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Politics - MURKETING

Don’t Look Back

I meant to mention this earlier and forgot. Probably you’ve seen it by now, but just in case: The guy who founded the band Boston told Mike Huckabee not to use the song “More Than A Feeling” in his campaign events and to drop it from the set list of Huckabee’s cover band:

 “Boston has never endorsed a political candidate, and with all due respect, would not start by endorsing a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for.”

Everything Boston “stands for”? Right.

In The New York Times Mazine: “Bush’s Last Day” Memorabilia

NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN
Winning consumer votes by catering to political disdain.

In Consumed this week, a look at a business with a rather broad potential audience — but also a built-in expiration date.

Given all the excitement generated by heated contests for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, it’s easy to forget that the current resident of the White House will not be moving out for nearly a year.

Then again, maybe you know precisely when that particular change occurs, since the date — Jan. 20, 2009 — has found its way onto a variety of buttons, bumper stickers, T-shirts and even golf balls and hot sauce. In fact, the rendering of that date as 1.20.09 was trademarked by a small company that sold more than $1 million worth of “Bush’s Last Day” merchandise in 2007.

Read the column in today’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, or here.

The Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The all-new Consumed Facebook page is here.

Imaginary endorsement

 

The folks at Last Exit to Nowhere, purveyors of imaginary-brand T-shirts (Consumed 11/18/07) have a new design out that I gather is doing well among U.S. customers right now. Given current interest in politics, maybe that makes sense: It’s for an imaginary candidate. Senator Palantine, you may recall, is the guy that mohawked Travis Bickle is aiming to kill in Taxi Driver. Should you wish to show your support for the fictional Palantine, here you go. And if this gets you a second glance from fans of the film, you can always as: Are you lookin’ at me?

Agenda Inc. reveals “luxury vote”

The ever-clever Agenda Inc. has taken the time to tot up the political donations made by those with registered affiliations with “100 luxury — or near-luxury — brands.” Among these luxe-affiliated and politically minded citizens, the clear favorite appears to be Hillary Clinton, whose donations from the posh demo put her well ahead of nearest rival Barack Obama.

Details, here, include who Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, and Dian Von Fursternberg, among others, have given to. Sample finding:

The most right-wing leaning couture brand is Valentino, where an employee gave $2,300 to McCain. Gucci is a hung vote with $500 to Giuliani and $500 to Obama, while the democratic ladies of Chanel are solidly behind Obama $2,800. Louis Vuitton puts $1,250 behind Obama and $250 behind Clinton. Prada is 100% Clinton country. A lone voice at Dior has given $300 to Ron Paul.

Do presidential candidates ever zone out during debates?

Apparently so. A Washington Post blog quotes Bill Richardson  discussing an incident during one of the Dem debates:

I had just been asked a question — I don’t remember which one — and Obama was sitting right next to me. Then the moderator went across the room, I think to Chris Dodd, so I thought I was home free for a while. I wasn’t going to listen to the next question. I was about to say something to Obama when the moderator turned to me and said, ‘So, Gov. Richardson, what do you think of that?’ But I wasn’t paying any attention! I was about to say, ‘Could you repeat the question? I wasn’t listening.’ But I wasn’t about to say I wasn’t listening. I looked at Obama. I was just horrified. And Obama whispered, ‘Katrina. Katrina.’ The question was on Katrina! So I said, ‘On Katrina, my policy . . .’ Obama could have just thrown me under the bus. So I said, ‘Obama, that was good of you to do that.’

First, “I wasn’t going to listen to the next question” might be the most honest politician statement of the entire campaign.

Second, I love that these people really just need a one-word cue (“Katrina!”) before they can launch into whatever their spiel might be.

Via TNR’s The Plank.

