Bulking up.

Oliver North's campaign for a 1994 Virginia Senatorial seat offers insight into an increasingly popular marketing tool: direct-mail video.(1) Although direct-mail videos began circulating in the United States around 1989 and are also used by the left, North's campaign illustrates their use by conservative factions for promotion, campaigning, and fundraising. Direct-mail video is a hybrid of conventional direct-mail print promotion and political television commercials. Historically, religious groups, especially televangelicals, use direct mail and air-time solicitation very effectively to create and maintain donor bases. Often televangelical organizations use direct mail not only as a means to solicit additional funds from first-time contributors, but also as a means of establishing a basis for a lifetime of membership and contribution.(2) It is useful in evaluating media policy on the right to recognize a relationship between the direct mail strategies of religious organizations involved in political lobbying and conservative non-religious organizations that currently share political concerns.

Conservative political consulting groups look to VHS video as a campaigning tool for two reasons: cost effectiveness and demographic control. In certain media markets, the cost of broadcasting one-minute or even 30-second commercials is too expensive for campaign budgets and often is not guaranteed to reach the group of voters for which the massage is intended. Direct-mail video has been used by candidates and organizations to customize their message for a targeted audience and deliver it directly to their mailbox. Virginia voters who fit the North campaign's target demographic, for instance, received an 11-minute VHS video with customized commentary and a mini biography of the former Marine Colonel.

A critical component of the overall effectiveness of a direct-mail video campaign is the compilation of honed, up-to-date mailing lists culled from various databases. The North campaign was able to raise nearly $18 million by election day, by using databases compiled from lists of donors to the 1987 North trial defense fund and the Freedom Alliance, a non-profit group formed by North in 1990 to promote conservative causes.(3)

VHS video has become an economically viable format for campaigns and interest groups to disseminate information due to innovations in duplication technology, the availability of lighter materials (particularly plastic cassette shells manufactured in China), and general vendor price competition. A duplication industry spokesperson explains that a 10-minute video produced in 1990 with a self-mailing envelope that cost $2.76 per tape in batches of 100,000 now costs only $1.23 per tape. Using lighter shells lowers postage cost and allows VHS tapes to be mailed at a third-class bulk rate. Recent innovations in packaging provide self-mailing cassette covers, further reducing postage and material costs. The most significant reduction in cost is due to the technological advances in video equipment. Cassettes can now be duplicated five times faster than real-time duplication without losing any level of resolution or quality. At large duplication facilities this factor allows tapes from multiple projects to be dubbed simultaneously, cutting labor costs and therefore wholesale and retail prices.

Direct-mail videos average five-10 minutes running time and have been used in a variety of spheres. Direct-mail videos were used in presidential races by both George Bush and Bill Clinton and are also commonly used in state and municipal races. Michael Huffington's ascension in business and politics is highlighted in a slick video produced by Californians for Huffington that was used in his 1994 bid for the US Senate. The video, distributed in California and Washington, D.C., served the dual purpose of soliciting funds and maligning his opponent, Dianne Feinstein. Industry spokespeople maintain that direct-mail video campaigns are most effective in local and primary races in which budgets and voter populations are usually smaller and easier to target and track. Direct-mail video is convenient for political fundraising because unlike network broadcast, viewership is restricted. Therefore, organizations can be very selective in determining who is most likely to respond to their solicitation of funds. State and local municipality voter history data are available to all political campaigns. Voter information includes voting frequency, age, and address. Election divisions offer the information to campaign organizers on disk or printed on mailing labels at no cost.

Complete voter data are not available in some areas due to the absence of sophisticated databases. In those cases campaign organizers rely on conservative research groups such as the Media Research Center in Alexandria, VA that purchase vendor lists and cross reference them with election division voter information in order to extrapolate a desired demographic audience. A conservative campaign organizer offered the following example. "If voter age information is missing from a certain county's voter history database, we then buy the mailing list from The Wall Street Journal and cross list them to locate Republicans 35-55 years of age, who we want to reach." This information allows political consulting groups to customize a candidate's message to appeal to a specific group through the mail. Through zip code sorts of purchased vendor lists and election board lists political consultants can identify individuals who reflect their desired economic or political audience, thereby further singling out their intended audience in a practice called, "niche-marketing." Although direct-mail video is often used for fundraising, the activity becomes synonymous with soliciting votes directly. Crucial to any political campaign, well-kept databases are the source for much of the conservative movement's financial resource pool and networking strategy to combine moral agendas with conservative political platforms as exemplified in North's campaign.

Other Conservative factions that have used direct-mail video to their advantage are interest groups and religious associations (see Mookas, feature page 15). For example, the American Conservative Union mailed out 157,000 VHS copies of an anti-Clinton health care reform message in the fall of 1994. Several factors solidify the relationship between interest groups and direct-mail video. First, groups and associations usually keep very organized membership lists and mailing information. Second, a call to action can be made more persuasive on video through dramatic images, sound, and a longer viewing time. Thirdly, videos can be recirculated, or passed along to friends and other potential group members. Individuals tend to keep videos, whereas pamphlets and brochures are usually tossed after a cursory reading. Video's novelty and durability add to this feature. Although direct-mail video is now often nearly as inexpensive to produce as conventional print mail, it has a higher perceived value by recipients.

According to industry spokespeople, direct-mail video is not merely a political tool but is viewed as a component of an overall public relations strategy often used to address community issues. Projects and subjects presently being addressed through direct-mail video by conservative interest groups include community waste incineration policy, public institution fundraising, casino zoning approval, and lobbying efforts of political action committees.

The effectiveness of direct-mail video relies on the proliferation of VCRs in U.S. households. However, direct-mail response strategies employed by conservatives are not dependent solely on VHS video or VCRs as mediums to disseminate their message and solicit funds. Their investment is in maintaining mastery over communications technology in order to create and expand a vast network of financial and political support. The technological networking that the right is using to transform American politics is essentially the same technology that televangelists have used to build their religious empires. As different modes of communication media become more accessible and production costs are driven down we will see conservative interest groups and religious organizations use different tools (for example, direct-mail CD-ROM and campaign ads via the Internet), to maintain the support of their fiscal end ideological constituencies.

NOTES

1. Andy Meisler, "Ideas and Trends: From Your Mailbox to Your VCR: More Ads," New York Times, (Oct. 16, 1994) p. 6.

2. See Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles E. Swann, Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1981).

3. Steven Colford, "North's Mail Barrage Would Be Hard to Lick," Advertising Age, (Aug. 15, 1994) p. 39.