6) 01 May 2023: Progress, progress, progress! Launched and nearing results

When things get “heads-down” to hit deadlines I tend to occasionally neglect these updates, apologies.

So we did launch the first test of INFLUENCE in April!

PROGRESS!!

We’re now over three weeks into it and will begin to measure initial results soon. Here’s a recap of steps since last update:

• Identified our test geography.
• Divided it into pre-test, test and control groups.
• Confirmed through pre-testing an anti-collaboration bias in that region (70% anti-collaboration).
• Finalized our pro-collaboration message and developed five video ads to convey that message to the target audience.
• Launched the first ad in the series April 9 on Meta, followed on a weekly cadence by ads 2, 3 and we’re now on ad 4.
• Separately conducted testing to further optimize the survey we use to measure pro/anti-collaboration bias.
  • Incidentally, while doing this we measured that in four additional regions this survey consistently measures a roughly 70-75% bias toward politicians acting in a principled, versus a compromising way. So that’s at least six different regions now — across ideologies — where this poll has produced highly consistent results.
• Separately conducted testing to optimize the ads we use to invite subjects into the post-treatment survey.

In the process above we additionally learned actionable lessons about tailoring our creative to audience demo/psychographics, optimizing ad campaigns on Meta, cost-effectively producing creative assets, optimizing ad and survey copy&art and collected useful extemporaneous feedback posted by target audience participants.

We also gained a huge amount of knowledge about how to minimize costs and enable scalability.

Next steps are to finish off the messaging campaign, then launch the survey against the test and control groups to assess if they exhibit any difference in sentiment.

The big win here has been the “standing-up” of this testing system. We now have an efficiently scalable system for testing really any messaging treatment (and potentially other types of treatment) against a diverse range of highly configurable audiences (configurable meaning, structuring the audience according to desired target geo/demo/psychographics). We have optimistic hope that additionally this first messaging campaign may prove effective at influencing sentiment, but we are realistic that, as the very first campaign, we may see only limited results. But now that we’ve proven out the test harness, we will be able to keep at it, iterating through different messaging until we achieve results.

Okay, so will give you an update on first results later in May.

• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 7 months ago by Hank.