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Obama & McCain: Selling Connections

These two campaigns are reflecting a cultural shift that is going unnoticed. How the power of this bottom-up social/cultural movement might play out is another thing. The group has become important but in a different way than just the parties. Belonging and connecting...  The times now are calling for collaboration. 

Last February Obama supporter KChristie noted that Obama reached his goal of one million people contributing to his campaign. At the time he was  inspiring the cry, "Yes We Can" and meanwhile McCain was saying, "My friends this, my friends that". 

Reminded by Jill that giving money to causes increases happiness, I was and I've been thinking in terms how when you give to something (time, talent or money), you establish a connection. Obama is marketing empowerment by encouraging these connections.  (I've writtten about how we is the new me).  Networking, especially to those younger, means clicking.  So I checked out Obama's website and it opens with the line, "Get Involved." Obama is marketing connections. McCain's website opens up with a big Donate Today red button.  There is a big difference between this.  Look at Obama's words.  Obama uses ownership in his requests (like that, right, from back in February). Clicking further, it isn't until the second page that you get the ways to connect with Obama.  Obama's Organinzing Fellows -- "a new generation of leadership that believes, like Senator Obama, that real change comes from the ground up," just takes a click to apply to the network.

It is the selling of this idea of connection that is going to be the most relevant factor of this campaign.  MoveOn originated this idea of clicking to connect with the Dean Campaign. You can't have tone-deaf leadership, or leadership by responding to polls alone --  there has to be management of bottom-up ideas and an ability to manage top-down AND bottom-up.  Full collaboration.  The management of the WE.

W. Bush's first campaign used the political influencer ideas of Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci to use "influential others" (this idea is behind the idea of small church groups leaders who establish networking and connection within the larger body) and the Amway pyramid marketing ideas for bundling large donors. Still, though, this was doing top-down influencing.  Howard Dean's campaign was revolutionary in that it inspired bottom-up connecting.  Obama is merging the two.

Media stories are covering the money but they are missing how Obama selling the connection idea.  WashingtonPost got the topic for these connections.  Obama is also using Bush's bundling techniques but one of the important things is that the idea of authority from the top-down has changed to a group idea (if you are a mom, you've seen this through your kids' group projects ad nauseum in school and peer editing rather than teacher input on papers).  It is through owning, networking and connecting from the bottom-up that is the cultural shift. Columbia Journalism Review looks at the fundraising with Obama and touches on this topic but I just think no one gets this idea of the power of the we.

Obama logo generator? Obama is connecting with creatives notes Paul Schmelzer, inspiring play with imagery and the connection of ideas. I wrote about Shepard Fairey's Obama Poster  and viral ideas that connect.

Well, the power of the we and connections will play out one way or another...

related posts on communication tools of campaigns:
The Art of Words: Campaign Visuals
Word Art: Talking Points

Money, Sex & Politics...

The Wall Street Journal today juxtaposes the leading issue on collective minds -- the woeful state of the economy -- with a political economic story on the topic above the masthead and a fed economic story on the top right under the masthead.  Link one to the other, business-wise and visually via the astute layout, as the WSJ paper did, and this catapults a candidate to the positional lead. At least on this topic. 

Hillary is swimming ahead with the economic issue (where CNN has been noting Obama had swum ahead).  Earlier I noted that swim, swam, swum, the race is far from done.

Well, sex, politics and money are the three hot topics so I'll just juxtapose the latest greatest New York Magazine cover in this post to have all three covered.  Their inside article, Why Stand By? took my post Wife, Thy Name is Support, to an interesting area: "Silda Wall Spitzer was caught in a trap she’d inadvertently set for herself. Like half of the best-educated and most-privileged women in this country who have babies, she relinquished her high-powered career to devote herself to supporting her spouse and caring for their three daughters. However traditional this idea of wifely duty, it was an open-eyed decision, mulled over endlessly and made on modern, postfeminist terms.  ...In a way, it’s the saddest part of the story, and it exposes the risks women take when they make certain kinds of choices—things that, after Silda, they might not think are safe."

