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Swing State of Mind: 9 Trends on the Future of Media From the 2024 Election

Advertising Analytics Consumer Behavior Ecommerce Marketing Testing

November 11, 2024

As I’m sure all of you are aware, there was a Presidential election in the United States this past week – one that reflected a fundamental change in our media landscape and crystallized a number of trends I’ve written about in issues past. So, for this issue, I want to talk 9 Trends that have emerged from the 107-day sprint we all witnessed – and what those trends mean for marketing + communications strategies going forward.

Trend #1: The Emergence of New Media & The Fall of Legacy Media

If you’re going to pick a single marketing trend or communications takeaway from the Nov 5th election, this is the one: legacy media has lost what little was left of its luster.

Elections – like most cultural/national moments, have a tendency to accelerate underlying trends, catapulting them from the fringes to the center of the proverbial zeitgeist. And every once in a while, a new form of media emerges and transforms the way we obtaininformation and interact with one another. The 2008 Obama election is widely hailed as the event that marked the beginning of the social era. But this isn’t new. If we crack open our history books, we can see that FDR captivated a troubled nation with his radio addresses (the fireside chats), JFK leveraged his made-for-TV charisma to previously-unthinkable electoral success, and Reagan mastered cable news to an unprecedented degree. Each of these elections marked not just a point in political history, but an inflection point in marketing + communications strategy.

This election marked another turning point in how we communicate with one another – a turning point that is (arguably) the most significant since TV: the emergence of new media generally, and podcasts (more specifically). While there are many other forms of new media – twitch streams, newsletters, private groups (Slacks, WhatsApps, etc.), other streaming shows – none has captivated the broader population to the same degree as digital audio generally, or podcasts specifically. It is for that reason I’m going to focus there – but that’s not to say the same overall logic does not apply there (it probably does); but rather to say that those platforms haven’t burst on the main scene to the same extent.

Before getting into this, there’s one question everyone asks: how did we get here? Let’s begin by stating the obvious: trust in traditional/mainstream media is at near-record lows:

We can all debate and discuss why that’s the case – whether it’s the format itself (time-constrained slots necessarily entail editing + condensing a story to fit what’s available), the emergence of digital technology (which took a sledgehammer to the business model underlying most traditional media), the perception of agenda/bias, and/or the ability of anyone to effectively report + distribute news thanks to the digital/mobile revolution, increasing polarization, fewer choices (back in the day there were only a handful of publications available, so you had to trust something; today, anyone can get access to just about any publication they want instantaneously) or something else entirely. Whatever the cause – and it’s likely there are many – the reality is undeniable: people don’t trust traditional media.

As the population has lost trust in traditional/”legacy” media, we’ve increasingly turned to “emerging” media, namely: podcasts, to fill that void. Roughly 135M Americans – 1-in-2 adults – report listening to a podcast each month, with 98M listening to at least one podcast each week. This is even more consolidated demographically: 57% of the podcast audience is adults between the ages of 25 and 54.

The rise of podcasts has been happening for some time, but accelerated following COVID: 29.5% in the last thirty-six months, and on-course to eclipse 200M within the next four years. That may not seem tectonic, but it does when you contrast podcast audiences with “traditional” or “legacy” media.

Here are the Nielsen Live + SD ratings for the week of October 14, 2024:

While these may seem like big numbers, they’re actually quite minuscule when you contrast them to the largest podcast’s weekly download numbers (keep in mind, thisexcludes views on YouTube or social – this is just weekly downloads):

And yes, while Nielsen + Podcasts tend to measure different things (viewership is estimated viewers during the average minute; downloads is just total downloads vs. downloaded + complete listens), let’s not lose the upshot for the sake of the details: a single episode of Joe Rogan or Call Her Daddy likely has a greater impact than a prime-time appearance on every major cable network, combined.

This has completely fascinated me, so I spent some time diving into Donald Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience:

Total View on YouTube: 47,891,067
Total Downloads (Spotify): 16,000,000
Total Audience (est): 55,000,000

Duration of episode: 2 Hrs, 58 minutes
Total Viewed Time (Est): 9,735,000,000 (yes, 9.375 billion minutes)

That’s….insane. But this also ignores the social impact of the Joe Rogan episode – users clipping, quoting, etc. across social media, to the tune of over 2,000,000 individual posts or videos about it. A conservative estimate of the follow-on “halo” impact is equivalent to the actual show itself, or another 9.0B minutes.

