Episode 1002: Empty calories

Zain 0:01

This is a strategist episode 1002. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. And guys, Thursday's

Zain 0:09

Thursday's Patreon exclusive. We've got so, so much to talk about, including the fact that Corey and I are dressed exactly the same. You look like the same white guy. And Carter, you look like a more advanced white guy nearing his final days.

Carter 0:24

yeah no i'm i'm i'm dying yeah

Carter 0:28

had a bit of a day today it's good i

Zain 0:31

mean this is this is the patreon it can go anywhere you can you can you know whisper your intimate secrets to to this to this group they'll they'll protect them yeah

Carter 0:39

yeah no i i uh okay

Zain 0:43

okay i mean i gave it i gave you a shot carter i gave you a shot i

Carter 0:49

yeah i'm not gonna do it today okay

Zain 0:52

we hit hit a nerve cory yeah i feel

Zain 0:54

feel like we hit a nerve no

Carter 0:55

no it's good i'm

Carter 0:56

i'm happy you know what i'm happy to be out in surrey uh working on this campaign um everything's

Carter 1:01

everything's going great should

Zain 1:03

should we be googling your candidate right now should we be googling what is happening with your campaign because either cory nor i know yeah okay or wait or

Corey 1:11

or care just to be clear okay okay sorry

Carter 1:13

sorry yeah okay here's what it is okay we have we have a bunch of big signs being delivered tomorrow right

Carter 1:19

right that's a a good thing big signs are a good thing except

Carter 1:22

except no one knows where they're supposed to be delivered to and the driver's having uh is

Carter 1:27

is essentially a whiny little bitch so

Carter 1:29

so the driver doesn't want to deliver them where they want to where i need them to go and

Zain 1:34

this is amazing this is a mechanic he's driving them overnight

Zain 1:38

okay there's a lot of stuff going on what

Zain 1:41

okay hold on no

Zain 1:42

no fucking Okay, scratch the entire episode. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're coming from Edmonton.

Zain 1:48

why are they coming from Edmonton? Let's start here. First of all, big signs for your academy.

Carter 1:54

There's like a worldwide run on Coroplast. Yeah,

Carter 1:58

Yeah, okay. If you can find Coroplast, you're

Carter 2:00

you're doing really well. Okay,

Zain 2:01

Okay, so you had to make the call to print these signs out of Edmonton. Now, was that because you have connections here in Alberta? Was Edmonton the cheapest? Talk to me about your procurement strategy here. cheapest

Carter 2:12

cheapest and the ones with coroplast do you guys have any coroplast in your house

Zain 2:16

yeah like literally right

Carter 2:18

here like literally all the literally all right here painting i'm painting literally behind me

Carter 2:24

turning it into one of my own so

Carter 2:26

so the question is how hard it has been to find coral did

Zain 2:28

did now are you remind me your candidate is she part of like a a slate is she part of like a brand so are you are you doing this for the entire operation or just your candidate it oh

Carter 2:38

oh yeah no you got everybody pulls the resources here in surrey so

Carter 2:42

so the resources are all pooled so i got eight candidates three

Carter 2:46

three of them by the way are completely out of signs already

Carter 2:49

and the other four

Carter 2:51

four i have lots of their signs so you know it's a bit of a gong show it's all working out you

Zain 2:56

should have had fill in the blank signs i mean this is what should have happened is you people you get people to to sharpie the signs hello my name is hello my name is insert candidate name. Carter, this is... Well, and that's friendly too. You know, that's a free one, Carter. It is. It is. It is a free one, Carter. You

Carter 3:12

Where the fuck were you guys when I was making these decisions? We

Zain 3:14

We were available at our billable rate for this advice. I mean, we were... We come as a team. If you could see Corey and I right now, for those who can't see us, we look like the same white person. I have to reiterate.

Carter 3:25

reiterate. Well, the thing that kills me is... Can

Carter 3:27

we post this as the image

Zain 3:28

image of the cover art, Corey? You just screencapped this. We look...

Carter 3:34

similar. We shot three videos today it was a big day big

Zain 3:37

day okay that's a big day um okay so you've got signs they're being run across the country uh what's what final thing on this why is this an issue so the driver doesn't know where to go why is this not a simple here's

Zain 3:49

here's where you go this

Carter 3:50

this is my point zane this is my point okay

Carter 3:53

okay okay it turns out that the address that they gave us if you know it was the wrong address and

Carter 4:00

that it took about 36 people to get involved to actually put it into the right spot

Zain 4:06

who thinks campaigning is sexy this

Zain 4:08

discussion right here has revealed what 90 of our jobs usually are i'm not even joking i'm not even joking you're right

Corey 4:15

right like if if you've been not

Zain 4:16

not even joking aaron

Corey 4:17

aaron sorkin if you think it's all walking around halls and talking in high-minded sentences you

