NDP: Win A Date with Tom Mulcair!

The NDP`s latest fundraising campaign offers a chance to watch a hockey game with Tom Mulcair, if you donate as little as 5 dollars to the party. While Tommy may be not as much a draw as say Trudeau for a date, it would still be interesting to sit and grill him about his plans for the party for a couple of hours and make him buy you beer and hot dogs for the exhorbitant arena prices. I have two questions about the campaign. First, why am I ignoring the emails? Second, I wonder how he feels about the whole thing.



I signed up to receive emails from the NDP, so that I could receive updates from the party. Instead, they function as a platform for a big, red "donate now" button. I stopped reading them because the information they send is essentially useless for me and they send far too many of them. I suspect for every forty people like me who views these emails as flies buzzing in my inbox, there is one person who will donate on the tenth email in seven days (I may be exaggerating on the amount of emails - this is my feeling of the frequency). If we follow the law of averages, the more people you contact the more likely they will donate. Great! Simple formula.



Or slightly incorrect. For people like me, who aren't inclined to donate willy nilly and get annoyed at the clutter in my inbox, the amount of emails may actually be impacting their perception of the party and may have some further negative consequences far beyond the reach of the campaign. I place my vote based on the party platforms. What if I were to get so irritated at the fundraising tactics that this would bias my interpretation of the platform to the extent I would see otherwise positive goals to actually be negative. How do you fundraise without turning people off from the cause?
 

I don't have a ready answer to that but I do know that this may be fine line to cross.

As for my second question, I am sure that Tommy - may I call you that? - enjoys spending time with a complete stranger who won some contest by donating five dollars to the campaign. Maybe he looks forward to getting to know someone new over a bonding experience like hockey. Dear Tommy I hope you have a great blind date and I hope that the campaign was worth the date.



On a side note, this campaign has been part of a larger effort to connect with a younger demographic. Their previous effort to engage young voters with the "pick the best sticker" campaign is another example. "I heart NDP?" Really? I suggest that they may have more success if they dressed Tommy in a flannel shirt and got him to wear a toque. They're already halfway there...

Ambivalent Motives: A Backlash Against the "Caring" Insurance Company

I don't watch the super bowl, but I ended up watching the "dead boy" commercial (and hearing my neighbours cheer every time someone scored a goal). Nationwide insurance wanted attention. That much is clear. Why else pay for a commercial spot during the super bowl. If this was their sole aim, they have succeeded on that point. Out of all the ads aired during the super bowl, theirs has received the most buzz on twitter and elsewhere.

But, and here is the big but: the response has been largely negative. Why? Because their motives appear ambivalent. Are they airing a commercial because they care about preventing drowning? Or, do they have a more nefarious purpose? One more closely aligned with the central purpose of ad space, selling or promoting a product. After the storm around the ad had already started to rage, Nationwide stepped up to the microphone and claimed that they cared. They were simply trying to start a conversation.

Yet judging from the twitter storm, many believe that they were trying to promote their product on the graves of innocent children. A rather unsettling association to say the least, and I would guess, not the conversation they were intending to start.

Part of the problem stems from the ad itself. Not only does it play on a person's heartstrings (most people do not want children to die, especially a sweet, lovely child like the one on screen), but it also uses the device of a surprise reveal that emphasizes the negative emotions. It is only at the end of the commercial that we learn why the child will never learn to ride a bike, to fly, and to get cooties. The child drowned. The surprise reveal is a trick that acts as an intensification device. In the commercial, it emphasizes an extremely negative outcome that partially places the responsibility for that outcome on the viewers. Ouch. The viewer now feels like they've been tricked and they feel guilty for the child's drowning.

Besides for the heavy emotional content in the context of light entertainment, why would the most negative motive be the one many jump to first? If google is any indicator of the widespread perception of insurance companies, it's not surprising that an insurance company is associated with say, "evil" or "scam" or "crooked." Those three extremely negative associations appear in the top five suggestions when you type in: "insurance companies are..."


Counteracting the negative perception of a company is one of the key motives behind initiating a public awareness campaign like this one here. Even though the company claims that they have been working with experts for more than 60 years to make homes safer, this is not the message that comes across. When designing the campaign, I don't think that the negative associations with insurance companies were taken seriously and addressed outright. The ad appeared to be the sheep's wool, hiding the wolf underneath.

A better strategy would have been to acknowledge the wolf. The ad could have begun with....

"Let's start a conversation about safety"
"We know our money can never compensate for a child's death"
"Meet..."

Then the original ad could have continued and perhaps the backlash would have been different.

Or not. Aren't insurance companies evil?