Add those together and you have about 18,735,000,000 minutes of watch time (and yes, some of the is ex-US, and some of it is duplicative, etc. This is quick-and-dirty math, not a dissertation). For comparison, the 2024 Super Bowl between the 49ers and Chiefs had about 123M views (Nielsen), and the entire game (including half time) lasted about 4 hours (kick off at 6:40 pm ET, game ended around 10:35 ET) – which represents about 29.52B minutes of view time.

Comparing just those two (very imperfect) metrics yields a fascinating result: Trump’s appearance on Rogan generated (approximately) 32.98% of the minutes-viewed of the SuperBowl. When you tack on the social media halo of Rogan, that surges to 63.46%. It isdifficult to ascertain the precise value of that exposure (and AVEs are a terrible metric), but consider this: during SB LVIII, ~59 advertisers aired a total of 71 commercials (66 during the game itself, 5 more in overtime), each costing $7M. That’s a total of $497M in ad revenue – and that’s just for the ability to run a sum-total of 35.5 minutes of ads during a ~4 hour event.

If you wanted to put a ballpark estimate on the “value” the Trump campaign received from that Rogan interview, look no further than the SB. Advertisers have calculated that 0:30 of attention from ~128M people in the most prestigious setting around is worth about $7M. This is $0.0018229 per person-second (yeah, weird metric). Multiply that by the length of the Rogan interview (180 minutes or ___) and you get a figure of $19.6875 per person. Intuitively, that feels about right – if someone offered me the ability to connect with a high-value, high-propensity audience in an engaged setting for 3 hours straight, I’d happily pay $20 per person. Multiply that by ~55M people, and the result is gobsmacking: $1.083B in advertising value equivalency (AVE).

While AVE is a deeply flawed metric, and the above is a guesstimate, the upshot is clear: the value created for the Trump campaign via new media dwarfs everything else to such a staggering degree that it’s almost comical. New media won.

In order for Trump (or Harris) to get the same level of total time viewed that he received from Rogan, he’d need to do somewhere in the neighborhood of 108 one-hour primetime shows evenly split between Fox, CNN and MSNBC – and even that would have no-where near the unique reach or the audience access (read: high-value potential voters) of Rogan.

This point bears repeating: not only are podcasts exponentially more impactful per minute spent than traditional media, their audience is exponentially more valuable. Rogan’s demographics are 81% male, 93% under 54, and 51% between 18-34. Call Her Daddy isabout 70% female, with 54% between 18-34, 94% under 54. Compare that to Fox News: 69% are over 50, 80% are over 35. A similar story is true for CNN and MSNBC (albeit on a smaller scale). From an advertiser’s perspective this audience has staggering advantagesover the “Traditional” media:

These are the most persuadable people (both commercially and politically)
They’re in their prime earning years, with far more economic potential + disposable income than the median senior citizen
These individuals are the most socially malleable – both in terms of affiliation with groups and willingness (+ desire) to engage with larger in-person and/or online social media circles.

Any way you slice it, we live in an attention economy, and that attention is increasingly commanded by New Media vs. Legacy Media. I’ve often said (well before this election) that if I was launching a brand today, I’d rather have 10 minutes on New Heights or Call Her Daddy than a 5-day “traditional” media tour across cable.

For brands & marketers, I think there are several crystal-clear lessons from what we saw on November 5:

Podcasts + New Media already own a disproportionate share of attention – but advertising revenue has massively lagged (even for the largest shows). This is similar to YouTube (which I wrote about here, last week), but there’s no reason to believe it will remain this way.
Despite the “winner-takes-most” reality of Podcasts (the top-100 podcasts account for about 80% of ad revenue), there are thousands of shows with hyper-engaged, niche audiences. Just because you can’t afford to sponsor Rogan doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t find + identify smaller shows where your target audience is active + engaged.
There’s a clear desire among younger-to-middle-aged audiences for longer-form, more compelling, less “algorithmic” content (more on this later). This is doubly true for podcasts, where the hosts are often (but not always) more human, relatable and interested in the guest’s story/perspective – a reality that stands in stark contrast to the news media’s “gotcha”/”angle-driven” approach.

The shift back from “snappy” to “substantive” is well underway, it just looks different. This isn’t radio or TV – there are no hard-and-fast rules about timing, segment length, ad specs, etc. Rogan’s episode with Trump was 3 hours. Other episodes have ranged from an hour(ish) to 3+.