Corey 4:22

you are wrong yeah

Corey 4:24

yeah it's mostly logistics and people fighting with people i

Zain 4:28

i i don't know if i've ever told this story but when when i was on the last days of the nenshi campaign i called called carter about my and i spent carter how long did i spend with you i don't know if you remember this call as much as i do because of how important it was to me i was freaking out about like sign placement whether we should go on like we should like do a sign wave thing on glenmore or we should do it on like shag and nappy on one of those overpass bridges i was talking to you like it was fucking make or break the election depending on where i'd go like these were the type of decisions that like we were making it wasn't like Like, hey, like what fucking takedown the candidate should do today. Like

Zain 5:04

crazy media strategy where we're unraveling in the background to take. These are the sort of like, like iterative, small, like one degree decisions, like half a degree. Non like material decisions sometimes that campaigns are filled with.

Carter 5:19

I got one guy in the campaign, God bless him, who wants us to do Burma shaves, like eight Burma shaves throughout Surrey tomorrow on Saturday. day and

Carter 5:26

and i'm like we're getting a hundred thousand brochures delivered on on friday we we need those people to deliver brochures not do burma shaves like we're

Carter 5:35

we're gonna have 50 people doing a fucking burma shave give me a break like deliver brochures so

Zain 5:41

so can i tell you can i ask you something um yeah a lot of this show is like not talking about stuff like we've just talked about right like the no

Carter 5:49

no we never talk about tech do you actually

Zain 5:51

actually still enjoy like the this like heavy operational operational like tactical like like non-negotiable you gotta do it sort of stuff of the campaign or like are you kind of bored about or are you like yawning like cory right now i

Carter 6:06

i have i usually have myself a zane who

Carter 6:09

who does all the details and uh i'm able to elevate

Carter 6:12

elevate myself into strategy because as you know i'm very old and

Carter 6:16

and i don't want to do things like you know potentially show up and unload 400

Carter 6:20

400 four by four signs like i just don't want to have to do that so

Carter 6:24

so you know it's just

Carter 6:28

yeah i mean this one is an interesting campaign this is what you have to do on these types of campaigns uh it doesn't matter like we've got 500 volunteers it

Carter 6:35

doesn't matter you still are gonna have to unload brochures every once in a while it just sucks look

Zain 6:40

look at that look at that cory we got we got the deep stuff this is the guy who had a 6 000 word profile written about him and how he is delivering sides and talking

Carter 6:50

talking to me. How many talks in that profile did it mention? You know, he has to sometimes pick up brochure boxes and deliver them to the candidates. You know, never.

Carter 6:58

That never fucking gets mentioned.

Zain 7:00

Speaking of delivery, guys, I want to start here. Corey, I haven't let you chime in, but I'm going to let you chime in first on this. We have to talk about our favorite fast food establishment because, Corey, an armed man has been arrested in a Dairy Queen wanting to restore Trump as king. Corey, there is so much in this story. uh he he's of course going to a pennsylvania dairy queen of course because it's obvious and he wants a dairy

Corey 7:22

queen that's good it

Zain 7:23

it is a swing

Corey 7:23

state dairy great episode

Zain 7:28

also a great companion podcast i would love to do a companion podcast where you you actually do like i don't know what would what would you want to do like some sort of exit polling at a swing state dairy queen uh but cory he is he's gone to the dairy queen on route 66 and he wanted to make trump king this of course when charles became king uh of course charles became king not at a dairy queen so i wanted to clarify that as well corey your reactions to uh our our favorite fast food restaurant or one of our favorite fast food restaurants finding itself uh into the zeitgeist again it

Corey 8:01

it makes sense that you'd go to one of the monarch themed fast food restaurants for this kind of demand what

Zain 8:06

what do you mean one of the monarch themes are there dairy queen

Zain 8:11

oh shit uh corn

Corey 8:13

corn dog dog archduke you're

Corey 8:15

you're all right there you

Zain 8:17

you know japan no that's just is it oh japan eddie no that's that's just a place in japan okay taco

Zain 8:23

taco bell no okay that's good but just i'm trying to think any other monarch theme or just leadership style theme well he was going through

Corey 8:31

through the same thought process saying he ended up he ended up dairy queen so he said if i'm gonna make a statement actually now i'm curious do you think he went to dairy queen because he thought that that Trump was deposed as king and replaced with the Dairy Queen?

Zain 8:49

Carl, what I want to know is where Charles fits into this. Like, what part of this was actually triggered by the events that happened in the UK for this gentleman? I know you don't know the article. I know you haven't read it, but please tell me the truth.

Carter 9:04

If all of a sudden we can go from having a queen in England, we can go to having a king in Canada or in the United States. That's just the way it works. So the United States obviously needs a king. That king needs to be Trump.

