blocked our way into the ground-floor conference room, which was shared among all tenants and needed to be rented by the hour—not exactly what I expected of such a seemingly-posh crew of political consultants.
But it was that room where Chester and I met with Alexander and Kieran Ward, whom Alexander introduced to us as his director of communications. Alexander said Kieran had been on the ground for SCL in many foreign elections; he appeared to be only in his mid-thirties, but the expression in his eyes told me they had seen a lot.
There was a great deal at stake in the election of the prime minister, Alexander told us. The PM had “an inflated ego,” he said. Chester nodded in assent. This was the PM’s fifth bid for office, and amid dissatisfaction, his people were calling for him to step down. In his meeting with him at Gatwick, Alexander had warned the PM that if he “didn’t batten down the hatches,” he was certain to lose, but there was little time left. The election was coming up in a few months, after the turn of the New Year.
What SCL was hoping to do, Alexander began, and then he stopped himself. He looked at Chester and me. “But you don’t even know what we do, do you?” and before we knew it, he’d slipped out the door and slipped back in again, laptop in hand. He turned down the lights and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation that he projected onto a big screen on the wall.
“Our children,” he began, clicker in hand, “won’t live in a world with ‘blanket advertising,’” he said, referring to the messaging intended for a broad audience and sent out in a giant, homogenous blast. “Blanket advertising is just too imprecise.”
He pulled up a slide that read, “Traditional Advertising Builds Brands and Provides Social Proof but Doesn’t Change Behavior.” On the left-hand side of the slide was an advertisement for Harrods department store that read 50% OFF SALE in large type. On the right were the McDonald’s and Burger King logos, arches and a crown.
These kinds of ads, he explained, either were simply informational or, if they even worked, merely “proved” an existing customer’s loyalty to a brand. The approach was antiquated.
“The SCL Group offers messaging built for a twenty-first-century world,” Alexander said. Traditional marketing like these ads would never work.
If a client wanted to reach new customers, “What you have to do,” he explained, was not just reach them but “convert” them. “How can McDonald’s get somebody to eat one of their burgers when they’ve never done so before?”
He shrugged and clicked to the next slide.
“The Holy Grail of communications,” he said, “is when you can actually start to change behavior.”
The next slide read, “Behavioral Communications.” On the left was an image of a beach with a square, white sign that read, “Public Beach Ends Here.” On the right was a bright yellow, triangular placard resembling a railroad crossing sign. It read, “Warning. Shark Sighted.”
Which one was more effective? The difference was almost comical.
“Using your knowledge of people’s fear of being eaten by a shark, you know that the second would stop people from swimming in your piece of sea,” Alexander said. Your piece of sea? I thought. I suppose he’s used to pitching to those that have their own.
He continued without pause: SCL wasn’t an ad agency. It was a “behavior change agency,” he explained.
In elections, campaigns lost billions of dollars using messages like the Private Beach sign, messages that didn’t really work.
In the next slide was an embedded video and an image, both campaign ads. The video was composed of a series of stills of Mitt Romney’s face and clips of audiences applauding over a soundtrack of a Romney speech. It concluded with the phrase “Strong New Leadership.” The image was of a parched front lawn littered with signs on which candidates’ names had been printed. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich—it almost didn’t matter who it was. It was so clear how static the signs were, how easy to ignore.
Alexander let out a little chuckle. You see, he said. None of these signs “converts” anyone. He held out his arms. “If you’re a Democrat and you see a Romney yard sign, you don’t suddenly have this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and change party.”
We laughed.
I sat there amazed. Here I’d been in communications for many years, and I’d never thought to examine the messaging this way. I’d never heard anyone talk about the flatness of contemporary advertising. And until this moment, I had seen the Obama New Media campaign of 2008, for which I’d been a dedicated intern, as so sophisticated and savvy.
That campaign had been the first to use social media to communicate with voters. We’d promoted Senator Obama on Myspace, YouTube, Pinterest, and Flickr. I’d even created the then-senator’s first Facebook page, and I’d always treasured the memory of the day Obama came into the Chicago office, pointed at his profile photo on my computer screen, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s me!”
Now I saw that, however cutting-edge we’d been at the time, in Alexander’s terms, we had been information-heavy, repetitive, and negligible. We hadn’t converted anyone, really. Most of our audience consisted of self-identified Obama supporters. They’d sent us their contact information or we gathered it from them with their permission once they posted messages on our sites. We hadn’t reached them; they had reached us.
Our ads had been based on “social proof,” Alexander explained; they had merely reinforced preexisting “brand” loyalty. We had posted endlessly on social media Obama content just like the Private Beach sign, the repetitive Romney video, and the lame lawn signs that didn’t cause “behavioral change” but were “information-heavy” and provided mere “social proof” that our audience loved Barack Obama. And once we had Obama lovers’ attention, we sent them even more information-heavy and detailed messaging. Our intention might have been to keep them interested or to make sure they voted, but according to Alexander’s paradigm, we had merely flooded them with data they didn’t need.
“Dear so-and-so,” I remembered writing. “Thank you so much for writing to Senator Obama. Barack’s out on the campaign trail. I’m Brittany, and I’m responding on his behalf. Here are some policy links for you on blah, blah, blah, blah blah.”
As enthusiastic as we had been—and our New Media team was hundreds strong and the campaign occupied two full floors of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago that summer—I saw now that our messaging was simple, perhaps even crude.
Alexander pulled up another slide, one with charts and graphs showing how his company did much more than create effective messaging. It sent that messaging to the right people based on scientific methods. Before campaigns even started, SCL conducted research and employed data scientists who analyzed data and precisely identified the client’s target audiences. The emphasis here, of course, was on the heterogeneity of the audience.
I had been particularly proud that the Obama campaign was known for how it segmented its audience, separating them according to the issues they cared about, the states in which they lived, and whether they were male or female. But seven years had elapsed since then. Alexander’s company now went far beyond traditional demographics.
He pulled up a slide that read, “Audience Targeting Is Changing.” On the left was a picture of the actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive from the AMC series Mad Men.
“Old-school advertising
