Mail consultants are honing their pitch to clients in a cycle that will be dominated by record TV and digital ad spending: We can help you message around local concerns for voters while the presidential campaigns put their budgets behind national and international issues.
“TV is still going to be very dominant, no doubt about it, but the ability to hyper-personalize messaging is [also] going to be really important,” said Kara Turrentine, who recently joined Democratic firm The Pivot Group as a SVP.
“There’s going to be a lot of national noise at the top of the ticket — foreign policy issues, big global issues — but there’s also these very hyper-focused issues that touch people every day that I think are going to be motivating factors to really move people.”
Direct mail will give campaigns the opportunity to address those, she added.
“It’s going to be really critical in ’24 to make sure [campaigns] have an early and consistent mail program that is really hyper-personalized and hyper-targeted.”
Now, Turrentine is not advising clients that they need to fill the entire 2024 calendar with mail sends.
“But I am saying that you need to define your successes, your accomplishments, what you’re fighting for to voters, in real time, because we’re going to have so much to deal with in terms of our competition — making the case against what’s happening in Washington or what’s not happening in the Beltway.”
She added: “We don’t want voters guessing where you were on the issues, what you were fighting for, and how you were involved in the real-time wins and successes that are happening on both these national and local issues.”