Cultural Indicator: Magazine Covers (& George Clooney??????)...

Reading culture from magazine covers is an art in itself. What is communicated through cover art, what do we read by design?  Men are in a messy confused state.  That's the message.

Cover art teases consumer interest by provoking curiosity to purchase in order to obtain what is inside.  This applies to book covers and (used to be) album-turned-CD covers.  The latter entered its heyday when albums were big and the tunes couldn't sell themselves as they buyer handled the product in the stores.  So, a little deconstruction of the art is in order in a comparative cover graphic post focused on one of today's leading cultural men.  What's the pull here?

What is the mess of March coverman George Clooney? Who is the target audience and why? What does this say? Do moms want to know?  Probably not.  Single women? Probably not for Esquire. (Men under 34 are the heaviest readers of magazines.)  Men, wanting to know what is the appeal behind the man?  Why he is such a leading man? Is there dirt here? Conflict of a mess, waiting to be told? International movie star George Clooney on the covers of Esquire for March and the NYTimes March 9 Sunday Style Magazine, is attention-getting for the fact that they both indicate messiness (click to enlarge the photo). The NYTimes has him pictured in an extreme close-up all grossly dirty and messy while Esquire features him all cleaned up casual with a messy teaser.  Media stats show that older men - 55 and up - are the heaviest readers of newspapers, but I bet the NYTimes Style mag appeals to younger guys (35 and under, the diamond bracket to appeal to for marketers --hence the edgy dirty face).

Equire's lead story highlights Coverman Clooney with a big headliner. The lead header above is his first name George (oh, his head is the O -- interesting graphic for the second most interesting leader nationally known by that name and so intimate - we are informal people and we know famous people by single names - Obama, Prince, Ringo, W). To the left of his photo is the rest of the lead story headline: Clooney Finally Talks About the Whole Mess That Is His Miserable Life.

Both media graphic cover illustrations communicate that there is more beneath the cover to the man.  Just the juxtaposition of these two covers is worth an examination itself for the iteration of the idea in two different national publications with broad audience (male) reach.

I like to ponder what the art of the medium says by design but don't have time or interest to read either of these stories. As a married mom raising a son, I just am curious: what appeal does the mess of this man have, and to whom, and why? Culturally?  For fun: If you put yourself on the cover, what would be the story? The title of the magazine? The graphic?  Digitally you can do this creative exercise.  Go mother yourself with creativity - play magazine cover editor/designer.

No, seriously, this isn't play. Our culture is undergoing a huge shift.  A recent study (pdf) for marketing to men showed that 50% of men in over 13 countries surveyed felt that their role in society is unclear and  80% don't identify with advertising geared to them.  So how do they understand themselves?  Cultural think tank scenarioDNA was part of the study.  Men don't drink beer in the lounge chair watching tv anymore.  Real men... (finish the sentence).

Skewed International News...

This distorted map shows the television news minutes worldwide last year according to the subject covered and the U.S. dominates with 79% of the news minutes with Iraq second.  Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International shared this map and information and Ethan Zuckerman blogged on her presentation at Ted2008. 

Fewer international bureaus, little international coverage (even less by local television news, watched by 80% of people) and  infotainment/celebrity stories skew news.  The latter is cheaper to produce.

Presidential by Placement; Presidential by Reiteration...(red phones ring...)

With all of the symbolism of power behind him, Obama is pictured alone in the front page photo, above the fold, from yesterday's NYTimes dead tree issue.  That is powerful positioning, in the premo place in the paper.

The media is toying with his image as a leader.  Time magazine asked about his experience, putting a halo around him as the cover guy.

It used to be that the major media such as these could hold terrific sway in the idea sphere of our communications. No longer.

Now it is the stories that emerge elsewhere that bubble to the top and perhaps have more power.  Who could have thought, even just five years ago, that Saturday Night Live skits and a YouTube Obama Girl would have such political traction, especially as they go viral?    

