Twelve years ago, a single billboard in Bosnia and Hercegovina put my whole campaign team on its feet. Everyone was against it, even the woman who made the coffee. I broke the deadlock by letting the focus groups decide. Eight of them sided with the creative director. The billboard became legendary. And then there’s what that episode taught me, the thing most campaigns still refuse to do, and it costs them elections.
Here’s a scene that played out again and again in campaigns I worked on. “If you ask me, both the visual and the message are excellent.” The line comes from the creative director—the man who dreamed up the message, showing it to people who work for him and asking whether it’s any good. Everyone says yes, of course, so the materials go to print “because it’s urgent.” Three weeks later, when everybody is spitting that solution out, and the rating doesn’t climb but heads the other way, the same man explains that “the people simply didn’t understand the message.” Trouble is, the people understood it perfectly. They just didn’t like it. Those are two completely different things, and the gap between them costs far more than you paid for the billboards and the rest of the print run.
Twelve years ago, a creative director emailed the full set of materials. My phone went red-hot with calls from my own people. Every last one of them — the coffee lady included — was against the solution. On the other side of the ledger stood the creative director and the candidate. A storm, the black-cloud kind that brings hail, was gathering over the campaign. I cut through it with one agreement: the focus groups would have the final word. And they sided with the creative director—not one of them, eight. The billboard went up the day the groups wrapped. It became legendary.
Message testing is the cheapest thing in a campaign, and almost no party or candidate does it. The reason isn’t money: four focus groups often cost less than a month’s rent on two billboards in good Belgrade locations. The reason is vanity. Testing a message means accepting it might be bad. And the message was dreamed up by the candidate, or the creative director, or someone the candidate trusts, and none of them want to sit on the other side of the glass and listen to eight chosen strangers tear it to pieces. Easier to publish it, lose, then cry while reading out the excuse that was ready the day the billboard was made: the voters are immature, the media are against us, the weather was bad, and Mercury was in retrograde.
The myth: a good message announces itself.
There’s a stubborn belief that an experienced politician “feels” a good slogan or message that it’s talent, instinct, something you don’t learn but simply have. And it’s partly true. Some people really do have an extraordinary nose for what voters want to hear. The problem is that there are few of them, that even they are not right every time, and that anyone who scores a good election result retroactively believes he had that instinct all along. My experience says it usually doesn’t work that way.
Remember this: instinct tells you how a message will land on you and “your bubble.” It says nothing about how it lands on a fifty-four-year-old woman from a suburban settlement with a vocational diploma who doesn’t always vote, doesn’t follow politics, and knows exactly as much about you as she caught while flipping past the channels that air reality TV. And she — not you, not your party members — is the one you have to convince. The members are presumably already on board. If you haven’t even won them over, follow Voja Žanetić’s famous line: "Lock the door and head for the fields.”
The other version of the same myth is worse: "If we like it in the war room, the voters will like it too.” The war room is the worst possible focus group on earth. The people in it know the context of every word, remember why a phrase is worded exactly so, have poured everything into the win, and, not least, are paid to agree. The voter knows none of that. He sees the message on a billboard for three seconds, from a car or a bus, in passing, with no context at all. If the message doesn’t work in those three seconds, it doesn’t work.
The reality: you test the message before, not after.
The logic is dead simple, which is exactly why war-room people so often ignore it: before you spend serious money and serious time getting your message in front of half a million people, show it to at least four groups of eight and watch what happens. If it doesn’t land with the focus groups, it won’t land with the half-million in your target audience either. It’ll just be much more expensive, and it can backfire.
Testing a message isn’t one procedure but several, and each answers a different question. Field research tells you how many people agree with a message; it gives you a number. But the number doesn’t explain why someone disagrees or what exactly is wrong with the message. That’s what focus groups are for: there you don’t count hands; you listen to how people react the first time they hear it, which word they repeat, where they frown, and what they misread. The most valuable thing a focus group gives you is seldom "Do they like it?" but what they thought the message meant, because what you think you said and what the average voter saw on the materials are often not the same thing.
The third tool is the A/B test, borrowed from marketing: two versions of the same message, two groups of people, and the same situation, and then you measure which version performs better. You don’t ask people which version they prefer; that’s a taste survey again—you measure what they actually do when they see one or the other. The words “defense” and “protection” can mean almost the same thing in print and still produce dramatically different reactions in the field. Which of the two works better is not something you can guess in a war room meeting. You have to measure it.
You don’t just test the text; you test everything.
This is where most campaigns stop, and it’s their most expensive mistake. They think you test the message as text, a slogan, a sentence, a tagline. But the message isn’t only what’s written. It’s everything the voter takes in during that single three-second glance: color, face, font, photograph, layout, how much text there is, whether he even gets to read it. A billboard communicates before a single word is read, and that visual impression gets tested in the focus groups separately.
Here’s how it looks in practice. You put three versions of a billboard on the table. Same words, different visuals. On one, the candidate looks straight into the lens; on the second, off to the side; on the third, there’s only the logo and the tagline, no face. You don’t ask the group, "Which one is prettier?” That tells you nothing. You let them look for three seconds, take it away, then ask what they remembered. Which face stuck? Which word? Whether they even registered who the candidate was. Nine times out of ten, the version the war room rated weakest turns out to be the best remembered because it’s cleaner, has less text, and gives the eye something to land on.
My experience with the drafts Ivan Ćosić produced backs this up. Three billboards, everything identical except the photograph itself. The first had the candidate alone, the second the candidate with people behind him, and the third those same people without the candidate. That third version won so convincingly that not even the candidate himself objected.
Because of things like this, you don’t test only billboards. You test literally everything. Photos of the candidate — smiling or serious, with a tie or without, in the office, the studio, or outdoors; the same person in two photos gets two different character descriptions from the same people. The flyer: Does he look at it or toss it? Where does his eye land first? Does he even turn it over? The TV spot: where the group stops watching, at which second someone reaches for the phone, and which line they remember on the way out of the room. The radio jingle: Does anyone hum it afterward, or does everyone hate it and nobody will admit it?
Here’s one we rarely do, and it’s especially instructive for a campaign: watch a focus group react to the opponent’s material. You put their billboard next to yours, and you stay quiet. What the group says, unprompted, about someone else’s material is worth more than ten analyses you write yourself because the participants aren’t weighed down the way you are and aren’t rooting for anyone. That’s often how you find out the opponent’s seemingly banal slogan works better than your clever one. The good news, if you’re running focus groups, is that you still have time to fix it instead of discovering the mistake on election day.
Why does it matter?
The reason couldn’t be simpler: defeat is the most expensive way to learn that your message was no good. A campaign that learns from a loss learns exactly one lesson every four years, because elections aren’t held more often. A campaign that tests before publishing learns ten things in a single afternoon and learns all of them while it can still change the material, rewrite the slogan, find a better photo, or drop a color that reads as negative to the voter.
“The people didn’t understand” isn’t analysis; it’s an alibi. If a message doesn’t work, it wasn’t working before you published it either. Testing doesn’t guarantee you a win; nothing does, but it takes away the most comfortable excuse this business offers: blame the voters. Voters are never to blame. They are the only reliable data you have and the only judge whose opinion counts. The only question is whether you’ll ask them before, while it’s cheap and fixable, or after, when the bill has already arrived.
#HowItsActuallyDone #MANDAT #messagetesting #campaign #politicalstrategy #focusgroups
How It’s Actually Done · 1
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