Carter 9:17

I think it makes perfect sense. And going to the Dairy Queen, given the passing of the Queen of England, is the only way to make this actually function.

Carter 9:24

He was thinking it through exceptionally logically.

Zain 9:28

I appreciate that, Carter. I'm now still Googling other monarch-themed fast food restaurants. But while I do that, let me move it on to our segment, our first segment, every problem manifests as a communications problem but especially when it is a communications problem cory i've taken your classic phrase that you've repeated on the podcast by the way no merch available for that phrase there is no merch on the strategist.ca but we will soon have merch for what cory uh we will have merch for stephen carter's most notable phrase most recent notable phrase uh before you win you lose uh oh beautiful stephen carter before you lose you win well who Who cares? We'll do both. We will do both. We will have on the front whichever

Zain 10:11

whichever one we want. You can actually have inversible shirts. Guys, I want to actually talk about communications

Zain 10:16

communications in our and political marketing. This is not that

Zain 10:21

that much of a deviation to talking about like the tactics of politics that I was doing with Carter up front, because, Corey, something seems to be broken. Something seems to be either toxic. Something seems to be overly exploited in our political communications world. And you might be asking what I mean. Well, there's a couple of examples this week that I want to touch on. And they include a text message, a

Zain 10:42

a social media graphic, and

Zain 10:45

And they kind of highlight the nature of how political parties, political campaigns are communicating with their supporters. Let me start with the text message. The text message takes us to the Conservative Party of Canada, where when Alan Reyes, who was a member of Parliament, Conservative member of Parliament, he left the Conservative caucus, said, no, I'm sitting as an independent. He was, of course, aligned with Jean Charest, for those who know.

Zain 11:13

Right after that, that same day, the Conservative Party, which they had to apologize for this message, sent out a text to supporters in that writing, from what we can understand, that said, your MP, Alan Reyes, just quit the Conservative Party. He decided to not fight the inflation by Trudeau with the United team by Pierre Polyev. Call his office right now and tell him to resign from his member of parliament post. Call him. This is, of course, translated from French. The Conservative Party then said the Conservative Party of Canada apologized for an automatic automated text message sent out earlier today to party members in the riding automated. That's interesting. We'll get into that. We'll get it. We can get into each. Yeah,

Zain 11:51

well, let's get it. Let me let me actually paint the broader picture. and then if you want to go narrow on each of these you can

Zain 11:57

second one Brian Jean has been putting out here in Alberta some of the weirdest fucking like social media posts I have seen the most recent one and he does these graphics with Brian Jean in them and they're all did you knows about Brian Jean this sounds pretty innocuous but most recent one did you know Brian Jean dot dot dot here we go lost his 23 year old son to AHS medical malpractice we need to fix AHS and Brian Jean is a leader to get that done

Zain 12:24

And this also includes versions of, did you know Brian Jean, and I'm paraphrasing here, has Indigenous friends. Did you know Brian Jean almost

Corey 12:31

almost- That's not much of a paraphrase. It

Zain 12:32

It is, I agree. Did you know Brian

Corey 12:34

Brian Jean was only a few credits short of a master's degree? Yeah.

Zain 12:38

And so, okay, that's the second example.

Zain 12:41

And like I said, we can get into each of these particular, because they're all relevant and they're all in the current sort of time horizon. The third one is also really interesting. This was a campaign email back here in Alberta sent by the Rebecca Schultz campaign, UCP candidate, where the email address is

Zain 12:59

is very clearly from her campaign. But the name on the email that you get, which a lot of these marketing email marketing platforms allow you to do, just swap the name out to whatever, says it's from your friendly neighborhood socialist. And then this entire email is phrased as if I'm an NDP supporter sending out an email. And it says things like, I think all of the candidates have put forward their best foot saying pretty much the same thing, if you don't vote for me. But my biggest nightmare is Rebecca Schultz. She's the NDP's worst nightmare. So please do me a favor. Please do the NDP a favor and vote for Rebecca Schultz.

Zain 13:35

Right? And so this email that comes from her campaign, which identifies it at the bottom, right, but tries to use this tone and this voice.

Zain 13:44

And, Corey, these may not be connected. They may be connected. But I want to have a broader conversation. Are we, is, and

Zain 13:51

and are the tactics of political communications broken? Are they toxic? Are we just exploiting them too much that this is where, what it looks like when people keep dialing it up to the degree of leaven? Start us here and then we'll either go broader or we'll go into these tactics. But I want to have a wide range of discussion on this.

Corey 14:09

don't even know where to start. Yeah, I mean, something is pretty wild right now, whether it is a trend or just a fad.

