Longtime NBCUniversal research executive Tony Cardinale has launched a research and consulting shingle designed to work on brand management for corporate clients and voter tracking in the political realm.
American Insight & Strategy , based in Chappaqua, N.Y., aims to offer political clients a proprietary voter-sentiment tracking system, dubbed VoterDNA, that analyzes political issues through a host of psychographic factors as opposed to a traditional research focus on age-based demographics.
“Voters are looking for a president that makes them feel a certain way. Every voter has a different ‘emotional password.’ So candidates need to decode that password and relate it to their own strengths and weaknesses in order to know which emotional buttons to press,” Cardinale said. “Sometimes those passwords are about addressing passion, and sometimes about addressing fear.”
Cardinale recently exited his post as NBCUniversal’s exec VP of strategic insights after 14 years with the Peacock, starting out in 2005 as a research exec at Bravo. Before that he worked for media buying behemoth Zenith Optimedia.