Trend #2: Long Form Narratives Are Back

For the past decade-plus, the arc of content has bent toward the short + fast: we went from Newspapers to Google/Meta; we went from books to sparknotes to tweets; we moved from films to clips and from structured releases to whole-season dumps. The end result has been a perpetual compression of information in order to connect within the audience’s increasingly-short attention spans.

Over the past two years, I’ve noted that this particular tide is turning, and it’s turning in a big way: newsletter subscriptions are up. Podcast consumption is up. Staggered releases on streaming platforms like HBO, Paramount, Netflix and Disney+ are up. The pendulum always swings back, but sometimes it does so across a different plane – in this case, newsletters have usurped periodicals, podcasts have come for cable, and social media has obliterated traditional news.

While I think there are many reasons for this, by far the most compelling (in my mind) is the rise of “fake” or “misinformed” or “manipulated” content. Audiences have come to the realization that more really is more – it’s exponentially more difficult to manipulatesomeone’s perspective if you allow that perspective to be properly contextualized. With progressively more of the population not simply craving, but actively seeking genuine, authentic content and connection, it should come as no surprise to see those sameaudiences increasingly turning to non-traditional formats that aren’t beholden to advertisers, TV schedules or clicks.

From a brand perspective, I think this is a wonderful thing – longer content naturally lends itself to better, richer, more compelling storytelling. It creates an environment where the brands that are able to set themselves apart on substance are once again able to compete with those brands that traditionally compete on sizzle.

I was speaking with one of our clients at a conference last month, and she mentioned how our relentless focus on creating exceptional “pillar” content – while initially panned by their various members of the team – has since paid incredible dividends. The analytics back it up: more of their audience is spending more time with their long-form, in-depth content than at any point before, and those users are converting to clients/customers at higher rates.

Trend #3: Authenticity Is All That Matters

While preparing for the Fall ‘24 conference season, I spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing multiple Meta Ads + Youtube Ads datasets. In those data sets, something struck me: founder stories, client/customer testimonials and low-fi demos/explainers consistentlydemolished more “polished” or “professional” creatives.

My takeaway now, as it was then, is the same: authenticity is all that matters.

President-Elect Trump’s campaign leaned heavily into this – consistently putting him in places where his authenticity could shine – podcasts, rallies, unscripted media scrums, social media. In contrast, Vice President Harris was – by orders of magnitude – the more polished, professional candidate. She was scripted and on-message in a way few candidates have ever been. But polish comes at the expense of authenticity. The more an audience believes (right or wrong) that you’ve rehearsed an answer, the less likely they are to think your answer reflects your genuine beliefs.

The simplest takeaway from this: lean into more authentic content. Shoot more ads on iPhones. Make your true believers – your CEO, your VP, your head of product, your first/best customers – the stars of your ads. The perfect is the enemy of the good, the polished is the enemy of the authentic, and if attention is the new currency, authenticity is the central bank.

Trend #4: Creative Velocity

I’ve written multiple times about how successful brands are making + shipping more ads simply because the underlying mathematical advantages of doing so are undeniable.

Just as brands have a defined set of offers, which are presented to different audience segments via different angles + creatives, so too do politicians. In their case, the “offers” are the big-picture agenda items (tax cuts, incentives, issue-specific policies, etc.), and the angles/creative are how those big-picture ideas are presented to voters. Using this framing, it is abundantly clear that President-Elect Trump embraced the idea of creative velocity. He seemingly unveiled new “creatives” around his core offers every day (and sometimes, multiple times in a single speech). And, just as with ad accounts, many of these went nowhere and were eliminated from his future communications – but when he found a winner, he doubled down again and again.

This is exactly how we run ad accounts, and for good reason – as the marginal cost of a creative declines, the expected value of it increases.

In contrast, the Harris campaign took a by-the-book, traditional approach to their “creatives” – everything was polished, buttoned up and clearly consultant-ified before it ever saw the light of day in a speech or announcement. If we’re making an analogy, this is 100% how old-school “creative” agencies operate – and it’s why they’re losing.

Trump was unafraid of failure, he was willing to accept that 9-of-10 of his “ads” would be losers because he recognized that the name of the game was to find as many “winners” as he could, as quickly as he could. The same lesson applies to brands.

The lesson here is clear: Make more ads.