Corey 14:17

it's difficult to say. There's a lot of concerns

Corey 14:20

concerns that I have about the fact that the laws that keep us safe as consumers do not apply to political communication. So you can dial up the manipulation. And then there's just some kind

Corey 14:33

kind of like spam best practices, this clickbait best practice that political parties have gotten into heavy. Because even though you have organizations Organizations like BuzzFeed who see over time those things stop working and your share value falls and the valuations you have for your companies fall. If you're a political party, you're running gun, right? You just try to burn your list as fast as possible in a way that soaks the most out of it before the next campaign. And you say, oh, we'll fucking figure it out for the next one. We'll go follow the next trends. And all of this is sort of feeding communications

Corey 15:05

communications chaos. chaos and the the final element that i i think needs to be addressed is that these three things all happened within one

Corey 15:17

one political sphere which is more conservative political

Corey 15:22

there is a different version of the same madness in left-wing political parties you especially see it in the united states with the democrats but you

Corey 15:30

you are also finding in these times where where, you know, extreme opinions are rewarded, that

Corey 15:37

that there's this strange bidding war that occurs between people in political parties, where if Brian Jean is going to say this, then Rebecca Schultz is going to say this. And it just, I think they're so deep in their own bubble and they're feeding their own madness on this particular one. I

Zain 15:52

think all three of the

Corey 15:53

the examples you offered in a global sense paint

Corey 15:58

paint a not very compelling picture about political communications right now uh but each of them individually um

Corey 16:04

um i think could be their own case study frankly

Zain 16:08

carter let's let's cory put a lot of things out there the laws the clickbait spam sort of trend or or new best practice you know this concept of burning your list i want to get into all of these and then this kind of like bidding war amongst candidates to kind of go lowest common denominator around message or go even deeper into the base carter you've been a practitioner in this for years like tell me tell me the trend you've seen is this in what i am highlighting today by poaching these three examples actually illustrate a net new comms environment for for politics or is this just more of the same from your your experience like give me a sense of of where we're at well

Carter 16:46

well i think that we've got um this is a fairly normal thing to be seeing

Zain 16:54

you're still here am i

Carter 16:54

i still here carter yes

Zain 16:55

yes yes you're going yes sorry

Carter 17:00

everything's breaking down on my computer the audience i think

Corey 17:04

the audience probably needs to know steven carter's battery uh is at 13 and he forgot his charger no

Carter 17:10

no it's now at three percent i told you my battery's fucked and you were all like anyways

Carter 17:15

anyways here's the thing uh

Corey 17:18

get it in fast my man this

Carter 17:19

this is called chasing the dollar you

Carter 17:22

you know what they're trying to do is they're trying to up their their relationship with people and the way that they do that is they find the most extreme positions because the people most likely to part with their dollars are

Carter 17:32

are the the ones who uh

Carter 17:34

uh follow these extreme positions rebecca

Carter 17:36

rebecca schultz you know calling it uh your friendly neighborhood socialist you know the mdp call them what you want to call them i i just don't think that they're really

Carter 17:45

really truly a party of socialists um

Carter 17:48

they're certainly certainly lefts of center. But I think

Carter 17:50

think that true socialists will look at the NDP and say, hey, what the hell?

Carter 17:54

Don't sully our name.

Carter 17:56

And in terms of Brian Jeans, did you know? I

Carter 17:59

I think that that could single handedly be the worst communications technique I've ever seen in my life.

Carter 18:05

This guy's been in political life for

Carter 18:07

for 100 years, and

Carter 18:08

and they're just now getting around and telling us that he has friends in the First Nations communities.

Carter 18:15

That's striking. striking um

Carter 18:17

um i just think that these

Carter 18:19

these things are bad communication styles coming from bad communicators and for me it really reflects something we talked about a number of times and that is

Carter 18:26

is the lack of professionalism these

Carter 18:29

these campaigns are being run by amateurs and

Carter 18:31

and these amateurs are doing anything that they can to

Carter 18:33

to be successful they don't know what they're doing and

Carter 18:36

and it never uh

Carter 18:38

uh on leaderships especially it really lays itself there cory

Zain 18:43

cory talk to me about a point carter just made which is let's let's sit on the brian gene one like these these what part of social media today do you think has changed with this concept of like feeding the beast you always need content like we've heard this so much in modern day communications even outside of politics content is king you gotta feed it uh burger king is also king um but but you gotta feed content constantly what part of it is is that in your mind well

Corey 19:09

well i we've talked about this there there is this drumbeat that's sort of expected. Hey, you've been hired to be the social media coordinator. It doesn't matter if nothing's going on today, you've still got to put social media content out. So

Zain 19:20

figure it out. Yeah. Yeah.

