their quirkiness or irreverence or rawness. Some, like TD Bank's "thank you" ad, have gimmicks (albeit a very heartwarming one in that case); others, like American Greetings's "World's Toughest Job," take a couple of minutes to set up a punchline or twist. And perhaps most importantly, just about all of them are ambiguous and a little confusing off the top – enough to hold the attention of a viewer who would quickly click away from anything predictable.
Anyone who has followed this country's recent political campaigns will know that none of those characteristics are exactly compatible with them. As a premium has been placed on message discipline, their communications have generally become as blunt, safe and predictable as possible. Not without reason, parties are wary of anything remotely offbeat or humorous, for fear of being misconstrued by their opponents or taken the wrong way by media.
The sorts of ads that are in line with that mentality aren't designed to be enjoyed, so much as to pound a simple message – about why a leader should be trusted, or an opponent shouldn't – into the brains of captive viewers. But unlike with traditional television audiences, most online viewers only have to watch what they want to watch.
There are plenty of incentives for parties to start thinking more about that latter audience, even beyond the fact that it's growing while television is struggling to keep what it's got. Online ads are still relatively cheap. They can be directed far more easily toward target voters, using both geographical filters and more sophisticated analytics. And they offer the opportunity to go beyond simply conveying a message, and redirect viewers to parties' websites – allowing the identification (and gathering of contact information) of potential supporters and donors and volunteers.
For all of those reasons, while television advertising will remain by far their biggest campaign expenditure, federal parties can be expected to spend more on online advertising in the 2015 federal election campaign than in previous ones.
But to really make the most of those dollars, and to avoid going unnoticed by generations that don't consume media the way older ones did, they'll have to somehow get past their risk aversion enough to embrace media that reward the unconventional.
Adam Radwanski