Challenge:

• The General Election provides a rare opportunity for research agencies to be at the forefront of the biggest news story of the year. Traditionally, voter intention polls have been dominated by YouGov, ICM, Populus and Comres who have utilised exclusive partnerships with national newspapers to publish their results.
• Opinium’s challenge was to gain leverage in this crowded market place and put its voter intention poll on the political map; positioning Opinium as a heavy weight in political polling and raise awareness of the brand in national and influential online media.

Solution:

• The leading political pollsters all have exclusive media partnerships making it very difficult for another research agency to get cut through with its own polls. Our recommendation was to identify a publication that did not have a partnership (the Daily Express), arrange a meeting with the political editor and put the Opinium proposition to them.
• As voter intent is such an important poll in the run up to the election, it was crucial to show the Daily Express that Opinium’s methodology would stand up to scrutiny. As part of this we recommended Opinium join the British Polling Council and utilise its relationship with Dr. Michael Bruter, LSE, who assisted Opinium in devising the methodology.
• Finally, we suggested offering the Daily Express the option to ask additional research questions to support any other political stories they had planned. This would provide Opinium with additional cut through in the Daily Express and provide a platform to approach other the Daily Express desks about a partnership after the election.

Implementation:

• Having identified the Daily Express, we approached its political editor to set up a meeting with Opinium where it was agreed they would run the voter intention polls on an exclusive weekly basis and additional questions would be offered on a monthly basis for supplementary the Daily Express stories.
• It was also agreed that the Daily Express would publish the Opinium logo alongside the weekly polls, providing additional high value branding for Opinium.
• To support the the Daily Express coverage, the weekly polls were distributed to all national and broadcast political desks as well as influential political bloggers. We also worked up a list of influential Twitter users for Opinium to follow in order to boost their online profile and put them in direct contact with senior and influential people in the political arena.

Outcome:

• The poll featured prominently every week in the Daily Express, which included the logo, and was twice supported by a larger story that featured the additional research. The poll was picked up by the Cabinet press office and BBC political unit which requested to receive it on a regular basis.
• The tactical targeting of Twitter and political blogs also proved successful with the likes of Tim Montgomerie and Vince Cable following Opinium and dozens of influential people retweeting the results to further raise awareness.
• The campaign has achieved: 676 pieces of coverage - National coverage: 32, Broadcast coverage: 24, Online coverage: 557.