It took being a young idealist for Tom Serres to decide to run a friend’s judicial campaign. After all, the odds were 10-1 against winning—and, sure enough, his candidate didn’t pull off an upset. But Serres helped his friend run a close race, despite struggling to get voter data and make the most of a limited budget.
“I experienced personally all the problems [candidates and staffers] go through when all they want to do is make change,” Serres says. Frustrated with the barriers facing regular people who want to run, Serres launched an online company to help small campaigns get the assistance he couldn’t find. “We started moving up the political ranks—helping with local, county and state elections,” Serres says. Soon his services were in high demand, but as prices rose, “smaller campaigns couldn’t afford us anymore.”
This dilemma isn’t unique to the political world. In 2004, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson described it in a seminal article, “Why Selling Less of More is the Future of Business.” According to Anderson, companies traditionally make money by offering goods that sell in high quantity. BestBuy, for example, sells millions of mainstream, big name CDs that everyone knows and buys.
But what if you want a lesser-known artist who isn’t profitable for BestBuy to shelf? Then you’ll visit iTunes, which sells the same mainstream as BestBuy, plus songs and names that aren’t profitable for large firms to keep in stock. They cater to what Anderson called the “Long Tail”—a scattered group of consumers with more specific needs. And political firms are increasingly finding that they, too, can build a successful business model serving the Long Tail.
While Serres was selling big software packages to lots of state and congressional races, his original judicial candidate could no longer afford his product. Serres had to find a way to make his customized solutions affordable to enough people that he could still make a profit.
His audience was out there, just spread across the Long Tail, and it represented a huge market opportunity for anyone who could make a profi t supplying such a wideranging set of needs. So after a year and a half at the drawing board, Serres envisioned the same Long Tail bridge that the private sector had already started using.
“Technology is becoming more and more of a commodity,” he says. “So if you created a technological system
that would allow anyone, anywhere, to run for public office, you could really serve a lot of campaigns.”
Shortly thereafter, Piryx was born. The company sells an online software system that uses the Internet to bundle volunteer management, online fund raising, Web presence and other services. Some of Piryx’s clients are candidates in big races, but many are running local campaigns for precinct chair or school board: the political Long Tailers.
While the Internet has done the most to bring Long Tail marketing to politics, new printers are playing a big role, too. Digital printers can produce mailing pieces that used to require multiple print jobs to let the ink dry.
“Ten years ago, people were charging $700 just for creating and designing,” says Jody Murphy, a partner in Barnett & Murphy Inc, a communications consulting firm. “Then there was the printing and postage and that’s where it got expensive. Here it’s all free because we built it once and it can be used over and over.”
The combination of these factors lets Murphy print at about the same price as with the old printers, but target specialized products to a far wider audience and bring higher profits. The political phone industry is also starting to dip into this market.
“The whole point of our service is to make it appealing in the most simple of ways,” says Les Morales, sales director at Voice Shot, which also takes a Long Tail approach to business. His firm offers call services for everything from robocalls to text messages and polling. “It brings the power of campaigning to the smallest of politicians. People running for president of the local school council can use Voice Shot to garner support just as much as people running for president.”
That’s the same rationale Ravi Singh used in creating ElectionMall, which he bills as a one-stop-shop for smaller races with specialized needs. He says the political Long Tail represents a remarkable business opportunity.
“When you look at the entire market,” says Singh, who is ElectionMall’s CEO, “you’re looking at 1.2 million candidates running this year in over 500,000 elections. The majority of those are state and local races, but the highest expenditure usually comes from the federal races. So if you think about it, you have an untapped market in the majority of the races.”
More advanced campaigning methods can make even small races more competitive, increasing the business opportunity for potential clientele. “If you can provide this kind of environment,” Serres says, “you’re creating a competitive opportunity for everyone to effectuate change on the national or local level.” Put another way, it’s a win-win-win for businesses, campaigns and American democracy.