Penn, Schoen & Berland
Encyclopedia
Penn, Schoen Berland is a market research, political polling and strategic consulting firm with American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 offices in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

, Austin
Austin
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas.Austin may also refer to:-In the United States:*Austin, Arkansas*Austin, Colorado*Austin, Chicago, Illinois*Austin, Indiana*Austin, Minnesota*Austin, Nevada*Austin, Oregon...

, and San Francisco, and international offices in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...

, Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

, Dubai
Dubai
Dubai is a city and emirate in the United Arab Emirates . The emirate is located south of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula and has the largest population with the second-largest land territory by area of all the emirates, after Abu Dhabi...

, and Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...

. The firm was founded in 1975 and purchased by the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-based WPP Group
WPP Group
WPP plc is a global media communications services company with its main management office in London, United Kingdom and its executive office in Dublin, Ireland. It is the world's largest advertising group by revenues, and employs over 150,000 people in 2,400 offices in 107 countries...

 in 2001. Partners in the firm include Mark Penn
Mark Penn
Mark J. Penn , is the worldwide CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and president of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. In September 2007, he released a book titled Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes, which examines small trends sweeping...

, Doug Schoen and Michael Berland
Michael Berland
Michael J. Berland is president of the market research and polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. He is also co-author of What Makes You Tick? How Successful People Do It—And What You Can Learn from Them with his PSB partner Douglas Schoen...

, for whom the firm is named.

Introduction

PSB offers services to businesses, non-profits and political campaigns. It is a strategic research and communications provider to more than 30 of the Fortune 100 companies, and includes an entertainment practice which offers motion picture research to major studios, video game research to top developers, and cover testing to leading magazine publishers.

According to Washington Business Forward, PSB's "reputation is largely as a Democratic political polling firm, closely associated with both U.S. President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

's administration as well as the Senatorial
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 and Presidential campaign of his wife Hillary
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the...

. But the firm also worked for Republican Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...

 in his mayoral bid in New York City, generating huge fees from the multi-millionaire self-financed candidate that caught some press attention during the campaign.

The company also has non-political corporate clients. Major corporate clients over the years have included AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

, Coca-Cola, American Express
American Express
American Express Company or AmEx, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Founded in 1850, it is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is best...

, BP
BP
BP p.l.c. is a global oil and gas company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest energy company and fourth-largest company in the world measured by revenues and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors"...

, Novartis
Novartis
Novartis International AG is a multinational pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland, ranking number three in sales among the world-wide industry...

 and Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

.http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2002-04/dealsoftheyear/salesmall.shtmlhttp://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2001_11_04.php#001553

1996 Presidential Election

In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

 hired the firm and replaced his old team to remake his message and his presidency. Starting with secret meetings in the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

, the firm polled to help defeat the Republican government shutdown. The firm helped devise "Building a Bridge to the 21st Century" and developed the concept of Soccer Moms that became a permanent fixture in politics and lifestyle marketing. The firm was dubbed the "Masters of Message" in lengthy recounts of the election that detailed its new polling techniques of message and mall testing. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985538,00.html

1996-2000 White House Polling

After the election, the firm was retained to poll for the White House and on Wednesday nights held regular meetings with the President and the White House staff to review polls and strategy. The polling played a critical part in Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

's thinking and decision making, and it directly led to the policy of putting Social Security First. During these years the firm worked for both Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

 and Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...


http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/65882116.html?dids=65882116:65882116&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Dec+31%2C+2000&author=John+F.+Harris&pub=The+Washington+Post&edition=&startpage=A.01&desc=Policy+and+Politics+by+the+Numbers%3B+For+the+President%2C+Polls+Became+a+Defining+Force+in+His+Administration

The 2001 New York City Mayoral Race

In an unconventional move, PSB opted to work for the campaign of Democrat
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...

-turned-Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

 billionaire Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...

, in his bid to become New York's 108th Mayor, following Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani
Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani KBE is an American lawyer, businessman, and politician from New York. He served as Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001....

. Although initially criticized in Democratic political circles for chasing Bloomberg's multi-million dollar fees, PSB played an important role in shaping the Bloomberg 2001 campaign and, in doing so, created what political consultants today consider to be the first "modern" campaign to utilize new data-mining techniques and state-of-the-art technologies in micro-slicing the diverse New York City demographic, coupled with a massive peer-to-peer volunteer network.

It was a unique partnership between the polling firm and the volunteer arm of the campaign - one not emulated with any similar scale until the election of Barack Obama seven years later. Doug Schoen, co-founder of PSB, who credits [Campaign architect] Kevin Sheekey
Kevin Sheekey
Kevin Sheekey is an American businessman and political adviser. He is head of government relations and communications at Bloomberg L.P. and chairman of Bloomberg Government. Sheekey previously served as deputy mayor for government affairs for the City of New York City under Mayor Michael R....

  “as responsible for Bloomberg’s victory.” realized that Bloomberg was a long shot, and thus he encouraged PSB to leverage the considerable human resources of Bloomberg's financial and media empire. Sheekey enlisted Bloomberg campaign operative Arick Wierson
Arick Wierson
Arick Wierson is an American-born media executive and entrepreneur. His has business interests that span television and film production, political consultancy, and a variety of business interests in the Middle East, Latin America, Europe and Africa...

 to coordinate what would later emerge as the largests and most sophisticated volunteer call center and push-polling operation in the nation, using Bloomberg, LP and Wall St.
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 sophisticated brokers and financial sales teams to work the phones. With surveys crafted by PSB, and detailed call lists, Wierson's "army" of over 15,000 volunteer callers flooded New York households with nightly peer-to-peer calls.

