If I had a say in the matter, I would urge the Democratic Party to step back from its election-cycle branding strategy, and start a year-round marketing effort to brand the party. That is, take a page out of the corporate world, where branding is a perpetual process. Right now, the parties dump all of their marketing cash into the weeks and months before an election. If you are a candidate, there's really no other way to do it. But if you are a political party, it should be marketed no differently than Coke or Nike (accounting for much smaller budgets than those giants, of course).
There is no better model of the benefits of non-election-centric advertising than NDN's strong efforts to brand the Democratic Party to Latinos. And the vehicle? Univision's World Cup coverage.
The NDN Futbol $2 million television and radio campaign to run the NDN ads throught the World Cup is looking particularly good given the HUGE numbers this tournament has generated.
The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported Tuesday that Univision's audience -- 1,442,000 households -- is up 133 percent from 2002. ABC has averaged 3,739,000 viewers for eight weekend games, up 103 percent from 2002. ESPN's audience (1,370,000 households) is up 150 percent, and ESPN2's (938,000 households), is up 66.7 percent.
The big jump in the Spanish-language ratings included the June 10 Mexico-Iran match, which was the No. 1 weekend daytime program among adults 18-34 for any network, Spanish or English. That figure was surpassed by the June 24 Mexico-Argentina game, with an audience of 6.7 million, making it the single largest sportscast among Hispanic viewers ever, including Super Bowls, and the fifth-most-watched Spanish-language telecast of any kind, ever.
NDN hopes to continue running ads like these throughout regular (non-World Cup) futbol coverage throughout the year, every year, making this a long-term process to deliver the Democratic message to one of the electorate's biggest swing demographic.
The politics of constituency groups would make this sort of campaign impossible at the DNC. If the Latinos got an ad campaign, every other group would demand their own effort. So such specialized campaigns are best left to 527 groups.