Trend #5: Influencers, Creators & Fandoms

It is impossible to talk about the staggering impact of new media and creative velocity without mentioning the source of much of that content: creators + influencers. 2024 was hardly the first election where digital influencers played a significant role (you could argue this was the case going back to 2016), but it was the first where those influencers were truly front-and-center. The Harris campaign, as an example, paid for and staffed a posh “influencer lounge” at the DNC, along with providing more than 200 individual creators with passes to the event – something that would have been unheard-of in Presidential campaigns just a few cycles ago.

By this point, most brands understand the inherent value of influencers and creators – these are individuals with massive, loyal fandoms. Gone are the days where people were loyal to a network (like CBS or NBC) or a publication (like the NY Times or the WashingtonPost); increasingly, people are loyal to people (read: influencers). This is a natural extension of the “authenticity” trend – influencers, in contrast to traditional celebrities, are seen as relatable, approachable, authentic – in a word, real. Fandoms already take influencer’s advice on a myriad of topics, from parenting styles to fashion, supplements, skincare, vacations, education/courses and so much more – so it stands to reason that those followers would also be receptive to the influencer’s perspective on politics.

And just as the Trump campaign went big with podcasts (Rogan, Lex Friedman, Flagrant, Bussin’ with the Boys, Theo Von, Adin Ross, Impaulsive (Logan Paul’s podcast) to name a few), it also went big – and won big – on influencers. According to WIRED, 9 of the 10 largest non-political influencers involved in the 2024 election were on the Republican side. There’s a reason the Trump campaign was able to win despite being out-spent about 3:1 down the stretch: the sheer volume of new media and influencer support they received countered the Harris campaign’s financial advantage to great effect.

What was even more remarkable from the Trump campaign was their willingness to not only allow their influencers to be themselves, but to actually encourage and promote it. Too often when brands engage influencers, they do so with strict conditions and requirements – from messaging to visuals to lighting to the precise length of the content. The end result tends to disappoint both the brand and the audience because it doesn’t feel authentic or true to the creator. The Trump campaign’s hands-off approach – while not appropriate for all brands (or compliance departments) – largely avoided that. There’s a lesson in that.

The other lesson – and the thing I’m watching now – is that while influencers may have fallen out of favor in brand circles (the influencer bubble of 2021 definitely popped), the 2024 election was an unequivocal demonstration of their persuasive power when leveraged in the correct situation/context. I sincerely believe more brands need to re-think both their willingness to work with influencers (and in particular, smaller influencers with hyper-relevant, niche followings), and the way in which they interact with those influencers (hands off, let them be themselves).

Finally – the Trump campaign also did a surprisingly good job of amplifying their influencer’s content in strategic ways. This is notable because it’s so uncommon, even in well-run ad accounts (most brands simply aren’t running partner ads). I truly believe the formula we saw from the Trump campaign is the way forward for more influencer campaigns:

Identify the influencers with a combination of the right audience / fandom, the right tone/message and the highest potential impact.
Overlap your influencers, such that multiple of your influencers all reach the same audience. Too often, brands think in terms of “coverage” instead of “critical mass” – your objective should be to create a surround sound for your target audience. That means multiple of their trusted sources (read: your influencers) all telling them the same thing, in different ways and for different reasons. The Trump campaign was truly masterful at this with the “bro-sphere”; the Harris campaign was far more interested in the coverage idea vs. the saturation one.
Include all of your selected influencers as you would any other partner / member of the team – the more access the influencer has, the more authentic, real andrelatable their content will be, precisely because they will have more opportunities to find the right tie-ins. Ultimately, while each influencer has a different brand/persona/approach, if you’ve recruited well and embraced critical mass, they’ll play off each other in interesting/unexpected ways.
Trust the influencer to know how to communicate with and position your brand to their audience – don’t overly script or prescribe. At the end of the day, everyinfluencer has gotten to where they are by knowing their audience better than anyone else. That’s the reason you recruited them in the first place, so don’t undermine it.
Amplify the best performing influencer content – when you find winners, ride them. Run partner ads. Use those influencer posts as ads in your own account. Put the influencers on your landing pages or site. Include them in your own content/events.

After seeing the outsized impact of influencers in 2024, I’m more convinced than ever that the 2028 election will be the Influencer Election – and the campaign that wins will be the one that can not only leverage influencers, but also create them.

Trend #6: The Rise of Natural Content Language

In the days following the election, I spent a significant amount of time re-watching many of Trump’s ads, speeches and appearances – and I picked up on something I noticed, but didn’t fully appreciate: Trump’s ability to communicate with his audience in their natural content language.