Corey 19:21

Yeah. And you're going to have some people who fill out their content ahead of time and

Corey 19:25

and get it ready to roll. And you'll have some people who simply do

Corey 19:29

not. And then they're scrambling to get things for the day. But in either case, you end up with sometimes this very milquetoast, generic content that's not necessarily tied to one day or the the other one of the challenges that i think that the brian gene campaign content presents to me is that it's not entirely clear to me that being terrible isn't the point um the graphic design yeah the graphic design you didn't really mention i

Zain 19:56

i didn't know the

Corey 20:00

a d it's ms paint style amateur ms paint user of that just putting it together you've got things like the logo has the white background and it's put on top the pictures are not aligned in any way shape or form the graphics over it aren't you know in the same style they're not using the same fonts it's

Corey 20:17

it's so bad i have to assume bad is the point and there is a school of thought that says

Corey 20:22

you you create something so ridiculous people share it to market but in the process of doing so they

Zain 20:27

they share it the famous example is no way that could do you think that's actually like internal strategy well

Corey 20:32

well so famous example of this was the uk conservatives who put out a tweet about we'll get brexit done and it was black comic sans on a white background yeah

Corey 20:42

yeah it's designed to be mocked and there's some suggestion that perhaps um perhaps that's the plan it's also possible that it's both the plan and not the plan and by that i mean they put their first graphic out it was an honest attempt they got shit on for it and then they said you know getting this actually has gotten the most views and the most engagement of anything we've done maybe they saw some similar metrics in fundraising because they kicked it all through and they said maybe we can do this more

Corey 21:09

that's a possibility to me i i you know i'm not even sure i'll call it a probability but that's lingering in my head as is this is it possible that this could be this bad for this long and seem to be getting worse and seem to be getting worse is

Corey 21:24

is that even possible without it being somewhat intentional that

Zain 21:28

that is not being rectified i i think your point about the engagements is an interesting one because there is there's something to be said about your comment last episode when you talked about like is the strategy for modern candidates to fill the pantry right just say what do you feel like that's similar on social media just like throw shit out there it all doesn't need to resonate but if some of it does and even if some of it's mocked it's like it doesn't matter because that's better than us paying for those eyeballs that's better than us for doing whatever like it's talking about that it's

Corey 22:00

it's the oldest communications thing in the book i mean it's an adage that i've never really bought into but it's the idea that you

Corey 22:06

you know is any

Corey 22:08

any publicity is good publicity there's no such thing as bad publicity right and i'm

Carter 22:12

i'm familiar with that phrase oh

Zain 22:15

oh you're back thank you carter thank

Carter 22:16

thank you for coming back punchline

Zain 22:18

punchline well delivered on your on your re-entry uh that's good um yeah

Corey 22:22

yeah so i i mean there there's perhaps something to that and the idea being again you just get out there you get in the conversation and you elbow everybody out there has been again maybe maybe it's but

Corey 22:36

but hooker by crook but we're

Corey 22:38

we're talking about brian gene a lot this week and we're not talking about danielle smith and in in many ways those opinion leaders on twitter and uh you know in the media are doing that because of his buck wild terrible social media you

Zain 22:54

know another good example of this carter flair airlines i mean uh they in fact i'm not even joking uh from the perspective of us making fun of them constantly uh but they've also kind of leaned into this brand i shouldn't say because of us but But I'd say because of us, it's kind of their brand. Right. Like we're cheap. We're kind of shitty, but we're cheap and kind of shitty. And we're the only game in town that's that's cheap. So fuck off sort of thing. Right. Like you're going to fly with us in that in that mantra. But Carter, talk to me about this. Like how much of this is now just like feeding the beast, low quality content, like this constant churn? And is it effective? Like this is what I want to get to just because someone else doing it. is

Zain 23:34

is it effective like this this beast that you feel like you have to feed this drum beat that cory talks about on social media that drum beat seems to be getting shorter in between those beats like like more more more more constant constant constant no everyone doesn't have to see everything you post the same thing nine times you post permutations of it nine times is this shit working i'm really curious to get your perspective on this carter yeah

Carter 23:54

yeah it works not only does that work i mean if you want to go viral and that's what everybody seems to want you You know, put a spelling mistake in your post, make it look like you're a fucking idiot. And all of a sudden you're going to go viral.

Carter 24:06

Now, is that what you want if you're a political leader? I guess that's what Brian Jean's thinking. Do the world's worst design. There's been a case made and we were part of we saw

Carter 24:15

saw some of the presentations from Andrew Bleeker, who did email

Carter 24:19

email and Josh Handler, Obama

Carter 24:22

a bunch of the Obama emails. And we saw how

Carter 24:25

how on the right, especially, truly awful emails worked super well, you know, with highlighting and terrible design choices. These

Carter 24:36

These are things that professional communicators look at and say, oh, my God, this is terrible. You know, throw a couple of spelling errors into your brochure and watch all of a sudden your brochure, you know, get a lot more interaction, telephone calls to the HQ. This is, you know, is this the right thing? I don't think so. I think that Brian Jean's graphic

Carter 24:57

graphic design, look at me and look how bad I am, style

Carter 25:00

style of communicating isn't the way I would go. I'm not running a campaign

Carter 25:05

campaign out here in Surrey where we're saying stupid things just to get attention.

