Why Dems Keep Screwing Up Media Efforts

Wired has a story by Taylor Lorenz about Chorus, which is a Dem backed influencer agency, attempting to recruit influencers with $8000 a month retainers and contracts that stipulate that they not disclose that they're being paid by the group. Taylor has written about Chorus before, and in particular, a disastrous attempt to fly a bunch of influencers to D.C. where they essentially dumped them at the Rayburn building and told them to knock on doors for interviews. (The influencers were not paid for this, and were understandably under the impression that the group would arrange interviews for them. They also had to front the cost of their own travel and submit content in order to be reimbursed.)

Per today's story:

Creators told WIRED that the contract stipulated they’d be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program. Some creators also raised concerns about a slew of restrictive clauses in the contract.

This is so, so stupid. It's also indicative of why so many of these Dem backed media efforts don't work. Here are the big mistakes they make:

1) Most political consultants are not media experts, and overwhelmingly, they do not understand how to build trust with audiences. And unfortunately, the bulk of the well funded Dem media projects are run, not by experienced media entrepreneurs or journalists or influencers who've proven they know what they're doing, but by political consultants and ex political consultants. This is not for lack of opportunities to fund journalists and people who actually know how to build these things, mind you, but because the political consultants over promise message control and often imply that they will be able to put tight parameters around what gets produced and published. This is how political advertising works. It is not how media qua media works.

2) Because these things are run by political people and not, say people with newsroom experience, they wildly underestimate the importance of transparency in building trust, and wildly overestimate the downside of disclosure. The reality is, audiences trust content with disclosed backers if it's good and resonates with them. Content that feels like it's being pushed on them with an agenda they're not being told about is a recipe for automatic dismissal and resentment. It feels like a cover up, even if it isn't.

I've been in meetings with some of these groups, worked with some of them, and advised some of their donors--mostly fruitlessly because the political consultants who do this sort of thing just tell them what they want to hear or what will get the check written, and I can't do that. Sometimes funny, but mostly irritating and counterproductive: a lot of them have an obsession with turning every single thing they do into an overcomplicated cloak and dagger operation. I don't know what they're afraid of. People might find out that an outlet or influencer is paid by partisan funders? Who cares? Many people already assume that, especially if you're talking about influencers who already make partisan political content. There's also a weird air of self-importance about it, and from the way people behave, you'd think they were conducting deep undercover operations in the heart of Moscow.

Worse, they're positively gleeful when they find a way to not disclose. Taylor's story mentions that the influencer program is a way to skirt FEC rules that are designed to make political advertising transparent. And since the content is not strictly speaking, political advertising, that seems fair. But then the lack of disclosure is a potential violation of FTC rules regarding sponsored content. This distinction is something anyone who's worked in a newsroom understands, but the political operatives running these things don't, because they have no media experience, and don't understand why there are ethical rules around this in newsrooms.

3) As a function of this, they think media and advertising are the same thing, and that traffic and audience are the same thing. They think of spending and investing in media as a tactical strategy that can be tied to electoral cycles. When my cofounders and I first started talking to people about The Barbed Wire, one of the first questions we got was about what the newsroom would yield in terms of cost per vote. This is entirely the wrong way to think about it--useful for political advertising, useless for thinking about long term voter engagement, driving the overall narrative, and counter-programming right wing media with the actual truth. Organic audiences take time to build, are largely resistant to paid acquisition, and only come back if the content is actually good and engaging.

4) The content is all too often bad commodity content. It's boring aggregation with no voice and no wit and no new angle. It includes strident Dem messaging that has been tested and workshopped to death and doesn't reflect the real world discussions people are having. Meanwhile, the right produces stuff that's provocative, is not afraid of contradictory messaging, is experimental, and trusts the people actually writing and scripting and shooting the content to figure out what works best. Dems want to dictate it from top down, sometimes directly to satisfy donor preferences.

