Campaigns are most relevant to communication
The term “campaign” is most commonly used in the context of the military, politics, or advertising, and refers to a series of connected activities intended to produce a desired result. It can also refer to money-raising (capital or charitable campaigns) and public-awareness strategies (public health campaigns).
Campaigns are most relevant to communication and media-based designers as they are almost all information-based ( Information Design, Visual Communication). Campaign designs can last for weeks or years, and are frequently highly collaborative activities that utilize multiple modes of communication.
Political campaigns ( Design and Politics) generate a great deal of work for graphic, image, and web-based designers as well as filmmakers, writers, set designers, event designers, and, increasingly service designers.
Politics is becoming more about packaging an image and less about debating the substance of policies and so has much in common with the strategies of branding. Consequently, advertising and branding agencies are commissioned to manage political campaigns. They concentrate on presenting the candidate in an appropriate and convincing manner using a broad range of direct and indirect forms of communication.
Public-awareness campaigns are most commonly taxpayerfunded communication strategies intended to create general awareness (of a new tax regime or the amalgamation of government offices, for instance), and/or to modify behavior (such as to reduce drunkdriving or prevent violence against women).
There is a growing body of research into these very complex issues that can be used to help design effective campaign strategies. Behavior modification is, without question, the most difficult and unpredictable of campaigns.
For example, the filmic shock tactics that are used in a bid to influence driving behavior and thus reduce car accidents will not necessarily modify the behavior of the age group at greatest risk those that often find visual images of high-risk behavior exciting.
An alternative approach could see a campaign designed to appeal to a sense of personal responsibility and shame by creating a scenario that anticipates the sense of overwhelming remorse experienced by a driver who has killed someone.
Or peer and “hero” pressure might be used (having young girls express a lack of interest in boys who smoke or famous football players in anti-homophobia campaigns) to appeal to the aspirational goals of the viewer.
Essentially all advertising campaigns now use the same multiplatform approaches to promote products and services, and therefore go to great lengths to integrate their campaign messages across an everincreasing variety of media and communication channels. Because of this, the idea of a campaign (that is, an integrated series of operations) becomes even more relevant as the advertisers have to try harder to reach an audience across many media and contexts.
Marketing often attempts to camouflage the promotion of a product by using strategies such as product placement in the film and TV industries. Within this diffuse “mediascape,” advertisers are attempting to both “find” the audience for the product and to advertise to them in ways that are hard to avoid or resist or even to identify.
The rapid rise of the Internet, the dispersion of communication channels, and the general public skepticism about the ability of charities and politicians to “make a difference” has put traditional campaign approaches under pressure to adapt.
In the 1990s, “viral marketing” was pioneered by campaigns trying to find forms of communication and context that were more likely either to find the desired viewer and/or to be passed along through social networks by way of web links, blogs, and so on.
Political campaigns have also adapted to this social networking phenomenon with candidate web sites that enable voters to view messages and speeches, make suggestions, get involved in linked blogs discussing various issues, link these into other blogs, and so on.
This approach has been concurrent with a rapid rise in portable image and video capture, particularly in the case of new cell-phone technology, that has resulted in almost every moment of a political campaign potentially being “on the record” and able to be distributed through web-based social networking (now being referred to as the democratization of the campaign itself).
In this context, the “image managers” struggle with the inherent contradiction of controlling every dimension of a campaign while fully utilizing the potential of these anarchic information distribution networks.