Carter 25:11

I am aware of when we would do things that would get more attention.

Carter 25:18

know we put out our more controversial positions earlier trying to get more attention because it's more controversy earlier does get you more attention and you hold your more mainstream positions for later but this doesn't feel like that to me this feels like

Carter 25:34

setting yourself on fire just to get just to get some views on on tiktok and i think that that's a

Carter 25:40

pretty silly way to run your your communication strategies i

Zain 25:44

still want to talk about email and texting mccoy jump in on what you may have heard from carter here on this discussion we're having on social right now and then i'll kind of jump it over to these other two platforms as well yeah

Corey 25:52

yeah this this jumping from fad to fad using you know clickbait trying to get people mad at your texts all of that i

Corey 26:00

i do think that in the long run this is the comms equivalent of empty calories you know you're not the communications

Corey 26:05

communications fundamentals you're not focusing on the delivery of a message making making sure that what you say resonates with an audience and that you're getting it to that audience. So you're cluttering up the table an awful lot. And I am somewhat doubtful that it's a good long-term strategy. I don't know how many politicians you can say have truly shitpost their way to victory. And even when I think about like that UK conservative version,

Corey 26:34

UK conservatives are pretty down on the polls. It's not like you can point to them as brilliant successes at this particular moment.

Corey 26:42

The Trump campaign was wild, but they weren't creating

Corey 26:45

creating like a bunch of totally fake spelling errors. I mean, Trump himself was doing that pretty naturally, but I

Corey 26:51

I don't know. I don't know how much it's actually tied to successful campaigns and how much it's tied to, we saw a spike in the metrics and we're chasing the KPI and we've sort of forgotten what the overall point was here.

Zain 27:01

Carter, yeah, what is that? This is kind of the fundamental, but what does that say about the environment right now? Like we know like there's some baselines, like it's hard to penetrate. right? People are trying to do anything to garner attention, that it's harder to get attention organically. People's attention is increasingly splintered. What does this kind of say about the macro conditions that political marketing is happening in right now?

Carter 27:22

Yeah, I think that what it basically means right now is that we are

Carter 27:29

trying desperately to get attention, and we'll do anything that we can. Corey

Carter 27:33

Corey talked about burning the list. Yeah, I want to get

Zain 27:36

into to that they

Carter 27:37

they will work um

Carter 27:40

uh you know no

Carter 27:43

matter what tomorrow looks like as long as you win today seems to be the strategy can

Zain 27:48

can you explain one of you explain what burning a list is i think with the three of us we know but like explain what what like this this accumulation of a list looks like and then like how you spend the capital on it like talk to us about that a bit yeah Yeah.

Corey 28:00

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. In its simplest form, burning a list means that you are treating it in such a way that you're increasing the amount of disengagement, unsubscribes, people who just do not open the emails anymore. You've just flooded them so much that they're either shutting you out or actively getting themselves off of your lists. Even sometimes reporting it as spam, which of course reduces your ability to communicate to all of them because you might get caught up more in filters. But

Corey 28:26

the idea is you hit a certain point in a campaign particularly if you're down and you think well fuck it this list is no good to me the day after the election so i will burn this list i will run through it and i will soak every dollar out of it every volunteer out of it and i'll confess even in my own life i had a kind of a regular saying especially around eday you guys know i used to like eday was my thing yeah

Corey 28:50

and i always you know we'd call them like five times we'd burn that list they'd stop answering answering the call when they saw it we'd email them perpetually and my general line was they got four years to get over it right and campaigns do tend

Corey 29:03

tend to think about that in these terms and even um if they're losing people literally from the list they know they've got four years to build that list up again yeah

Corey 29:11

yeah you know it's such a time-bound exercise it's such a time-bound exercise though zane it's not even necessarily illogical to burn the list when you get to the the final days

Carter 29:21

but what's interesting is we're not at the final days you know so we're burning the list earlier and earlier and i'm on i'm on fundraising lists for just about everybody right and you know everybody sends you the fundraising emails and and

Carter 29:34

and they're they're tragically written and they all come from you

Carter 29:37

you know i get i get the emails from the leaders the deputy leaders the the volunteers that are active in the campaign and you're saying

Zain 29:45

saying like the names are changed The voice has

Zain 29:47

changed on those. Yeah, yeah, right. In

Carter 29:48

In the same fashion that Rebecca Schultz changed her voice on her campaign to be from a disgruntled socialist or whatever it was, your run-of-the-mill socialist or whatever. You know, is it that different than changing the voice in the email to the campaign volunteer that just wants to say, have a great day and everything's really looking up for the NDP? Like, fuck off. I know it's an email. I know it's a fundraising email.

