The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

Which established organization or way of doing things is the best predictor of marketing’s future? That is, is it the newspaper business? The record business? Neither? None?

I think politics is a pretty good canary. There’s a great article in this month’s Atlantic about what many are calling the “YouTube” election. (Note: I’m not. That’s the new handle professional journalists have bestowed upon the race). Michael Hirschorn notes that the Clinton campaign has run smack into a new reality:

Like watching Nixon sweat on television in 1960, to read Hillary’s e-mail today is to experience an old dispensation crashing headlong into the new. Clearly, someone at Hillary HQ—or, more likely, a highly paid consultant—spent serious time building a multiplatform, interactive strategy to swathe the electorate in the marital faux-togetherness of Bill and Hillary running for office.

 

Fake doesn’t make it any more. (He got some phony “have lunch with Hillary” emails last fall). And Hillary doesn’t get it. Hirschorn goes on to say:

…what the era of YouTube and social media prizes is authenticity, improvisation, rough edges. Whether these values are genuinely held or brilliantly mimicked is immaterial. You have to bring the realness. John McCain and Barack Obama turn out to be fantastic at realness; each offers up a kind of linguistic meta­narrative that says—screams—“I am not a politician,” or at least, “I’m not only a politician.”

 

He adds later,

…but as Frank Rich has pointed out repeatedly and hilariously, Hillary’s spontaneous interactions with the public have all the improvisational élan of a Fortune 500 earnings call. On her Web chats, the viewer questions might as well be submitted by voter­bots. Hillary answers in fully formed paragraphs that double as nonnarcotic sedatives.

 

Look. It’s easy to bash the Senator from New York. It’s fun, too, because her transcendent phoniness gives us so many opportunities to shake our heads in disbelief.

But here’s the most important point. And the one marketers can ignore only to their ultimate peril:

The old political speech has started sounding so canned that we literally cannot hear it. I could listen to Hillary all day without really understanding a word she says. It’s not just the unearned intimacy; it’s the way everything seems manipulated and focus-tested by teams of professionals to the point where it becomes a kind of elision, a non-speak.

 

Isn’t that the way we sound as marketers? Isn’t the latest special offer “just for you, Mr. _______, the computerized “personalized” thank you, the false touting of goodness equally grating on the nerves?

I think it is. Marketing could talk all day without a normal person understanding a word of what you’re saying. What does “increase my consideration” actually mean? Can you really measure opinion - and , worse, try to claim a “shifting of opinion” in a positive direction?

I don’t think we can any more. There are too many people out there ready to hoot in derision at your latest overblown claims.

The old ways are beginning to fail at selling politicians to the American public. Can toothpaste that doesn’t really get your teeth whiter, motor oil that doesn’t protect your engine better and discount stores that don’t offer truly lower prices be far behind?

Tags: Truth