First, a definition: natural content language (NCL) is the default medium, style, sophistication and script of an audience’s communication. It’s how a given audience communicates with others in their “tribe.” For academics, the natural content language might be formal, written long-form articles and the peer-review process; for a younger, Gen-Z gamer audience, it might be twitch stream clips or memes.

You can observe NCLs for yourself – find a random sub-Reddit about a niche topic, and browse the posts – you’ll notice patterns in the language. Specific phrasing and words members of the audience use. The reality is that we all have a natural content language – we just don’t notice it because (usually) the people in our “circles” have similar NCLs. The only time we notice it is when we interact with someone who has a very different NCL, in which case we tend to think something is “off” or “weird.”

Trump innately seemed to understand how to adapt his communications to the NCLs of his audience – using their words and phrases, making references to things they’d understand, speaking in ways his audience intuitively understood and appreciated. Vice PresidentHarris, in contrast, tended to prefer communicating in her natural content language – on-brand, poll-tested, beautifully scripted speeches in controlled settings.

Once again, this is a “new school” (Trump) vs. “traditional” divide – and new school won.

The lesson I take from this – and the lesson I hope more brands take – is that we (marketers, brands) need to adapt our communications to our audience’s NCL. To me, that means:

Do more audience research – The reality is that 90%+ of marketers don’t take audience research seriously. It may be a quick-and-dirty thing, or done as an afterthought or to rationalize the strategy/creative they already are planning to run, but it’s rarely done in advance, and once it’s done it is almost never maintained/repeated. Audience research is about understanding not simply what informs, motivates and compels people to take an action, but also where they go to get that information or take those actions. This is one of the core reasons why I’m such a proponent of SparkToro – it actually gives you the data on what influences each audience segment (podcasts, social, youtube, search terms, publications, etc.).
Immerse Yourself In Their Language – This is a debate I’ve had with many marketers (including some on our team) many times over the last 5 years: it isn’t enough to simply identify the sources of influence; you have to understand them. This means listening to the same podcasts, watching videos/reels from popular creators, subscribing to the same newsletters, reading the articles and following the comments. As you do this, actively note the patterns – trends, vocabulary, phrasing, creative style, references – across that audience’s sources of influence, then adapt your content to those terms. That will likely entail moving away from some pre-approved “brand” messages and scrapping brand imagery styles. It will probably mean moving from hyper-produced spots to lower-quality productions. It won’t be as uniformly consistent, pretty or polished – but it’ll come with a significantly higher probability of connecting and resonating with that audience in a way that will shift their behavior/perceptions.
Fish Where The Fish Are – Adjusting your content to your audience’s NCL is a necessary, but insufficient condition for success. The other half of the equation is distributing that content in the places your audience already visits (vs. the “traditional” strategy of “shout it loud enough and everyone will hear”). This probably means diversifying your media efforts and platforms. Once again, that means more work + more effort – but with that comes higher rewards. The Trump campaign were masters of this – frequently sending him everywhere from airports to niche podcasts to industry-specific events

Trend #7: Owned Relationships > Rented Relationships

At the outset of this campaign, I signed up for emails + texts from both candidates (just in case I wanted to write something about it later), and spent the past 107+ days frantically trying to prevent my inbox from exploding.

Both campaigns clearly embraced their owned, one-to-one relationships – their ads (especially Trump’s) pushed users to sign up for emails/texts, and once the user signed up, there was a non-stop deluge of communications – up to 15 a day. While there’s a clearelement of “stickiness” or “willingness to put up with far more” at play, the underlying lessons are equally clear:

You Can Send More Email – I will never stop being surprised by the number of brands that are categorically resistant to sending more than 1-3 emails per month. The simple reality is that most brands could comfortably double their send volume with a negligible impact on list size, and a massive increase in revenue/leads per send. I’m not saying to ship 15 emails a day, but 4-8 per month isn’t unreasonable.
100 White Hot > 1,000 Lukewarm – The hidden benefit of more sends is that it accelerates the rate at which the lukewarm/disinterested users self-select out – leaving a brand with a white-hot, hyper-engaged list that is primed, ready and willing to act. The sooner you accept that list size is vanity and that 1 white-hot user is worth more than 10 lukewarm users, the sooner you’ll start seeing disproportionately higher returns from your one-to-one communications.
It’s OK To Push – One thing I’ve consistently noticed from the Trump campaign is a willingness to push subscribers aggressively toward the campaigns’ desired outcome (donation, volunteer, whatever). I’ve received emails from Trump stating that I’d let them down by not donating, that I wasn’t a “True Patriot”, that I needed to “stand with President Trump now” (or else bad things), and that President Trump was personally reviewing his supporters and I was not in good standing. If you showed these emails to most email marketers, they’d probably say they were ineffective, overly aggressive and likely to backfire – but, despite that, it’s clear (from both fundraising and results) that they did not turn off Trump’s audience to the same level/degree as they turned off marketers. Chalk up another win for Natural Content Language.

