AN: Here's a quick update. Just came to me a few days ago and wouldn't leave me alone.
“Selling Security” – Feature Article, Die Market, Vol. XCIV, No. 11. May 3043By Kristoffer Gerlach (Tharkad) with additional reporting by JoAnne de Ferrol (New Avalon)
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[COVER PIC: Map of the Federated Commonwealth, with two gauntlets superimposed, one in Steiner Blue, the other in Davion Green, holding bags marked with Kroner signs]
“Strong Defences. Strong Economy. Strong Future.”
Phrases you are probably heartily sick of seeing and hearing by now.
“But, that’s not the way I heard it,” you might be saying. And you might be right. Perhaps you heard it like this:
“Strong Economy. Strong Defences. Strong Future.”
Or, maybe you remember it as:
“Strong Future – from Strong Defences and a Strong Economy.”
Or, even this way:
“Strong Future – built by a Strong Economy and Strong Defences.”
Whatever version of the slogan you remember, you were witness to (and the target audience for) the largest advertising campaign in the Federated Commonwealth’s short history, one that is estimated to have cost about five billion Kroner. Now, for the first time,
Die Market can take you behind the scenes to examine the origins of this enormous effort.
A true bi-national undertaking, the “Strong Future” campaign was the brainchild of an unprecedented joint-venture between the Ministry of Ways and Means in the Federated Suns and the famous Donegal-based ad agency BeckerRomano & Associates.
[PIC: Three-quarter profile shot of Priscilla Romano in her office. CAPTION: “Senior Partner Priscilla K. Romano”]
“We were originally approached by a representative of the FedCom government in the middle of 3040,” says agency partner Priscilla Romano. “They mentioned that we had caught their attention because of our long experience in adapting ad campaigns for regional markets – but we’d never done anything on this scale.”
That experience would be sorely needed, and tested, in the coming months. Given a brief to reach every world in the Federated Commonwealth – almost one thousand separate markets in all – you would have expected BeckerRomano to have mobilised every asset at their disposal.
“Actually, that was not the case,” Romano clarifies. “For two reasons. Firstly, we had existing campaigns we were already working on, and we could not simply pull people from those. Secondly, and most importantly, we believe in quality over quantity. It is far better to have fewer people, but the right ones, on a job, rather than putting in lots of people who may or may not be the right fit. Also, the larger the team gets, the harder it becomes to manage. A smaller team is more flexible too, and we needed that flexibility.”
In the end, the Strong Future campaign was created, managed and executed by a team of less than one hundred people at its largest – and was often smaller than that. That number included the contribution of the other party in this relationship – a ten-specialist-strong group from an obscure part of the Federated Suns’ Ministry of Ways and Means.
[PIC: Cooper Tikolo perched on the edge of his desk. CAPTION: “Deputy Director Cooper Tikolo”]
“I think our greatest challenge was convincing the BeckerRomano fellows that we weren’t AdSer!” laughs now-Deputy Director Cooper Tikolo as we talk in his New Avalon office. He understood why there would be some apprehension on the part of the Lyran agency. After all, the Federated Suns’ Ministry of Administrative Services is notorious Sphere-wide for its inefficiencies and borderline incompetence, and often the only thing ousiders now about FedSuns bureacracy. Ways and Means, on the other hand, is universally considered to be the best-run ministry in the FedSuns by some margin.
The new Deputy Director of the Ways and Means Research Bureau was a section leader within the bureau when he got the call to take his team across the Human Sphere to work on the “Strong Future” campaign. It might seem surprising that a ministry primarily concerned with hard numbers in the form of trade, taxes and fiscal policy would maintain a bureau that tries to measure public feeling and opinions, but Tikolo doesn’t see it like that.
