Crucial Tool for 2014 Mid-Terms and Other Races
By Andrew Blum*
In an election campaign you have minutes to respond to an opponent’s comments or track reaction to your candidate’s latest media efforts or appearances.
While the internet and social media have in many ways usurped the immediacy of TV, getting quickly ahead of TV coverage is still a key part of any political campaign.
You need to keep track of your events and those of your opponent, be able to react quickly to what is being said on TV, assess the impact on your campaign and see how the clips can help feed into fundraising and polling numbers in the race. Doing so is also key if the campaign hits bumps or winds up in crisis mode.
While you can find select TV clips online, broadcasters don’t post everything and often take hours to publish video content to their sites. In many cases, the relevant TV or radio coverage that needs to be reviewed by a lawmaker or candidate is never posted to a news outlet’s web site.
Having a real-time broadcast monitoring service like Critical Mention is the equivalent of operating a DVR on every single terrestrial and cable channel. On top of recording every minute of every broadcast, the content is searchable by key word.
Critical Mention allows you to save and share clips with supporters and donors and can also be used by campaign PR staff and the candidate to research how reporters are covering the campaign and to prepare for upcoming interviews and debates.
Critical Mention is used by dozens of sitting members of Congress, federal agencies, state legislators and candidates for office. The service tracks TV coverage at some 2,000 outlets in the United States – both national and cable news and in 210 DMAs around the country.
Critical Mention’s global media capture infrastructure and services have transformed the use of TV and radio in intelligence markets. Founded in 2002 in New York, it is a unit of privately held Critical Media. For more information, visit www.criticalmention.com or call +1.212.398.1141.
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*PR consultant and media trainer Andrew Blum of AJB Communications has directed PR and high-profile and crisis PR for professional services and financial services firms, NGOs, PR agencies and other clients. As a PR executive, and formerly as a journalist, he has been involved on both sides of the media aisle in some of the most media intensive crises of the past 25 years. He is reachable at [email protected]
or follow him on Twitter @ajbcomms
