How the U.S. Census Is Reading Your Mind

The upcoming census count will be accompanied by one of the broadest marketing efforts imaginable -- trying not just to reach every person living in the United States with a message, but getting all of them to act on that message. "Typically when you're marketing a product ... you market it to the people who are most likely to buy that product. In this situation, we have to market to everyone, whether they are likely to participate or not," said Vita Harris, chief strategy officer at DraftFCB, who is handling the general-market leg of the census effort. To go that broad, the $300 million-plus effort has to incorporate reams of data, tapping Census 2000 information, lifestyle and media habit data banks and cultural and ethnic studies. But this year, the U.S. Census Bureau and its ad agency also decided to add an "attitudinal" layer. Although they already had the geographical and demographic data collected from previous polls, what they didn't know were the whys: Why was someone more or less likely to answer the census? And what could marketing do to improve the odds that they would? So DraftFCB interviewed more than 4,000 people by phone, mobile phone and in-person during the summer of 2008, posing questions in 30 different areas, ranging from how much interviewees knew about the census to what kind of messages would make them participate. It took two months to analyze the data. And what came out was a statistical set of five different mind-sets that are most prevalent about the census.