Confession of a horserace fan

Jack Shafer’s fine piece in Slate — In Praise of Horse-Race Coverage — gives me the inspiration, or maybe the intellectual cover, to admit something. Everybody knows that campaign coverage is ridiculous: Too little focus on substance and policy, too much emphasis on image, personality, and “the horserace.” Even after reading Shafer’s piece, I would not really disagree. But even so, the fact of the matter is: I love the horserace.

I don’t mean to suggest that I think it’s all that useful in making a decision about who to vote for. But as Shafer says: “Even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

What I love about the horserace is the story, or the stories. Not the supposed meta-story that various observers are always trying to extract from the drama, the Big Meaning about What Americans Want. (That story is always the same: “This is the greatest country in the world – and it’s in desperate need of fundamental change.”) What I find riveting is specifically the most horseracey of the horserace stuff: The tactics, the machinations, the personal dramas, the surprises, the petty spats, the cheap shots, the armchair psychoanalysis, the endless deconstruction of a certain remark or background image in a political spot that may or may not have a hidden double-meaning, etc. It’s like a soap opera, or a serialized 19th century novel. Such great characters! Clinton, Obama, Romney, Huckabee – all would make a fine protagonist in a tale of triumph or heartbreak. And that’s what they are! Only one will see his (or her) dream realized – but at what cost? And as for the others: Their hopes will be dashed! I empathize with (almost) all of them at one point or another, including people I wouldn’t vote for on a bet.

What about the constant wrong turns of the horserace press, which is forever headfaking and reshuffling the story of what’s supposed to happen next and how it’s all going? I love the wrong turns! That’s where the suspense comes in. Sometimes the narrative veers so drastically and so quickly — yesterday’s “conventional wisdom” is proven so wildly wrong — that it’s like a soap opera that has to be implausibly revised because one of the lead actors just got a movie deal and left the show. Or, to go a little more highbrow, maybe the horserace press functions as a kind of unreliable narrator. Either way, it’s part of what keeps me engaged.

Anyway, Shafer makes a better case than I ever could about why anti-horserace critiques are wrongheaded. You can check that out and decide for yourself. I guess I could say I’m glad that he’s staving off any threat to the horserace I enjoy so much — but really, we all know it’s never going away. So figure out who you want to vote for… and then enjoy the show.

Consumption and (political) identity

So the Iowa caucus is upon is. What about it? Well, drawing parallels between the selling of political candidates and the selling of consumer goods is an old game, dating back at least to the Eisenhower era, and probably earlier. An iteration of this idea that’s gotten more attention lately is the (potential) connection between our consumer choices and our political ideologies. Over the weekend, a Times story about Democratic candidates digging for caucus-goers made passing mention of the Clinton and Obama campaigns relying on “sophisticated voter identification models, using detailed demographic and consumer data.”

In terms of political strategy, the interesting thing about these tactics is they have nothing to do with targeting the so-called “swing voter.” They are about identifying, partly on the basis of consumer behavior, people who are most likely to support your candidate. The effort then goes into making sure such people do so – that they actually go to the polls. It’s not about persuasion, it’s about motivation. (This is doubly important in the bizarre caucus system, of course.)

As an exercise in linking consumption and identity, what’s significant about it is that it only works if that demographic and consumer data really does give a good clue as to who someone will vote for.

Which sounds a little fishy.

Certinaly when it gets reduced to the extreme shorthand version. An example popped up in a recent New Republic piece about the Democratic nomination battle in Iowa, which quoted an unnamed Clinton operative, trying to spin Obama as out of touch with blue-collar workers, referring to him as “the arugula candidate.” Elsewhere there was mention of a pundit saying that, along similar lines, Obama has a “wine track” image that he needs to shed, in favor of a “beer track” image. This was followed by an anecdote suggested Obama has indeed tweaked a regular stump speech anecdote in which usually mentioned a glass of wine, to “a glass of wine or a beer.”

It’s easy to make fun of this as mere pundit-think – surely there is more to you or me than our appetite for arugula, or relative feelings about beer or wine. But when you get past the soundbites it turns out that the efforts to link politics and consumer behavior are pretty sophisticated … or at least complicated.

