The week before Nov 5, KFF Health News ran a headline that stated: “Health care hasn’t figured prominently on the campaign trail this fall. These voters wish it would.” When I read it, I muttered an expletive and wondered where reporter Noam Levey gets his data.
In fact, Mr. Levey, within the last four months, in coverage of the November election, there were, on average, 330 stories a week that mentioned healthcare and almost all included quotes from a candidate, surrogate, or spokesperson talking about healthcare.
I know, I analyzed all 7000 of them.
I understand that the focus of your story was specifically on high medical bills and not all the other healthcare-related topics that the media focused on (i.e. women’s health or the ACA or Medicare,) but nearly 15% (over 1000) did in fact discuss the high price of healthcare.
Perhaps you didn’t see those stories because a third of them were in local papers, to which you probably don’t subscribe. I’m also guessing you missed the 2% that appeared in specialty tech or religious publications. But all the rest appeared either in major media outlets (i.e. New York Times, NPR, Wall Street Journal,) online news (where more than half of Americans often get their news ) and health trades, of which KFF Health News is one. Call me skeptical, but it seems unlikely that a reporter, or most voters, can miss more than 100 stories a week that discussed the candidates and their views on healthcare.
It’s not that they didn’t talk a lot about healthcare, it’s that the voters weren’t listening and didn’t hear what they needed to hear.
And there lies the lesson for today’s professional communicators. Whenever a campaign fails (be it political or promotional) it’s because either the messages weren’t clear, the spokespeople weren’t trusted and/or they appeared in places that the audience wasn’t paying attention to. This is today’s reality:
- Top tier media isn’t what the vast majority of your stakeholders, customers and/or constituencies are actually paying attention to. In fact according to Pew’s latest research, one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media and most influencers (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.
- We don’t focus on trust nearly enough. Research has shown that in order to get someone to pay attention to your message they must:
- Trust the source of a message
- Trust that there is a benefit in doing whatever you are asking them to do.
- Perceive a downside to ignoring your message.
- Trust that they have the ability to do what you are asking them to do.
- Two in three Americans have little or no trust what they consider “the media” according to the latest Gallup Research. Those 7000 articles ran in every imaginable type of media and clearly some percentage of those readers trusted the media they were reading, even though some of those media sources were what we categorized as whack-a-doodle sources of conspiracy theories.
- Just because they’re seeing it, they may not believe it. Who is delivering the message matters more than what the messages say. The president-elect spent a good amount of time talking gibberish, but he won because people who were listening to him heard what they wanted to hear.
- Face to face conversations matter more than you think. We as communicators spend far too much effort and energy on getting “media placements” when the most persuasive place to be is in front of the people you are trying to persuade.
- Many politicians flipped house seats in New Hampshire House the old-fashioned way, spending their Saturdays at the dump, pitching voters as they were pitching out their garbage. Strong door-knocking and ground game efforts narrowed the gap in some swing states and helped down-ballot candidates win in others. PR professionals need to get their thought leaders out of the corner offices and off their computers and talk to the people that influence your customers.
- Make sure you are asking the right questions. Audience research today needs to focus on who or what they trust, not what they are familiar with or say they read. Too many marketers treat research as a popularity poll, asking respondents “where do you get information.” That isn’t what you need to know. You need to ask people what sources they trust, and why they trust that information.