The events of 9/11, changed the dynamic of the campaign, and PSB conducted in depth polling using sample-sizes well above the norm to get micro-insights in best how to shape the Bloomberg's post-September 11th message.

2004 Venezuelan recall election

PSB received negative attention for polling it did during the Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004
Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004
The Venezuelan recall referendum of 15 August 2004 was a referendum to determine whether Hugo Chávez, the current President of Venezuela, should be recalled from office...

 of President Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...

. The referendum results were controversialhttp://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1046.html. A Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) exit poll predicted that Chávez would lose by 20%, but the election results showed him to have won by 20%. Schoen commented, "I think it was a massive fraud". US News and World Report offered an analysis of the polls, indicating "very good reason to believe that the (Penn Schoen) exit poll had the result right, and that Chávez's election officials — and [Former US President Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

] and the American media — got it wrong".

PSB used volunteers from Súmate
Súmate
Súmate is a Venezuelan volunteer civil association founded in 2002 by María Corina Machado and Alejandro Plaz. Súmate describes itself as a vote-monitoring group; it has also been described as an election-monitoring group....

, an anti-Chávez NGO which was the primary organizer of the recall referendum, and involved around 200 polling places out of 8500. With over 20,000 responses the exit poll produced a much larger amount of data than most opinion polls (typically around 1000 responses), leading to an extremely low sampling error
Sampling error
-Random sampling:In statistics, sampling error or estimation error is the error caused by observing a sample instead of the whole population. The sampling error can be found by subtracting the value of a parameter from the value of a statistic...

. However, one academic noted that "Few independent observers put much credence in the Sumate results, which were very likely skewed by overrepresentation of voters in areas where volunteers were willing to conduct their interviews."

Serbian elections in 2000

PSB was a key adviser to the democratic opposition to Serbian president Milosevic in the run-up to Serbian presidential elections in 2000. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A13155-2000Sep15¬Found=true

British general election in 2005

In late January 2005, The Daily Telegraph revealed that British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...

 had recruited the services of PSB's Mark Penn
Mark Penn
Mark J. Penn , is the worldwide CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and president of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. In September 2007, he released a book titled Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes, which examines small trends sweeping...

 in the run-up to the general election in the UK
United Kingdom general election, 2005
The United Kingdom general election of 2005 was held on Thursday, 5 May 2005 to elect 646 members to the British House of Commons. The Labour Party under Tony Blair won its third consecutive victory, but with a majority of 66, reduced from 160....

, widely expected to take place in May of that year http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/23/nblair23.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/01/23/ixnewstop.html. The election took place and Tony Blair won unprecedented third term for a Labour PM.

Italian general election, 2006
Italian general election, 2006
In the Italian general election, 2006 for the renewal of the two Chambers of the Parliament of Italy held on April 9 and April 10, 2006 the incumbent prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the center-right House of Freedoms, was narrowly defeated by Romano Prodi, leader of the center-left The...

On January 2006, a survey was commissioned to PSB by House of Freedoms
House of Freedoms
The House of Freedoms , was a major Italian centre-right political and electoral alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi. It was initially composed of several political parties:*Forza Italia *National Alliance...

' leader Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...

, who claimed the Italian surveys to be fixed in favour of the centre-left opposition. The survey, then announced on late February, showed Berlusconi statistically tied with leader Romano Prodi
Romano Prodi
Romano Prodi is an Italian politician and statesman. He served as the Prime Minister of Italy, from 17 May 1996 to 21 October 1998 and from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008...

, and so did their March 16 survey, whereas other Italian surveys showed at least a 4% lead in favour of the centre-left. Prodi narrowly defeated Berlusconi in the Italian general election, held on April 9 and April 10, with the final result 49.8% Union vs 49.7%, making the PSB polls the most accurate in the election.

Awards 

The firm reports winning these major awards:

2010
Politics Magazine's Reed Award for the UnfairCreditCardFees.com campaign.

2008
Pollie Award; Silver: Television Advertising – Candidate, Democratic Presidential Primary
(Hillary Clinton, “3 AM” ad)
Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award; For PSB’s work on market research leading to “Shell Oil’s National Dialogue on Energy Security”
Telly Award; For PSBcreative’s work on Dominion’s “Every Day” campaign

2007
Pollie Award; Gold: Phone Calls – GOTV (Hillary Clinton, Endorsements)
Pollie Award; Bronze: Internet – Website Candidate, US Senate
(Long Islanders for Hillary website)
Pollie Award; Bronze: Phone calls, Candidate US Senate
(Hillary Clinton, Microtargeting Long Island)

2005
Pollie Award; Bronze: Best Persuasion Online Advertisement – Organization
(New Democrat Network, “Promise Preview”)

2004
ARF David Ogilvy Award; For work on Microsoft market research resulting in the “Realizing Potential” campaign

2003
Pollie Award; Bronze: Candidate, Governor (Jim Blanchard, “Game”)

2000
Pollie Award; Special Award – Pollster of the Year for work for Hillary Clinton

1996
Pollie Award; Special Award – Pollster of the Year for work for President Clinton

http://www.psbresearch.com/awards.htm

See also

  • Bill Clinton
    Bill Clinton
    William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

  • International Crisis Group
    International Crisis Group
    The International Crisis Group is an international, non-profit, non-governmental organization whose mission is to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts around the world through field-based analyses and high-level advocacy.-History:...

  • United Kingdom general election, 2005
    United Kingdom general election, 2005
    The United Kingdom general election of 2005 was held on Thursday, 5 May 2005 to elect 646 members to the British House of Commons. The Labour Party under Tony Blair won its third consecutive victory, but with a majority of 66, reduced from 160....


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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