In 1968, a young reporter named Joe McGinnis covered the presidential
campaign of eventual winner Richard Nixon. Nixon was determined to
overcome the liabilities that were thought to have contributed to his
loss in 1960 to John F. Kennedy. At the Kennedy-Nixon debates, for
example, Nixon's skin tone, choice of suit color, and physical
awkwardness contrasted with his verbal command of the material: radio
listeners voted Nixon the debate winner, but Kennedy was viewed as the
winner by the TV audience. In 1968, a television producer named Roger
Ailes took charge of managing the Nixon campaign to avoid any such
missteps. McGinness's chronicle of the campaign, The Selling of the
President, put McGinniss on the map as a political observer, and Ailes
has continued to shape American political debate as well.
Fast-forward to 2012. The selling techniques for a television
candidate are blunderbusses in the age of Internet marketing. The term
of art is "microtargeting," and both the Obama and Romney campaigns
are expending considerable sums of money and expertise on the analysis
of sub-segments of the electorate. At base, political campaigns
overlap consumer products branding. In fact, to see how political
intensiveness and likelihood to vote map against soft drink
preferences, television viewing, and automobile ownership, I urge you
to take a look at the charts published in The Atlantic or the New York Times.
One widely reported microtargeting effort occurred in 2004 when the
Bush campaign neutralized a segment of the traditionally Democratic
coalition: socially conservative black voters responded particularly
strongly to anti-gay marriage messages. In the runup to the 2008
campaign, and to some degree in response to Bush's 2004 success,campaign of eventual winner Richard Nixon. Nixon was determined to
overcome the liabilities that were thought to have contributed to his
loss in 1960 to John F. Kennedy. At the Kennedy-Nixon debates, for
example, Nixon's skin tone, choice of suit color, and physical
awkwardness contrasted with his verbal command of the material: radio
listeners voted Nixon the debate winner, but Kennedy was viewed as the
winner by the TV audience. In 1968, a television producer named Roger
Ailes took charge of managing the Nixon campaign to avoid any such
missteps. McGinness's chronicle of the campaign, The Selling of the
President, put McGinniss on the map as a political observer, and Ailes
has continued to shape American political debate as well.
Fast-forward to 2012. The selling techniques for a television
candidate are blunderbusses in the age of Internet marketing. The term
of art is "microtargeting," and both the Obama and Romney campaigns
are expending considerable sums of money and expertise on the analysis
of sub-segments of the electorate. At base, political campaigns
overlap consumer products branding. In fact, to see how political
intensiveness and likelihood to vote map against soft drink
preferences, television viewing, and automobile ownership, I urge you
to take a look at the charts published in The Atlantic or the New York Times.
One widely reported microtargeting effort occurred in 2004 when the
Bush campaign neutralized a segment of the traditionally Democratic
coalition: socially conservative black voters responded particularly
strongly to anti-gay marriage messages. In the runup to the 2008
Hilary Clinton's pollster and chief campaign strategist Mark Penn
published a book on microtrends that illustrated the blurred line
between his job at a public relations firm and his work on the
campaign. (In 2009, the conflict of interest resurfaced as firms
affiliated with Penn won nearly $6 million in stimulus spending.)
Very few people understand how web advertising works. Rather than try
to explain it here, I can include a few references:
- The Atlantic, 2/29/12
- Wall Street Journal
- Penn professor Joseph Turow's new book, The Daily You
Such data-rich customer -- er, voter -- profiling means that political
ads will be triggered by seemingly apolitical searches or site visits,
and persist across one's web travels. Both the Obama and Romney
campaigns mine Facebook data from individual voters, who repeatedly
say in surveys that they are uncomfortable with behavioral tracking,
to the limited extent they understand it. Microsoft's decision to
limit tracking in the new Internet Explorer browser is not well
received by advertisers.
As any good marketing executive knows, integrated marketing can amount
to more than the sum of its parts. Microtargeted online ads, e-mail
campaigns, negative TV ads, positive radio spots, statesman-like
thought pieces, friendly voices on the Sunday morning pundit shows,
billboards, direct mail -- campaign marketing has become a complex
beast indeed. And for all the sophisticated microtargeting that is
possible, the power of the brand - Hope, in 2008 for example -
dictates many of the other possibilities. As usual, we are witnessing
the fights to define the brands in the post-primary, pre-election
doldrums. Will Mitt Romney be equated to a wealthy, out-of-touch
business executive or a can-do manager? Especially in light of weak
job numbers, does President Obama get to boast of his foreign policy
record or defend the limited impact on employment of hundreds of
billions of borrowed stimulus dollars?
I'm very sensitive about romanticizing the past. The good old days are
seldom as good as selective memory can portray them. Nevertheless, I
am concerned that developing political campaigns as just another
consumer preference has definite limits: it ignores the necessity for
sacrifice. David Brooks made this point nicely in a New York Times
piece on May 17: in contrast to the limits on popular sentiment
engineered by the Founding Fathers (Madison most notably), "Leaders
today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job
is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has
developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims.
Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives.
Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right."
But the customer/voter's self-interest, even when it might be
enlightened, will not solve hard problems, of which there is no
shortage:
-Public pension funds continue to budget for 8% investment returns
even though the reality is far less rosy than that. Thus the shortfall
in public pensions will be far larger than predicted. (WSJ story here.)
Even aggressive, expensive investments such as hedge funds are not
making up the slack. According to author Simon Lack, cited in the Economist , "Indeed, since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year, half the return they could have
achieved by investing in boring old Treasury bills." Social security is only the
tip of an underfunded iceberg among elders that we can see from afar
yet pretty much ignore.
-Student loans are being taken by naive families, to finance
educations with low or uncertain returns, at an unsustainable rate.
Total student loan debt is roughly $1 trillion, and rose 8% this year.
At the same time, college graduates are the majority of the
unemployed, and the institutions must change their form, incentives,
and content to address a new world. So far that is not happening on a
wide basis.
-The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can never be completely
calculated, extending as it does probably six decades out in veterans'
health care costs. Amputations and concussion ramifications will cost
billions to address. More urgent still is the need for mental health treatment adequate to the need: far more veterans of those wars have
committed suicide after mustering out than were killed by combat
injuries.
The limits of politics as consumer preference are being played out
everywhere from France, to Italy, to Mexico, to Greece, to the U.S. As
the planet encounters physical and other limits to infinite growth on
multiple axes -- the nexus of aging, health care, and pensions, along
with carbon, petroleum, animal protein, and others -- the question is
no longer only or primarily "what do I want?"
At base, the fallacy of the consumer hypothesis is deeper than
politics. As research from scholars including Barry Schwartz, Daniel
Gilbert, Shawn Achor, and many others is showing, material stuff,
money, and success do not make people happy. (Excesses of the same
ruin lives, whether of lottery winners, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain,
Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Whitney Houston, Bobby Petrino, and many
others.) Meaning, purpose, community -- these old-fashioned notions
run counter to the consumerism mythology. When will politics be forced
and/or ready to embrace civic values that acknowledge shared sacrifice
rather than endlessly finance subsidies with a tax on the future?
The answer may lie on the web, with hints coming from the likes of
Kickstarter, Kiva.org, and Ushahidi, rather than from the promised
algorithmic paradise of the Big Data political analysts that, probably
earnestly, try to bring to American elections the same mechanics that
have made Wall Street what it is today.
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