Zain 30:17

treating me like i'm a child but this is the thing you do and cory do you think we're at a moment where the gen pop those on the receiving end of that list do because you know how many times like i'll tell you guys this another nenshi 2017 anecdote we would send emails on behalf of the candidate sometimes it'd be like nahed nenshi and we'd say nahed nenshi comma you know nenshi campaign right so we try to make it clear that hey this isn't nahed nenshi the campaign's writing this and to be written in his voice sometimes we do my voice right as a campaign manager other the times we do other people's voices and some of the replies we'd get like you would think people thought it was us right they'd be like hey zane like saw you the other day or hey now i had to keep up the good work or like hey and i can you like tell me about this that would be the responses so carter yeah you and i get it but we're not the audience here like i'm really genuinely curious in in this political marketing universe you know this is perhaps some of the reasons why some of trump supporters fell for it thinking donald trump's emailing me well i only got i only got got this deadline there's a ton of stories i'll throw this to you cory but because i don't know carter if everyone understands like like the hyper engaged you understand let's

Carter 31:20

let's think of the consequences that they don't understand and i think that the best example is those trump emails that are being sent out now um

Carter 31:27

um you know donald trump can get to your donation increased by 50 fold if you donate now oh donald trump's was looking at the list of donors this month and And it's super sad that we're not able, that he didn't see your name on the list. You

Carter 31:46

marketing. Corey mentioned earlier on that we exempted ourselves in political communications from the legal

Carter 31:53

of advertising and communications that a corporation would have to follow. And I don't think that that was a good idea because

Carter 32:00

ultimately there should be some sort of truth in advertising. advertising and the fact that we have disallow or we've availed no truth in everything to simply lie you know it is a lie that you think that that uh rachel notley's written this email or or is even going to see your reply i mean i could see it if rachel notley

Carter 32:25

the emails or at least signed off on the emails almost you could make a case for it But I guarantee you that Donald Trump's not seeing all these texts that say Donald Trump looked at the emails and, you know, that's just an absolute lie. And these multiple, you know, these factors of we can, you know, triple your donations. On what level can you ever do that? That's not legal. There is no legal means to do that. So it's

Carter 32:48

it's just. just let me

Zain 32:49

me let me get to you cory but carter you're you're actively on a campaign and i don't want to litigate your campaign too much but are you saying that if you're running a campaign today and the candidate hasn't signed off you're not sending emails on behalf of the candidate to that supporter base telling him to do action why get a lawn sign right you know help find wherever the truck is from edmonton and help it find its location but you're not telling supporters to do that in an email voiced by the candidate no

Carter 33:15

haven't done any voice i haven't done any emails voice by the candidate jump

Zain 33:18

jump in on this cory there's a lot to chew on here yeah

Corey 33:22

and it's funny we've we've gone a little bit different place than i thought we were going to go but um this is these

Corey 33:28

these are high pressure sales tactics these are high pressure sales tactics that are illegal because they manipulate people and they're not allowed in any other context to steven's point because um you know people who do not understand technology and the mass nature of email i think donald trump's actually emailing them or zayn velji is actually emailing them

Corey 33:47

right and and you find in particular that's with older populations but not exclusively there's a lot of people who can be confused by that and feel like perhaps they're letting down the candidate um and

Corey 33:58

and it's not just like the the way you position things like that it's that in any actual advertising context the standard is so much tighter i think than people appreciate so So it's

Corey 34:11

it's not just, it's not even, is it technically true? Like politics doesn't even need to be technically true. Advertising, you can't even say I was technically right. The Ad Standards Council of Canada, the ASC, which all of the major advertisers are members of, have a number of guidelines, a number of requirements. I won't rattle through them all right now. But the one that you got to keep in mind is that a person receiving it, how would they take the information? And if it's misleading, misleading even if you present two accurate statements back to back uh if it is misleading and if it leaves somebody with an impression that is fundamentally inaccurate that's

Corey 34:48

that's not allowed and the ad standards council will say this this ad is written up and that ad will not be allowed to be broadcast by its members after that politics

Corey 34:56

politics doesn't even have a truth standard right

Corey 34:59

right yeah yeah so i mean this dystopian hellscape that is politics that's what furnace sales would be without laws and i do not understand why we allow politicians to get away with this it's just a wild thing to me

Carter 35:11

well and i think i think that we're going further now than we used to go i mean i think that there used to be kind of a good taste barometer where if you didn't advertise in a certain good with a certain good taste then

Carter 35:22

then things would fall apart um

Carter 35:27

the advertising and the hyperbole has been there for a very long time this isn't entirely I mean, even the Daisy ad, the Daisy

Carter 35:35

Daisy ad was kind of the very first big negative

Carter 35:39

negative ad that kind of was a

Carter 35:41

a full scale television ad where I

Carter 35:43

I can't remember who was being portrayed as

Carter 35:46

the one who was going to use the nuclear bomb. But that

Carter 35:50

that ad changed the political world, and

Carter 35:53

and it would absolutely be tamed today.