And then you have phones ringing at 3:00 a.m. to cognitively capture attention with the Fear Factor.  The Clinton ad that used stock photo footage of a little girl sleeping... a little girl now 17 and a campaign worker for Obama, has become a free ad for the Republicans unwittingly and free promotion for the Obama news angle that has emerged.  The phone ad became a media reiteration, fodder for reuse, re imaging, reinterpretation.  That ad, as a communication tool, may have a long, long, long, long ring to it: the phone ad that won't hang up; the ring that keeps on ringing.  When manipulation by fear becomes funny....well, what does that say?

In an age of remixing, appropriation and reiteration, the ringing phone still has more lives to go. Raw Story has Saturday Night Live's full parady of the 3:00 a.m. red phone ad.

Are people being led by the media elite? Is Saturday Night Live setting the media agenda now that the writer's strike is over?  Here's Hotline's take on Hillary and SNL... Gamechanging?   

Media Matters & Marshall McLuhan

Media theory, popular culture and society and how ideas are communicated is a very regular theme here.  Marshall McLuhan (1911  - 1980) is a media theorist I studied in Journalism school in the 1970s and then again these past few years as I delved into graduate media studies.  Today his ideas have a new found relevance and significance as media has moved forward with new technologies. So, I thought I'd highlight a few McLuhan essentials.

These books are foundational: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and The Medium is the Massage (which was supposed to be Message but the typesetter made an error and McLuhan wanted the typo left in place. When he saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age."  Both books were published in the 1960s.

At Cambridge he studied under I. A. Richards, a psychologist turned literary critic who examined the process of reading. For Richards it was not the paraphrasable content of a poem that mattered but the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader. It is how the ideas are communicated and the cognitive patterns behind the semantics that hearken to some of the lines of theory studies that were foundational to New School thinkers and I found this theoretical merger to be very interesting in the field of media study.

McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user. He was appointed in 1963 by the President of the University of Toronto to create a new Centre for Culture and Technology, to study the psychic and social consequences of technologies and media.  Woody Allen greatly admired him and he had a cameo role in one of Allen's movies.  New technologies altered the rate and impact of changes occurring culturally - for example, the railroad didn't introduce travel but it greatly diminished distances and altered the patterns of expansion.  The telegraph didn't invent rapid communications, but it exerted great change on the scale of communications capability and diminished geographical boundaries in the process.

He placed importance on medium because it is the technology contained in the medium that "shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." So, for just one example, let's think about e-mail as a medium.  It is a non-human form of association that can be scaled from one-to-many.  It eliminates the need for voice contact and aural readings of information, or face-to-face communications.  The actions that can take place with Blackberries as new appendages, or iPhones with texting, is altering how we speak.  Think how you identify yourself now in your e-mail openings and closings. Have you changed?  Has this medium changed you?  Are you less formal as a result?  My study of business emails showed a drastic decline in traditional formalities in structure in this medium, for example.  I bet if I went back and replicated my study the formalities would be even further reduced in the three years since and probably due to texting and language abbreviation.  I would probably find more lower case now than then.  Just after three years.

Here are some of my favorite McLuhan quotes:

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.

The road is our major architectural form.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.

The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale

The westerner doesn't have a point of view. He has a vast panorama…a total field of vision.

This last quote I particularly like, writing this as I watch the sun set over the Jemez mountains, licking the sky with a brilliant streak of pink.  We are no longer contained in our protective armament with limited vision.

Apple: Cover Stuff Again...

One of the things I loved most about living in NYC was seeing newsstands everywhere and thus reading the cultural pulse of America  on all the covers.

La Fonda in Santa Fe is my first go-to for media and the newsstand doesn't carry half of what I'm interested in (but at least it is devoid of People, US, OK and that ilk). So best cover this week?  Fortune.

If only Apple stock was up there... Jobs, who has faced down death, is head of a company Fortune calls a "one man show." 

My take on the guy: he made the black shirt and jeans a trademark statement.  He will make the Apple phone the ubiquitous one to access the internet. The creative versus the suits.  Plus, Jobs has just released business features for the iPhone.  It is just a matter of time before I, like probably a lot of others, have one.