I am also convinced that some of the politicos running these things simply cannot tell the difference between bad content and good content, because they have a different standard for voters than they do themselves. They think they are competing against political messaging and they are competing against whatever a potential audience member might find more compelling, including literally everything in the world of entertainment. The intuition to work with influencers is smart because influencers have already demonstrated that they know how to build and talk to their audiences. But when you demand that they take your direction about how to do that, you lose the entire value of working with them in the first place. If you already knew how to do that, you wouldn't need them to begin with. Dems who work with influencers need to understand that they will never be as good at talking to audiences as the influencers themselves are.

5) Along those lines, Dems need to stop being condescending to influencers and other media people they work with. These people are not your marketing interns. They are professionals who have worked to build what are essentially their own media companies. They do not need you; you need them.

Reading Taylor's first story about the influencers who flew to DC and then were treated like they should be grateful to be there reminded me of my early days at New York Magazine when I was editing and writing front of the book and had to cover celebrity events. I was 25 and I didn't like entertainment reporting and was hoping to transition out of it. At the last minute I had to cover one event that conflicted with a friend's birthday dinner and wasn't happy about it, and when I showed up the Four Seasons prepared to ask Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher about their new relationship, I got physically blocked by the same PR guy who begged me to come. Frustrated, I walked over to the co-host, Glenda Bailey, then the editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar, pulled out my recorder and tried to get a quote from her. She told me no one was doing interviews. "Then why am I here?" I said. She told me I should just enjoy the party because I got free drinks and got to "be in a room with" the celebrities. I did not give a flying fuck about being in a room with celebrities. The PR guy emailed later to ask why there was no coverage of the event. Because you wasted my time, I said.

That was the exact vibe I got from the DC episode. Influencers with real audiences flew to DC at their own expense and probably in lieu of other opportunities and once there, the organization did nothing to help them and also insinuated that they should just be happy to be there. (On top of that, this new contract with Chorus stipulates that any interviews they do with politicians outside of their work with the org has to be done through the org.) The balls on these people. I'm a freelancer and if anyone I freelanced for said, we're not your employer but I want you to run all of your other work through us, I would laugh and laugh and laugh. I have an agent at CAA and even they don't ask for that.

5 (a) As a corollary: Dems need to stop being control freaks. All of the good media you consume, including entertainment content, is good because people who are good at doing it were paid to do it by people who mostly let them do their jobs, and didn't try to dictate what they make or how they do it. I made an argument to some donors a couple of years ago that if they wanted to work with influencers the best thing they could do was create a management and talent agency to handle back office functions so the people already doing good work could do more of it and build even bigger audiences. A decent agency would also find ways to monetize them so that instead of begging for donations all the time, progressive media would be self sustaining. There are progressive organizations that work with influencers, but their value add to the influencers is not big enough, and so they cannot compete with other demands on the influencers' time and efforts. They need to offer more money and more help and listen the influencers about what they actually need.

6) We need to try things knowing that most of them will fail, and be much more risk tolerant with content. This is how we innovate.

I think right and left media are heavily asymmetrical so I try resist direct comparisons (e.g, one side is willing to weaponize conspiracy theories, the other is not.) But one thing that the right does that the left does not is spread a lot of money around, try everything, and not flagellate themselves endlessly when something fails. Every time I talk to people about funding liberal media projects, they bring up Air America. Air America!! Air America had a six year run, and it died FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. It has zero relevancy to our media environment here in the year of our lord twenty twenty five.

First of all, there should have been twenty Air Americas and not one, and second of all, it is beyond pathetic that the attitude is, we tried it once and it failed so no point in ever trying it again. There are smaller investments that Dems have made but they still fit the bill above: small, run by political operatives, not too risky. The most risque thing Dems have funded so far is Pod Save America, and I like those guys, but it's a podcast run by political operatives that preaches to the choir. And look, preaching to the choir is important. It motivates people to go a step beyond voting. It keeps engaged people engaged and hopeful. But we need broader efforts and those require more money and more risk. For all of the talk about building a new media effort that might appeal to young men, I do not think the people putting money into Dem efforts are prepared to take the kind of risk you'd need to take to make content that actually appeals to that demographic.