“If you think about it, getting the public onside is critical to the successful implementation of any policy in general,” he says, jabbing a finger into his desk for emphasis. “We’ve all been on the receiving end of seemingly arbitrary decisions by the local council or county – let’s say, by suddenly doubling the pet licence fee with no explanation – that one happened to me last year. So now the bureaucracy is wasting time fielding complaints from the public, wasting money chasing down people who refuse to pay. On and on it goes. All because they failed to get the public onboard with them. If you scale that up to an interstellar level, the losses and wastage become truly incredible. So it behooves us to head off as many problems as possible.”
I suggest that sounds a lot like the advertising business. “Oh yes,
Frau Romano saw the parallels straight away,” he acknowledges.
So what did Tikolo’s team bring to the table, given that BeckerRomano were no slouches themselves in the public opinion game?
“Oh, they’re damned good at PubOp research,” Tikolo says “but my team’s area of expertise is in secondary and tertiary effect analysis. Things like what the consumer is likely to do if they liked your message, how that’s different if they didn’t like the message, how much of their circle can they influence, that kind of thing.”
Romano is similarly complimentary about Tikolo’s team. It was a good thing the teams meshed so well, given the scope of the project.
Their task was to build public support for possibly the largest military project since the creation of the Star League Defence Force, the wholesale upgrade of the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth.
A little background is necessary at this point. Thanks to the recovery of the Helm Memory Core by the Gray Death Legion, and painstaking work by institutions such as the New Avalon Institute of Science, the Federated Commonwealth found itself in a position to bring LosTech back. Some data from the core, chiefly medical in nature, was released as soon as the core could be decoded, but most of the effort was focussed on retrieving military systems knowledge. It was government policy to prioritise the recovery of military data above all else.
By 3040, the FedCom had recovered enough data to make the restoration of dozens of military production lines feasible. Everything from jump packs to JumpShips was in line for upgrades, and the military grapevine was alive with rumours of super-powered weapons and vehicles coming “any day now.”
The critical resource, as always, was money. There were rumours that the cost of upgrading every factory and production facility to LosTech standards would bankrupt even the FedCom. Although that is most likely an exaggeration, it was manifestly clear that whatever they decided to do, it would not be cheap. Also, like any nation state, there were multiple calls on all available funds at any one time, forcing the government to make hard choices.
Enter the joint BeckerRomano-Research Bureau team.
“It’s far too easy to make the mistake of over-simplifying matters,” Romano asserts. “Our initial research brought out two themes that resonated with the population of both states. One was security, and the other was economic benefit. Now, while security had a higher emphasis in the FedSuns and economy polled stronger in the LyrCom, once we dug a little deeper, we found a lot of regional variances.”
One of those variances was that planets in border regions were far more likely to favour the security message, regardless of state, and likewise, planets in the interior were more stimulated by the idea of economic development. In that respect, for example, the Tamar worlds had more in common with those of the Draconis March in the FedSuns than they did with say, Donegal ones.
Given the number of planets involved and looming deadlines, it seemed slicing down to provincial level was the best that the campaign could hope for in crafting their message. But here the Research Bureau team proved their worth.
[PIC: People standing in a holotank looking at a map of Skye Province, with data windows attached to some worlds. CAPTION: “BeckerRomano and Research Bureau team members at work”]
“What we did, essentially, was run our usual analyses and processes backwards,” Tikolo explains. “Instead of putting a proposition forward for testing, and then reading the factors to determine what the changes were likely to be, we went straight to the data maintained by both states, extracted the factors on a planetary level, and used that to determine what the population thought, right now.”
Exactly what those “factors” are remain classified, but Tikolo, speaking in generalities, says they include such items as demographic profiles, self-sufficiency indices, consumer purchasing behaviour and sometimes even the fortunes of sports teams; all of this being run through algorithms to compensate for certain differences between worlds.
“Frankly, it was astonishing what they were able to get for us,” Romano says. “I mean, they were able to give us reads on Periphery-border planets where no one had ever done a poll since the days of the Star League!”
But how accurate were they?
“Of course there was some degree of skepticism,” acknowledges Romano, “and given the importance of this contract, we felt we had to find a way to confirm their analysis.”