In the United States, Apple's 28 percent market share is No. 2, behind RIM's 41 percent. Palm is No. 3 with 9 percent.

Hook 'Em Horns? The Eyes of Texas Are Upon Them...

It is a contest of bestial proportions so the Texas Longhorn hanging over the Democratic candidates is the best illustration of the week by far. ABC got it. 

Heroes are made in Texas, just so you know.  Or heroines in a modern way.  Remember that Ann Richardson, born without a silver spoon in her mouth, became one for her sharp witticisms so they are primed to pay attention to the oratory of a woman seeking leadership.  Kay Bailey Hutchison is pretty well liked.

Tomorrow is the day when the political line is drawn in the sand (my NM Governor Bill Richardson says tomorrow is D-Day but I like the Texas hero idea of ginormous proportions and it being the place where legends were created that defined eras, leaders and republics...well...let's just say I like the idea of William B. Travis' line in the sand in The Alamo where men went one way or t'other).  Epic sagas get made in Texas.  An epic meta-narrative might get set in stone.

The CNN announcers stand in front of The Alamo. So apropos. Years hence we may talk about how one was left standing at the end of the day when the sun set in Texas.  Another talking media head on the road, reporting from the field, wears a cowboy hat.  Bill Clinton stands in the back of a pick-up truck in a suit, and talks to a wee crowd in the grass in the DFW area.  My daughter hears Chelsea Clinton talk in Fort Worth today and writes home about her (lack of) style. Her mama this, her mama that was what we heard, second-hand. Obama says "ya'll" to a crowd in Beaumont and Ms. Mapes writes that Texas is turning from red to blue.

ABC's The Note had the illustration, at right, up today highlighting the Texana-rama going on for their story of the political saga unfurling: Good,Bad or Ugly.  Dontcha love it?  It is down to the wire and Texas, with the second largest economy, is flexing its political muscle.  Yee-haw.  Lots of dust gettin' kicked up.  A Texas dust-up heading up the trail to the presidency.  The Note is one of the best places to go for political reads.

Original: New and Old...

Is anything really original?  This week's Oscar's had the smallest viewership in more than 30 years. Javier Bardem won best supporting actor for his role as a really big bad guy and his character was an original reinvention. No gun-slinging shooter, black-hat wearing killer, he, this canister-toting boogey man.

While visiting Fort Worth, I always have to go have an original Tex Mex fix on Camp Bowie's brick-lined street at The Original Mexican food restaurant, consistently rated as one of Fort Worth's favorites.  And yes, my meal there this trip was good - traditional original. 

But when I saw Ad Age's article on the audience ratings for the Oscars, as they say in Texas, "I did me some thinkin' " on media matters. The ratings erosion for network tv is just part of a trend. Viewership is changing and fewer blockbusters are making it - at least in the U.S. - so it is the world-wide release that is impacting profits.  Titanic (best picture 1998) mega-hits are just not happening much anymore. My son-in-law could have cared less about the Oscars and my daughter watched only because I wanted to.  They watch movies on their home screens, not in theatres.

Writing yesterday about Tommy Lee Jones and Westerns as Classic Americana, led me to link up movies and new media trends as a lump topic since this is part of the new and old trends combining into our new (original?) formats.  Bob Somerby, (Jones' roommate at Harvard),  became editor of the media criticism site, The Daily Howler and as that site, very original in its inception, approaches it's tenth anniversary, I realized in our warp speed changes now, ten years makes it nearly ancient.

The Daily Howler lists two main things (quoted directly) learned about the mainstream press this ten year span:

1) They hunt as a pack: The most remarkable thing about the mainstream press is the way they all insist on saying the very same things. This contradicts everything we’re told, in iconic texts, about the way a press corps functions in an open society. Meanwhile, it’s impossible for average citizens to observe this cultural trait of the so-called press corps. You can only observe this trait if you examine a wide array of news sources. Obviously, most people don’t.

