Towards the end of the 2011 federal election, I was invited over to the home of some good family friends for easter dinner. My parents had gone down to Calgary for the weekend, leaving me without any family in town, and these fine people took pity on me. Dinner was fantastic, with delicious food and interesting conversation, and as often happens when you’re the odd person out at an event like that, the chatter eventually came around to what I was doing, and accordingly to politics and the federal election.
This is always a dicey moment for a Liberal in Alberta. The hosts were Liberals, or at least sympathetic, but I had never met most of the extended family members around the table, and the odds were pretty good that they weren’t as keen on my political leanings. Dinner parties with strangers and children are rarely the best places to get into heated political debates, so I began explaining that I was working for the Liberal Party in Alberta’s campaign team, while walking the fine line that Alberta Liberals become so adept at straddling – the line between explaining our convictions and trying desperately not to incite anyone to begin hurling profanity in our direction.
In this particular case, I didn’t have that much to worry about. Everyone was very polite and interested, and the conversation carried on into a peaceful and generally thoughtful discussion about the federal election. Eventually, as these things are wont to do, it came around to the topic of negative campaign ads. No one likes negative campaign ads. Most people, when asked (and often without being asked), will tell you that they find them condescending and ineffective. We’re all smart enough to know when we’re being manipulated, we say, and these ads aren’t even very good attempts at manipulation. This conversation was no different. And then, perhaps just as predictably, a dinner guest who had been one of the more vociferous denouncers of the ads and who was clearly an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful person, announced that she didn’t think she could support Michael Ignatieff because his eyebrows were too creepy. She didn’t trust his eyebrows.
I don’t mean to write yet another post about how “negative ads work”, or about how ridiculously dishonest the Conservative portrayal of Michael Ignatieff was. There is lots of stuff on the internet about that, and it’s hardly new information. What I am interested in is what this encounter said to me about the difference between what political organizers think people are paying attention to, and what they’re really paying attention to.
Much has been written about the 24 hour news cycle and how it applies to politics and Canada. News can happen any time, and stories can flare up and then completely disappear in a matter of hours. Twitter, blogs, facebook, cell phones, whatever: politics is about sound bites and being on top of issues as soon as they happen.1 The result, the story goes, is that attention spans are shorter. People no longer pay attention to the bigger, longer, less “exciting” issues, because there are just so many smaller, punchier issues monopolizing their time and attention. And as organizers or marketers or whatever, we have to be on top of all of those small issues, reacting to them and spinning them in our favour. I don’t even want to tell you the sheer number of hours I spent in meetings and on conference calls during the election talking about our “twitter strategy”.
I don’t buy it. Or at least, I think we need some caveats. I think that the 24 hour news cycle and the compression of current events in many cases has the exact opposite effect on the general public that it does on political organizers. For the organizers, it becomes all-consuming. We begin to look at the world around us on an ever more micro level. We spend hours on the internet with CBC Newsworld humming in the background, taking in every detail and interpreting them and spitting them back out, modified to suit our own purposes.2 Regular people3 don’t approach the flood of information this way. They’re too busy not being obsessed with the media to an unhealthy degree. They have the exact opposite reaction: rather than looking at the world on a more micro level, their frame of reference expands, it becomes more macro. There is just too much crap going on, the signal to noise ratio on the micro level is no good.
More importantly, our attempt to control the micro level can, I think, often make the problem worse. Our attempts to “control” the message and spin every single issue and event just amplifies the noise exponentially. Often when we think we’re being clever or convincing or whatever, we’re really just being loud and confusing. People aren’t changing their minds, they’re changing the channel.
Maybe attention spans are getting shorter, maybe they aren’t. What I do think is happening is that people are choosing to devote their conscious attention to issues that have more relevance to their lives. But as political organizers or marketers or whatever, we’re fighting our battles and staking our claims in a territory that is more and more being populated only by our own kind. The people I spoke to at that dinner party weren’t talking about whatever issues the various campaigns had obsessed over that day, they were talking about their impressions. They were basing their political leanings and their vote on much more abstract feelings about the parties or candidates or their ads or their leader’s eyebrows.
Now, I’m not saying that the issues aren’t important or that we shouldn’t be reacting or defending ourselves against whatever is going on day-to-day. I use twitter all the time and I’m as big a news junkie as they come. These things are important and they have their place and they definitely have value. What I’m saying is that we can’t be doing that at the expense of the longer-term. If people are giving us less of their short-term, conscious attention, we need to cater to what they are still giving us: their long-term, unconscious attention. Negative ads work4 because they stick in the backgrounds of our brains without our even realizing it. The strategy for the Liberal Party isn’t to get bogged down in the minutiae of day-to-day politics, but rather to develop an understanding of what people’s unconscious impression of us is. We need to get past the sense that we’re smarter or better informed or more correct on a policy or ideological level, and come up with a long-term strategy for planting a positive impression in the backs of people’s brains.5 Moreover, that positive impression has to be strong enough to withstand the negative impressions that our opponents are trying just as hard to craft.
In the 2011 election the Liberal Party ran a far, far better campaign on a micro level than any of the other political parties. Turns out that wasn’t where the real fight was.
- I’m using politics here because it’s my bailiwick, but this post is really about any media-focused industry. [↩]
- Often with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. [↩]
- by “regular” I mean those who aren’t obsessed. [↩]
- I guess I lied, this is yet another post about how negative ads work. [↩]
- I fully admit that the Conservatives are pretty good at this. Much better than we are at any rate. [↩]
Wow, that’s a really clever way of tnihking about it!