Poll Position: Gallup Streams Daily Briefings

Since it began more than 70 years ago, the Gallup Organization has studied and explored human behavior and thought through polls, the Gallup University, various publications, and other avenues. The resulting "Gallup Brain" was a vast store of information that, while interesting and a wonderful resource, had become bulky and difficult to navigate.

The first step towards clearing the Brain resulted in the popular Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing series, which launched in 2002 and offers in-depth articles relating to government, healthcare, religion, education, and finance. The Briefings also include summaries of Gallup poll results, and subscribers are encouraged to search Gallup archives. As successful as the Tuesday Briefings were, "some of us felt that we wanted to make points that we couldn't make without a TV-type format," says Gallup CEO Jim Clifton. Clifton and others within the organization believed that the best way to transmit much of the Gallup content was via a real person imparting information to the audience. So Gallup developed what Clifton describes as a three-stack product: The Gallup Brain, which is their most valuable asset, the Tuesday Briefings, and the Daily Briefings.

The Gallup Poll Daily Briefing, which debuted on September 13, 2004, is a five to eight-minute streamed segment from editor-in-chief Dr. Frank Newport that is available first thing each morning. "We've done our research," says Clifton, "and we have found that there are approximately 300 people in the U.S. who create conversation around the country. We want to be smack in the middle of that daily conversation." Gallup has put together an internal team of about a dozen employees that determine just what those daily conversations are in the hope of reaching a wider audience, particularly journalists and early adopters interested in serious research.

"We're sort of breaking new ground here," says Clifton, "making a news show with real people. We have had a number of opportunities to have a TV program, but…it's like Wayne Gretzky said, 'The trick in life is to go where the puck's going, not where it is.' Well, the Internet is where people, especially younger people, are going for information." Thus far, Gallup has found that their viewers include a significant number of journalists, scholars, players in the political arena, and financial executives via their subscriptions to Bloomberg’s.