2) We’re all with Stupid: Second counterintuitive fact: There’s nothing so stupid that pundits won’t say it, once it becomes a Standard Text. And uh-oh! We’ve come to feel, in recent years, that many people simply can’t process this basic fact about the press. We’re all accustomed to the idea that major journalists may be “biased.” For many people, though, it seems to be very hard to come to terms with the stupidity of these big players. And yet, you simply can’t describe our modern “press corps” without explaining how stupid they are.

Original thoughts on new and old...  Chile willy cheers from Tejas.

The Art of Words: Campaign Visuals...

Words as ideas: The soundbite trophy, right now, goes to frontrunner Obama. McCain's graphics were originally developed by a defense industry promoter.  Selling ideas to the consumers populace is the art of branding.

Obama branded himself as the Change Agent. The daily candidate bite is around 7.8 seconds.  Blips stick and the snippets count.  Americans are dumb and getting dumber.  Details don't matter.  "Words matter. ...What our leaders say matters," Obama said this week. 

One of the political communications tactics that Bush introduced and perfected was the background set: a sea of slogans behind him as he spoke. This focus on branding is similar to the red carpet backgrounds for the stars -- the slogans/logos are big enough to be visible and legible for the cameras.  Obama's big banner behind him doesn't make it into the camera but his podium slogan does and those behind him were holding up their red signs echoing the talking point.

The semantics of the repetitive sound bite, the talking point, the phrase, the slogan.  The branding of the product, program, personality, policy or idea.  This is how things are sold.  Especially today. (Read the Dumbing of America, yesterday's WaPo article by Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason where she talks about the shrinking attention span, the erosion of general knowledge and the inability to grasp complexity).

The semiotics of it all is something I'm very interested in. My school studies at The New School had historical roots in this area, sociologically, and the strands of the German founding thinkers lead to West Coast studies and George Lakoff is probably the most well-known from that line.  He has taken up advising the Democrats on the power of words and ideas to counter the expertise of the Republicans on this front.  Fred Luntz uses meters to measure public response to words.  Words express ideas.  Art expresses ideas.  It is the idea today that matters.  I wrote yesterday about the iteration of these ideas, graphically. 

Lakoff looked at Obama vs. Hillary and the semantics of the issues and ideas.  Most voters do not vote primarily on the basis of policies, but rather on (1) values, (2) connection, (3) authenticity, (4) trust, and (5) identity.  Lakoff writes: Obama understands this.  Hillary is "I, I, I" while Obama is "you, we"...

"I promise you, my friends... we are the makers of history, not its friends," is what McCain said  in his celebratory speech last Tuesday.  "Hope is a powerful thing.... I've seen mens' hopes tested in powerful ways....my hope for our country resides in my faith in the American character..." ooops.  Couldn't get the rest of McCain's speech as my husband turned the tv off.  What more can I say?  Ok. He turned it back on after my squawk... "My country saved me," McCain says...  "I'm running to serve America and to champion the ideas... to make in our time, and from our challenges, a stronger country and a better world. I intend to do that by fighting for the principals and policies that best serve the American people,"  he continues.  My husband is not paying attention while I type the words he's using. As some say about McCain's rhetoric: TLDR*: McCain's use of the pronoun "I" is extensively heavy.  I, I, I.  "I will not yield.  I promise you, my friends, I'm fired up and ready to go." Just like Hillary, all of those I, I I's. 

Obama has primed the people for the we's.

Obama's own rhetoric has created imagery via words like progress, hope and 'yes we can'.  Obama's words have  an evolutionary/revolutionary quality about them.  The repetition of words then becomes representative of the brand, the idea.  Obama is now "Yes We Can." What do these words now represent?  The idea behind these words: hope & change.  

The war of snippits, of branding, of tag lines will turn on these words as semantics is fought in soundbites.

Related Media/Political Culture Communication Posts:
Rhetoric, from Aristotle to Obama
The Obama Poster
Presidential Campaign Logos
Word Art: Talking Points
The Che Factor
Political Art: Powerful Tools in the Icon Age

*TDLR=too long didn't read