When Brad Parscale was getting heaps of praise for Trump's first term campaign, I didn't think it was a big mystery why it was working. He was a digital marketing guy, not a political operative. People who do lead gen and marketing commercially know that you throw a thousand different options out and see which one performs. Dems have learned to test that extensively, but not to try things that don't conform to message testing data or campaign standards, or might be risque or crass or provocative. Parscale's team just went wild and tried everything and because Trump's campaign was full of amateurs too, there was no one to control them tightly from the top down and or insist on rigorous message discipline, or approve every piece of copy. They just threw shit at the wall and paid attention to what stuck. I'm not recommending this exact playbook, but I understand exactly why it worked, and it wasn't because Brad Parscale was a messaging genius.

Zohran Mamdani's campaign does this naturally, and it's because it's not staffed by old school political operatives who would muzzle this kind of thing. Imagine a city wide scavenger hunt coming from a traditional political consulting firm. If they managed to greenlight that sort of thing, it would be so mind numbingly boring and preachy that it would feel like work. There would be prepackaged talking points for every stop.

Another example is Gavin Newsom's social right now, and the woman responsible for it is a 29 year old named Camille Zapata. Does this lower Gavin Newsom's cost per vote for his inevitable presidential campaign? Who knows. But here's what it does: conveys to voters that Newsom is not intimidated by Trump and is willing to ridicule him to expose Trump's own juvenility and venality. It's also discombulating the people who've used these tactics to build up Trump's base, and forcing them to mix their messages. It is not a direct communication strategy to voters, but it is engaging, it shapes the narrative and makes Newsom look like a fighter. (Predictably, there are a lot of old school operatives who hate it.)

So what are the solutions? Well, reverse engineer everything above. Find people who know how to build organic audiences--lots of people, not just one or two. Fund them, and fund them well. Don't make them jump through 50 hoops over the course of 12 months to get a $50,000 check. That is useless, it wastes their time, and they can't do anything useful with it.

Drive the car like you stole it. Be aggressive, fast, generous and ratchet up your fault tolerance. Understand that in order to be effective you are going to have to build a media ecosystem that holds contradictions and is representative of the Democratic populace, not some imaginary median voter who everyone assumes is a platonic centrist (despite evidence to the contrary, which is another post.) There are lots of different kinds of Democrats. There should not be a monolithic template for talking to them and if Dems try to force all of these efforts into one, they will end up talking to no one.

Learn the difference between bad and good content, and not by message testing or doing paid spend it but by putting it in front of audiences and seeing what works organically. (People also use really shitty metrics to decide whether something is having political impact, but that's a whole other post too. I could write a treatise on why ad performance on meta as a metric is stupid but this is already running long.)

When I work with brand clients--who are much more rational and savvy about all of this than political people are because they know they're fighting hard for attention--I tell them to track their own media consumption for two days and be honest with themselves about how they spent their time and what they were drawn to, what they had to read or watch for professional reasons, and what they consumed during their downtime without even thinking about it. When I've worked with political operatives I've asked to do the same thing, but with additional assignment: they had to read the Federalist every day. Or Breitbart, or Natural News, or some right wing media site that's kind of a mess, full of colorful assemblages of lies, and not strictly consistent in message. They groaned, but the point was driven home when they did it.

Democrats often think too little of voters, and think of them as people to be talked to, and not people who want two way engagement, who don't want to feel like they're being preached at, or bored shitless or continuously horrified when they think about what's happening politically. I am the first to defend polling for narrow use cases, but we are not going to poll our way into making compelling media.

At any rate, if anyone wants to discuss this (or just vent with me, lol) my inbox is always open. Espiers@gmail.com. And I'm happy to work with anyone who wants to change these things!