Another recent piece, in The New Yorker, mentioned the work of a firm called Strategic Telemetry, presently working for the Obama campaign, which “builds profiles of voters that include more than a thousand indicators, long strings of data—everything from income to education to pet ownership—that [the firm’s founder] calls ‘demographic DNA.’”

“The actual combinations that we come up with aren’t really anything that you could put on a bumper sticker,” Strasma told me. “You know, soccer moms or office-park dads. Sometimes people will ask to see the formula, and it comes out to ten thousand pages long.” When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.

Several members of the Bush 2004 campaign team put out a book a year or two ago called Applebee’s America, which deals with similar material: Basically, that campaign’s mining of consumer data to figure out which voters to target. “If you’re a voter living in one of the sixteen states that determined the 2004 election,” the authors wrote, “the Bush team had your name on a spreadsheet with your hobbies and habits, vices and virtues, favorite foods, sports, and vacation venues, and many other facts of your life.”

According to the book, much of the mined data came from a company called Axciom, owner of the “largest collection of consumer data in the U.S.,” drawn from credit card companies, retailers, airlines, and “scores of other places where people do business.” In the election, the book said, Axciom gave (or sold to) the Bush team “a list … showing the stage of life (age, marital status, number of children, etc.) and lifestyles (hunter, biker, home renter, SUV owner, level of religious intrest) of each voter, drawn from a menu of more than four hundred separate categories.”

Again, the fact that the campaign was using this data to identify sympathetic potential voters (who as I understand it were then bombarded with direct mail and other more traditional entreaties to get them to the polls), significantly raises the stakes on the question of whether such demographic profiles are accurate. If a formula based on buying habits identifies the wrong people, a campaign risks motivating hostile voters – the worst possible outcome. And as the book described it, some weird things came up. “Dr Pepper is the only sugared soft drink that has a GOP-leaning consumer base,” the authors wrote. Also: Many republicans watched Will & Grace. They say the Bush team “didn’t know why” some of these patterns existed — and “didn’t care.” They just wanted it to work.

Did it? In the end, they say, their program “was able to predict with 80 to 90 percent certainty whether a person would vote republican, according to postelection surveys conducted by the Bush team.”

Obviously I have no way of knowing whether that’s true, or whether it’s politico bluster. But if it’s even close to true, it’s a pretty interesting statement consumer behavior revealing very surprising things. Interesting enough that I’m guessing the Dems are spending serious money trying to mine that data — and that we’ll see more such efforts in the future.

Second thoughts

Okay, that last post was a little cranky. I better repent, before someone says I’m a dinosaur who doesn’t get it.

How about this. Let’s embrace this exciting new showcase for citizen creativity — and simultaneously devise a way of sustaining (or even starting) widespread interest in the race for the presidency. Let’s have a parallel competition, a sort of talent show of candidate questioning. Let America vote (via text message obviously) for their favorite YouTube question-videos in each debate, judging them on creativity, production values, originality, and, if you like, substance. The top vote getters get to ask another question in the next debate — although of course they’ll also continue to compete against others who have advanced, in an ongoing, elimination-style tournament.

As the number of questioners gets whittled down, more of each debate broadcast will be devoted to learning about them — who they are, what their aspirations are, how much their new branded T-shirts cost and where we can buy them, etc. At some point, all the remaining questioners should probably have to live together in a loft-style apartment, maybe in Ohio. As their fame grows, the candidates will be expected to ask them questions.

Then the final showdown: After the primaries, we have not only two presidential candidates going through the motions of the familiar leader-of-the-free-world thing, but two YouTube question-video makers, squaring off to be America’s Next Top Citizen-Celebrity! (If Bloomberg or another independent gets involved, we could bring back some of the more annoying eliminated questioners in some kind of sudden-death YouTube press conference format.)

Fun, right? See, I get it!