How Alaska Candidates Can Engage Millenials

This is an interesting article on how political campaigns can reach millennials. The Alaska Dispatch News is already offering sponsored content and the Alaska Republican Party and Alaska State Senate Majority are renting wholesale their own plausible deniability based blogs, but we have yet to see anyone target millennials with native ads.

The Hill — While underwhelming voter turnout has millennials pegged as the apathetic generation, studies examining millennial interest in politics and news show the opposite. We’ve just been looking in the wrong places.

Contrary to their stereotype, millennials are consuming news and not just entertainment news. Theaverage millennial follows four hard news topics at a time, and 69 percent report getting news at least once a day. And they’re not just reading one side of the news. Seventy-three percent of those exposed to views differing from their own report investigating others’ opinions.

While their polling numbers may not currently reflect their obvious civic interest, their lack of activism shouldn’t come as a shock when you consider that historically, even previous generations of young-adult voters have been less likely to vote than their older generations.

This is not a uniquely millennial problem. Reaching and motivating young voters to action has always been a challenge for politicians and until we consider how to effectively deliver our messaging in a way that will be received, we will continue to fail.

Voter mobilization: Where are we going wrong?

In order to understand how to get millennials engaged in political movements, we need to rethink how we communicate political messages and uncover which advertising tactics resonate with millennials.

For decades we’ve relied on television, newspapers, billboards, mail and radio as the preliminary way to reach voters, educate them on initiatives and move them to action. Even with the advent of the Internet, interruptive advertising tactics simply evolved into interruptive display ads, pop-ups and spam.

But the millennial generation, born on the cusp of the internet boom, have different expectations when it comes to the types of advertising they’re willing to accept.

Consumers, of all ages, are becoming less and less patient with disruptive online ads – forcing brands to try a more personal tact in the form of native advertising. Data from BI Intelligence found that spending on native ads will reach $7.9 billion this year and grow to $21 billion in 2018, a significant increase from just $4.7 billion in 2013.

Native ads (paid-for content that is designed to be similar to a website or app’s regular content), are meaningful, relevant and non-disruptive by nature. Their in-stream placement results in two times more visual focus than banner ads, which are processed peripherally and most importantly, they’re favored by young voters.

Among 18 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. who have seen native advertising, nearly 19 percent said that it had a positive impact on their view of the brand being advertised.

Political ad campaigns have a huge opportunity to motivate young audiences via native ads, because like native ads, your politics are personal.

Click here to read the full article.

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