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2004 US Presidential Election
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July 28, 2004
| Candidate Web Site Content Analyses

I was tipped to this today, and it’s pretty cool: NextStage Analytics’ demographic analysis of the Bush, Kerry and Nader web site home pages. The analysis compares how well the sites are communicating to different age, gender and personality-type demographic groups. From the site:

Curiosity got the better of us here at NextStage, and we turned our language engines loose on the homepages of the presidential candidates. We wanted to know who these sites are appealing to and how well they’re communicating their messages.
We did this once before - during the recent democratic primaries - with stunning results.

While national polls had Governor Dean as a 20-point front-runner before the Iowa caucuses and NH Primaries, our research pointed to a much different result - that Dean had effectively stopped communicating with 2/3 of all voters, and Kerry and Edwards were heads and shoulders above everyone in projecting winning campaign messages.

And so, to once again showcase the predictive capabilities of our Media Content Analysis( MCA) and Message Projection Analysis (MPA) behavioral analytics tools, we are presenting this free Demographic Analysis of the Bush, Kerry, and Nader home pages everyday for the rest of this election season.

You can visit the main page for the analyses here, and visit the most recent analyses here. They show, for example, that all the major candidate’s home pages skew strongly in their appeal toward male audiences, and that the Bush site has generally greater message comprehension across all age groups except 25-34, where they all run roughly equal.



Posted by Alan at July 28, 2004 10:25 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Interesting. From the 7th to today, both Bush and Kerry’s web sites have reduced appeal to all age groups, but Nader’s web site has increased appeal to all ages.

Bush and Kerry have increased their appeal to men, while Nader has increased his appeal to women.

Message clarity for all three has increased, but also shifted to a much younger audience. I don’t know how message clarity is measured, but does this represent a dumbing down of the message? Unlike alot of people, I don’t necessarily disapprove of that. The ability to present a message clearly and simply is to be prized.

Message comprehension has decreased for both Nader and Kerry, but increased for Bush.

Of course, now I have to figure out how those categories are defined…

Posted by: TBox [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2004 10:57 PM

So, anyways, Age isn’t age and Gender isn’t gender, but I would support their use of the terms as a simple means of conveying what they’re actually describing.

Age is actually a measure of reaction to information. It includes a level of maturity, represented by the ability to process larger amounts of information, and physical stability… older people tend* to like larger print, so they classify larger print websites as appealing to older people, when in actuality it appeals to people with failing eyesight. Similarly, there’s a conflation between age and enhanced information processing capability, which is *generally true across the age spectrum. There’s also a language component, and if they’re smart, a culture component. References to The Mary Tyler Moore show, for example, would tend to be classified as appealing to older people, but us Nick at Nite raised young’uns find it appealing too. Or at least can relate to it.

Gender is specifically stated to be neurological gender, not biological, meaning they’re using Male and Female as a series of predispositions… stereotypes… that can be exhibited in either sex, but there are far more men who fall under the Male stereotype than women, and vice versa, so again, I would defend their use of the term as a simplification of a complex subject.

Posted by: TBox [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2004 11:27 PM

According to these statistics, all the campaign web sites currently suck as general purpose marketing tools, but Nader’s comes closest to succeeding.

Posted by: TBox [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2004 11:36 PM

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