Trend #8: Distribution Is The Name of the Game

While this was hardly the first election where content distribution was the part of the game, this is the first where (I’d argue) it was the difference maker. Both campaigns (and, in particular, the Harris campaign) make significant investments in their rapid-responsecapabilities (the Kamala_HQ channel on Twitter, for example) and in ongoing content distribution on different platforms, mediums + formats (something I wrote about here).

There are two components to this: (1) embracing the concept of content repurposing + distribution, and (2) building an engine to do it.

When I talk to marketers, executives and agencies about their content distribution, there’s almost always an implicit, unstated fear: that everything they create should be original, or else the internet might remember. And while the internet has an awfully long memory, the reality is that no-one cares about what you publish as you do. It’s OK – and advisable – to be repetitive, to hammer home the core themes that you want your audience to remember (though please, communicate them in your audience’s NCL). This is something the Harris campaign did fantastically well – Vice President Harris was ALWAYS on message. She consistently brought everything back to her core talking points. She was unafraid to say the same things, over and over again, knowing that she needed to be repetitive in order for her message to break through.

The same is true (in a different way) of President-Elect Trump: while was rarely consistent in his specific communications, he did consistently hit the big-picture themes (lower taxes, bad economy, immigration, inflation).

What both campaigns had in common was a willingness to communicate the same core concepts over and over again, due to an acknowledgement that most people aren’t listening all the time, and those that really, truly are don’t care if you repeat yourself.

The second half of this is to build a content machine that follows the A-I-C-D-D-A framework:

A: Audit – Identify the content you already have – articles, videos, posts, speeches, press coverage, podcast interviews, webinars, etc. Most brands have too much content, to the point where they don’t even know what they have (and have not) used.

I: Identify – Find the content gaps. What topics are relevant to your audience AND not covered by your existing content? Are there niches your competition is focused on that you have not addressed? What emerging topics/areas could be hyper-effective if you have a first-mover advantage? You’ll notice from the campaigns that both Harris & Trump continually sought to identify gaps with voters – whether it was on local/regional issues, or emerging debates, or simply matching/countering the other’s policy positions. This is exactly what more brands should be doing.

C: Create – Knowing the gap is great; addressing it is better. Once you find gaps, prioritize them then create content that both (i) addresses the gap and (ii) does so in the natural content language of the audience to whom it is addressed. It is worth mentioning here that not all content is text-based – the Harris campaign (by way of example) heavily leaned into video & memes, alongside traditional written content.

D: Diversify – This is where both campaigns truly shined – they both took content created (policy papers, speeches, Q&As, appearances) and transformed it into dozens of different formats, lengths and styles – often in real-time. This is a lesson that more brands need to embrace – every single piece of (for instance) written you create can (easily) become 50 to 100 pieces of content:

2 10-minute YouTube Videos
1 Podcast Episode
2-3 5-minute explainers
5-7 X threads
3-5 emails
3-5 LinkedIn posts
1-2 lead magnets/downloadables
10+ Quora/Reddit Articles/Posts
3 Landing Pages
5 YouTube Shorts/Reels/TikToks
1-2 Case Studies

Look at both campaign’s social media pages and you’ll see this in action. Not only did they do this for their candidates, but they also expanded this effort to third-party supporters, amplifying relevant user-generated content + edits.

D: Distribute: Distribution is not once-and-done – and both campaigns knew it. Trump + Harris relentlessly distributed both positive (for them) and negative (for their other) content. The top-performing content organically was amplified with paid media and shared by high-profile accounts. Any way you look at it, these two campaigns were among the most effective and efficient content distribution machines we’ve seen in a long, long time.

