OK folks, here we go, the final stretch of the final inning of the final game of what should be the deciding day for the 2024 election, for now. It’s pretty much assured that even after the votes are counted on November 5th, we’re still going to be in a highly energized political environment. And that’s a good thing. No matter which side of any candidate or issue you find yourself on, you must agree that people’s focus on their local and national civic direction is positive. Yes, it can get loud and ugly, and not everyone is a great ambassador of their party brand, but take a step back and try to look at it like a Madman: these are highly engaged, highly loyal consumers.
So now we’re getting somewhere. This is about selling an idea or set of policies, perhaps in the form of a statewide ballot initiative or personified in a candidate. Great, we’ve got a product with attributes we want to highlight, benefits we can claim, and lots of testimonials from satisfied customers that resemble ourselves and our neighbors. Awesome.
So why does political advertising have to suck so badly? Why are the standards so fucking low for these ads, and why do we think this stuff works? Mark Penn, deep political insider and CEO of Stagwell was just recently riffing on this very topic for the advertising elite at the ANA Masters of Marketing (Matthew Perry voice: “Hey ANA, could you BE more pretentious when you name your events”?) and said “Only the voters can send signals about what they like and what they dislike.” He couldn’t be more right, and political advertisers couldn’t be more tone-deaf.
When TSM was speaking with members of a national party paid media team earlier this year, they reluctantly let it slip that most of the people making media decisions for campaigns aren’t media people; they are campaign people who, while good at getting 15-seat passenger vans to bring people to the polls on election day, they couldn’t navigate a media plan even if they had a 12-inch pile of Adderall to help them focus. And compounding the matter is that the folks higher up the food chain, working on national campaigns (think U.S. Congress, Senate, Presidential) earned their stripes before the turn of the millennium, so their adoration for local television news is somewhat insatiable, despite the fact that those viewers are already so fixed in their political persuasion they might as well be a beetle trapped in amber.
And don’t even get TSM started on social media, the darling of the 2008 campaign 16 years ago that during an electoral media event held in DC earlier this year, it was pretty much universally agreed that social media political advertising had jumped the shark in terms of efficacy. Yet, campaigns pour ungodly amounts of money into it because they have become habitual spenders on these platforms, not because they work. A professional campaign manager is an amateur media planner and follows the herd blindly so their candidate or cause can say, “We spent where our competition did,” making the whole practice a self-affirming, self-validating, enormous sinkhole. When a room full of political media professionals concede that social media political advertising is a waste, you’ve witnessed a rare moment of honesty in a notoriously dishonest business.
What we’re going to see in the next week leading up to Election Day will be nothing less than the worst impulses of partisan hacks expressed through the formats of video, display, and DOOH, plastered all over every available screen until your head explodes. Expect to be so inundated with negative messaging that if the ads are to be believed, both candidates are capable of human cannibalism and have your family and friends on their menu for this weekend’s BBQ. There is no difference between the opposition candidate and a godless apex predator that will rampage through your community like Godzilla through downtown Tokyo.
Politics is really the only category where this kind of advertising is allowed and encouraged, and it sucks. You can’t do this with razor blades, “their product will cut your throat,” or tires “use those and you’ll skid off the side of a cliff,” or fast food “that burger will immediately metastasize into a giant hairball in your stomach.” Still, for some reason, we put up with it about folks or ideas we disagree with. It’s insane, and we should be better at educating the electorate and elevating ideas than we’ve proven ourselves to be.
And we’re doing all of this, as I said at the beginning of this article, with an audience that already cares about the category. We don’t have to create interest, agitate, or in any way cajole the audience into understanding the importance of participation in this process. They are already heading toward that essential consumer transaction of pulling the lever in a ballot box, and all of this paid effort is just last-minute merchandising to capture the few impulse buyers who remain. That’s an absolutely awful ROAS, should anybody decide to calculate it.
And this is why TSM is an optimist about our country. Because despite all of the bullshit advertising thrown at voters, they see through most of it and cast their ballots based on core values and not some kind of short-term price promotion, new feature, or BOGO offer. And more of them are voting than ever before, meaning the trend overall for political participation is positive, so throwing negative messages at them won’t change the trend toward being consistently civically active. And yes, I know half of you reading this are incredulous that I would have any respect for the other half you don’t agree with and don’t think they should be able to exercise their voting franchise at all. This is precisely why I’m glad there’s the other half of the electorate who can counteract those exact sentiments.
You see, TSM lived through a period where folks really didn’t notice or care that much about the outcomes of elections. It was pretty much a set of choices that felt distant, obscure, and opaque to most citizens. It was aneurysm-inducingly dry, wonky stuff. You had to have a pocket protector to even think about getting involved. Fast forward to today, and it’s part of the cultural conversation in a manner that it hasn’t been for generations. Voting participation rates have increased by 30% over the last 30 years, and no statistic makes me prouder of our nation than that. And this is what makes a democracy great, no matter which side of the aisle you sit on.
This Week’s Music: Music And Politics by The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
The views and opinions expressed by The Streaming Madman are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Streaming Wars or its affiliates.