Given the limited time, the team picked ten worlds with poor polling histories and did their own studies to check against the Research Bureau team predictions.
“That’s low for a statistically sound sample,” admits Tikolo, “but that was all we had time for.”
And the results?
“On seven of the ten worlds, the polls agreed with our analysis within the margin of error. The other three were within four points of the margin.”
With the methodology judged acceptable, BeckerRomano’s messaging team swung into action. Thanks to the Research Bureau team, they were now able to segment their target audience down to the individual planetary level. This was the point when the team grew to its largest as additional analysts and translators were brought in to craft ads that would be tailored for each planet.
“We paid a lot of attention to the wording of the campaign slogan,” Romano says. “Our experience in the marketing world shows that simple and short is better. The data showed us that support for the Federated Commonwealth was reasonably solid, but not spectacularly so. We wanted originally to tie the campaign to the aspirational goal of a ‘Strong Realm’, but the word ‘Realm’ had too many, sometimes contradictory, meanings for people in our focus groups.
“So we went for our second choice, ‘Strong Future’ and found that this resonated with the vast majority of those who supported the FedCom, as well as a significant majority of those that were neutral toward the FedCom, and, oddly enough, this phrase also tested well with nearly half of the FedCom-skeptics, so it was a natural fit as the ‘punch-line’.
“The other two phrases reflected the basic concerns of the ordinary citizen – security and prosperity. We kept the adjective ‘Strong’ to tie everything together, and picked ‘Defences’ and ‘Economy’ to go with it because those terms could be partially self-defined by the viewer, and allow us a better chance to get agreement with the messaging.”
There was another reason for keeping the wording as simple as possible. Now that they could tailor the message to planetary level, BeckerRomano proposed to their client, the FedCom government, that as far as possible, the advertising should run in the dominant languages of each planet, and the simple slogan aided translation.
And now you know why there were multiple versions of the slogan at the top of this article. The simplicity of it allowed it to be rearranged according to planetary priorities without losing any of the impact.
Those concerned with security would get messaging that emphasised the increased capability of upgraded vehicles to provide defences. Those wondering about seeing opportunities from the FedCom merger would be told how the revitalised military production would have flow on effects into many disparate parts of the economy. All would emphasise the better (Strong) future that would flow from the preceding things.
With the concept nailed down Romano’s team went back to the FedCom government to pitch their execution ideas.
[PIC: Poster Proofs fanned out across a tabletop. CAPTION: “Some of the sample imaging BeckerRomano used”]
“We planned on a large-scale campaign, without going full saturation, because that can backfire on you,” Romano explains. “We mocked up Screen ads, flat media, UniNet banner ads, the whole lot. We bought screen time, UniNet pageshare, static posters, mass transit decals – everything we could. We intended that each ad be topped and tailed by regional, recognised public figures, sandwiching a piece from, say, an entrepreneur, a soldier, and so on.
“So we went to the government asking for help to get nobles, especially, to front these ads. “
That was when the meeting took a bit of a surreal turn. The senior FedCom representative, upon hearing the request to facilitate the appearance of senior nobles in the ads, pointed out that this was a campaign of national importance, and if BeckerRomano wanted noble participation, why were they asking for regional nobles and not the Sovereigns themselves?
“I had to admit to him that it was because we didn’t think we’d be able to get them!” Romano chuckles.
But get them they did, which paved the way for the most memorable ad campaign in living memory.
In hindsight, it’s easy to wonder how anyone other than the Archon and the First Prince could ever have been considered to open and close the ads, so perfectly did it work. But in fairness to BeckerRomano, this was a offer without precedent, which only emphasises again the importance placed on it at the highest levels of the government.
The Research Bureau’s analyses continued to pay off even at this stage.