A: Assess + Accelerate: This is the final – and most important – step: access (determine what’s actually working) and accelerate (do more of that). It’s something that most brands + agencies leave for quarterly or annual business reviews, but that campaigns did on a daily basis.

What was even more impressive (in my view) was that both campaigns applied this to their failed content, too – they weren’t content to just say, “Well, X didn’t work” – they actively attempted to understand why it didn’t work, then apply those learnings to future content – was it just that a certain issue/framing wasn’t working? Did they miss a bigger shift? Was something more important? Was the content not right for the audience? While it’s tempting(and very common) for campaigns or brands to bag up a failed piece of content and move on, the best brands are curious: they want to understand why it failed so they can avoid it in the future. There’s a big lesson there.

Trend #9: Points of Leverage

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: the Trump campaign (and Elon Musk in particular) were ruthless in identifying the core points of leverage necessary to get the result they wanted (a victory) and the bottlenecks that prevented them from moving those levers in the ways they needed – then systematically removing those bottlenecks.

The best examples of this might be Musk’s “giveaways” in Pennsylvania + the campaign’s fixation with the “manosphere.” In the case of the former, the campaign identified that Harris’ best path was the “blue wall”, and the weakest link – the point of leverage – was Pennsylvania. Armed with that information, the Trump Campaign (read: Elon Musk) systematically attacked every bottleneck that stood in the way of his desired outcome:

Harris campaign outspending Trump across the board? America PAC spent an estimated $130M to $150M in the final 3 weeks of the campaign, much of it in PA.
Voter apathy? Musk + America PAC unveiled thousands of ads + angles, highlighting local issues to re-engage potential voters.
Low-Propensity voters not being engaged/attending events? Trump, Vance & Musk hosted over 50 events in small communities across the state.
Going against a well-funded, professional on-the-ground operation? Musk made a massive late-game investment in a ground game, ultimately knocking on 2.3M targeted doors.

While most campaigns try to do everything – reach every voter, run ads on every channel, knock on every door (there’s a similarity there with many brands) – but what Musk did was narrow the focus. He identified the 20% of actions that would produce 80% of the results, and he systematically dismantled any obstacle or impediment that stood in the way of that 20%.

Whatever your politics, what Musk did in PA will be the topic of many case studies in the years to come. As for marketers – the lesson here is crystal clear: do less + prioritize more. This is the ultimate encapsulation of what I meant when I said the best brands do less so they can do it better.

I’ve written before about how I believe too many brands try to do too much – too many products, too many service lines, too many competing priorities – with the end result being that we over-extend our capabilities, capacities and budgets. Compounding the problem is the (seemingly) never-ending onslaught of shiny new things – new platforms, new mediums, new creators, new trends – all of which we believe (right or wrong) that we should be doing. The reality is that only a small fraction of these things will actually move the point ofleverage; the rest is (at best) noise and (at worst) a resource drain on the tactics/platforms/tools that are actually effective.

The trick is to ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t fall into that “20%” category above – and that starts with a shift back to first principles:

List everything you’re doing – channels, tactics, etc.
Determine the resource load required to execute each item from (1)
Identify which of the items from (1) appeal to a sufficiently large OR a sufficiently impactful segment of your audience, such that they can have a measurable impact on your overall objective.
Prioritize each item from (1) based on Cost To Execute x Potential Impact
Cut everything that is outside the top-20% OR restructure it such that it fits within the top-20%.

I firmly believe that EVERY brand can learn from this. The overwhelming sentiment I’ve heard from many senior marketing leaders can be summed up with this quote from a CMO:

“We’re doing so many things I’ve long since lost count. We are doing too much, on too many channels, with too little clarity or accountability. It’s impossible to know what’s actually working, what only appears to be working, and what we’re completely missing because there’s too much noise and too little signal – and it’s only getting worse. Everyone wants to have a little bit invested everywhere, instead of deploying everything we have into the channels/tactics that actually move the needle.”

If that sounds even a little familiar (and it should), then I’d encourage you to follow Musk’s example: identify the core points of leverage, then manically obsess about them until they move in the direction you need them to. It sounds simple, but (in practice) it’s a maddeningly difficult skill to master and execute.

I firmly believe that we’re entering a new paradigm for media and a new era of communication – and there’s much we can learn from massive events (and this certainly qualifies as such). I sincerely hope that some of these observations and trends are helpfulto you in the days, weeks, months and years to come – or, at the very least, that they gave you something to think about.

Until next week,

Cheers

Sam

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