By Leona Hobbs
Last week, Toronto-based Spark Internet Marketing kicked off a campaign to "ignite interest" in the federal election by offering Canada’s first downloadable digital lawn signs.
They’ve got signs for the four national parties and a non-partisan one encouraging Canadians to vote.
I caught up with Adam Green from Spark Internet Marketing to ask him five quick questions about this twist on the general election to form Canada’s 40th government.
What are the campaign elements?
"We launched the pages to download digital lawn signs last Friday and reached out to national media today to get local and national coverage. The lawn signs can be added to webpages, blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages, We’re also asking voters who download a sign to answer five questions in our ‘real person poll.’"
Why did you decide to do this digital lawn sign campaign?
"Frankly, this has become a very ‘sleepy’ federal election. Around the offices, break rooms and water coolers of the nation, everyone seems much more interested in the US election. At Spark, we wanted to do something to ignite some interest in this election and at the very least, encourage Canadians to make their mark and vote on October 14th. It also seemed like a unique idea for the web-savvy community to post on their blogs and Facebook profiles."
Why do the 2-minute real person poll?
"It seems like a lot of the straight-forward questions get missed in the major polls. We often know who is leading in the polls and what are key issues, but we thought it would be interesting to ask questions like ‘is your vote strongly for a party/candidate’ or ‘against a particular party getting into power?’ We really have no idea what the results will be, this is just a way to take a pulse of the nation as we head into the election. We’ll be releasing the poll results to the media on October 9th."
How did you come up with this idea?
"Traditionally, Canadians show their support for a party by proudly displaying lawn signs on their front yard. But what do you do if you don’t have a lawn? A lot of young professionals live in condos or rental apartments that don’t allow any signs or posters in windows so this form of civic expression wasn’t available to them. We thought that creating a digital lawn sign, on a non-partisan site, where any parties lawn sign could be downloaded would be a great way to get some excitement going about the election. We also felt strongly that everyone can agree on the need to vote and could support the initiative by downloading the ‘Make Your Mark on October 14th’ digital lawn sign."
What election issues do think are important to digital marketing professionals?
"Anything that effects the business economy is important to digital marketing professionals, but I think in the past few years we’ve seen a lot more government intervention and regulation in the Internet and media. It will be interesting to see where each party stands on those issues. We should, however be thankful we don’t have senators like Ted Stevens who defined the Internet “as a series of tubes”."
This is a really interesting project. I’m curious about the download rate…