“Going by the stereotypes, it would have been easy to make Archon Melissa the face of the ‘Strong Economy’ ads, and First Prince Hanse the face of the ‘Strong Defences’ ones right?” Tikolo asks. “But it’s not that simple. The modeling showed that, for example, in some places, people were pretty confident in Prince Davion’s martial abilities but wanted reassurance that he was concerned with their need to put food on the table – so there we’d have him doing a modified ‘Strong Economy’ pitch.
“There were also some places where one Sovereign was more popular than another – for any number of reasons - so it made sense to use the more popular one there. That’s why the First Prince ended up being the front man in the ads that went to about one third of the planets in Skye – there was a lot of distrust over anything that was too obviously from Tharkad there.”
Tikolo also provides another example that shows some of the complexities – Archon Melissa fronted the “Strong Defences” ad for Novaya Zemlya, a world in the Capellan March and an obvious choice for the First Prince to sell the plan.
“But our analysis kept twigging on one of our factors, and after we dug a little, we found that there was a little bit of annoyance towards the First Prince because he had been photographed jogging in a Listowel Rockets jersey the year before, just before the Federation Cup playoffs.” The Listowel Rockets, arch-enemies of Lokomotiv Novaya Zemlya, famously beat Lokomotiv in the grand final of the FedSun’s top-tier interplanetary rugby championship that year.
“So, just to be safe, the decision was made to use the Archon in that ad.”
There were also ads that featured both Sovereigns. In the end, with over sixty variations of ads to be made for broadcast, BeckerRomano was granted an unprecedented six days of the Sovereigns’ time, spread over three weeks, to film their parts. In a happy circumstance, The First Prince was on Tharkad during this time, allowing the entire campaign to be pulled together there.
[PIC: Archon Melissa in Court Dress in front of a green screen. CAPTION: “The Archon between takes for the ‘Strong Future’ ad shoot]
“How many variations?” Romano tries to recall. “There were ones with the Archon alone, the First Prince alone, both of them together, with the First Prince in military uniform, in a business suit, outdoors attire, the Archon in uniform, in court dress, in workwear. The background could be any number of environments matched to their wardrobes – the only ones we didn’t use were their throne rooms, because we wanted to make them feel as close to the people as possible.”
And then there were the languages. Like most nobility across the realm, both the Archon and the First Prince were fluent in a number of languages, but the campaign certainly stretched their abilities.
“I’m told they were enthusiastic supporters of the local language idea,” reports Romano, “and they pushed to speak as much of the different languages as they could.” While there were limits – there was only a subtitled version for Igbo speakers – viewers were treated to the sight of Hanse Davion speaking “surprisingly good Tharkad German,” according to one observer, while the good citizens of Panpour in the Federated Suns found the Archon gamely pitching in passable Urdu.
This last ad ended up spawning a cultural phenomenon among the worlds of the old United Hindu Collective when the popular variety show
Doston ye Dekho! (Check this out, guys!) did a spoof of the ad featuring AsSamikwood superstar Priya Lockwood in a blonde wig sending up the Archon doing an ad for a popular soft drink. The skit was viewed over a billion times in forty-eight hours on the UniNet, eventually achieving cross-border memetic status.
Lockwood would reprise the role six more times over the next year, each time featuring the Archon hawking ever more ludicrous products. Famously, the Archon, showing quite the sense of humour, replied by filming her own version of Lockwood’s spoof ads where she championed a rival variety show.
For Romano, entering the cultural
zeitgeist is confirmation that the campaign worked.
“After spending all this time talking about how we avoided stereotypes, it really was the old one that summed it up – ‘All publicity is good publicity’. Those parodies kept the campaign alive far beyond the end date. It’s the biggest job we’ve ever had, and I truly cannot thank the team enough for putting this together. It was a collective success.”
And the result? Multiple polls across the entire FedCom show that the message struck home. The ordinary citizen seems to have accepted that revitalising the military has to come first in order to enjoy the fruits of a return to the golden age, and that they also believe that they are likely to see personal economic benefit in due course.