Carter 35:56

And especially if you look at advertising in the United States,

Carter 36:00

I mean, they get away with murder because

Carter 36:06

the other candidates because their defamation laws are so terrible.

Carter 36:10

I don't know how they get anybody to be a candidate in

Carter 36:13

in the U.S., and that's where we're heading here. We're

Carter 36:15

We're heading in the same path because

Carter 36:19

that are doing this type of work,

Carter 36:22

they just aren't good enough to do better work.

Zain 36:27

From your perspective, do

Zain 36:30

do you feel like we're in this territory because this stuff is effective or this is what's now just considered a new standard? Because often we have seen in the political marketing universe, people do things that are not effective all the time. like all the and i think this is true of advertising in general right like they're reading the ron mechtritz they're just like you know different people like oh it looks good that's all it matters right how many millions of

Corey 36:52

of dollars people threw into content marketing 15 years ago exactly

Zain 36:55

exactly just because it looked good it sounded good someone's boss was happy with it right so this is just like every industry this one is also not based on true objective measure but

Zain 37:04

but as it relates to this concept of burning lists voiced emails uh now reaching perhaps their their wildest degree showcased by Trump, and not to say Rebecca Schultz and her emails and even in that same category, but it's an illustration of something like that. Do you feel like we're in this territory because this shit works?

Zain 37:22

Or do you feel like we're in this territory because it's been set as a new baseline? And if you don't do it, someone's going to say you're a poor executor of a, you're a poor comms director, you're a poor campaign strategist, you're a poor campaign manager that you're not turning over every stone available to you.

Corey 37:37

Some of it is basic

Corey 37:39

basic game theory, right if you're the only person who acts it's in your best benefit and we've talked about this in the context of you know those like waving inflatable arm things i said yeah i guarantee you the first car salesman who put one of those up sold a shit ton of cars brought a lot of people onto the lot and then everybody does it but in politics the version and why it's game theory is if you see your opponents doing this especially if you're in the same political party there

Corey 38:05

there is a safety in that herd to say well i'm going to do that too i mean the worst case scenario is we're both being suboptimal the best case scenario is

Corey 38:12

is that we're both being optimal and you know if i let him do it without me doing it uh there's a chance that he's just gonna run me into the ground because he's found some brilliant tactics so there's a lot of me too in politics it's if they're doing it i don't know if it's working or not but i better be doing it too just in case it's working and if it's not working it's not working for either of us and so that's fine and so it's kind of you know like matter anti-matter just collides and it doesn't you know nothing's left left at the end of that particular equation.

Corey 38:40

So there's some safety there. And I think that there's a fair bit of that going on. But I don't think that tells the whole story. I do think that political communicators are just as likely to fall to fads as other people. And you see a tactic work in one context, and you think, I'm going to try that in this context. And then before you know what, everybody is doing it. And that's

Corey 39:00

that's how you end up with the same advertisement running for 20 years across these ways.

Corey 39:06

I mean, even negative advertising was kind of a, you

Corey 39:09

at one point a fad, right? LBJ, Barry Goldwater was the Daisy ad.

Corey 39:14

But it wasn't even the only negative ad. There was another one. I think it was the same election.

Corey 39:21

No, it wasn't. But there was another ad where somebody says the name of the candidate and they just start laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, you

Corey 39:28

and they say it would be really funny if it wasn't so so serious right and

Corey 39:32

and and then people are like that worked let's do more of that let's see that go and and they just keep bidding themselves up on these particular things and uh enforcing themselves into a more aggressive state perpetually carter

Zain 39:45

carter can we talk about text messaging politics so i'm like this this i brought up the the the conservative party of canada i'll get into this i'll ask you guys i'll do a run through on the specificity of each of these in terms of what what you think about them so let's keep this about like the the discussion around texts in in campaigns uh have exploded in the last half decade i'd say right multiple

Zain 40:06

tools have entered the market that allow you to do threaded text messages with multiple supporters um there's also a legal element to this and i'm not as familiar as you guys may be around like political parties and their ability to text unsolicited versus third-party groups and certainly like actually less

Corey 40:20

less than some of the other communications media oh

Zain 40:23

oh interesting like you mean you mean to some of

Corey 40:24

of the CRTC rules, yeah. Right.

Zain 40:27

But Carter, now we're seeing texts kind of, you know, take on the same sort of voiced by different people. The liberals do this all the time, right? Hey, it's Justin Trudeau. And I just released this thing today. Can you donate five bucks here? Can you read the plan here? Can you do whatever, right? So we're seeing the voice element come into it. People sometimes think it's real, right? We're now seeing people randomly get text messages from things that they may have signed up multiple years ago. go, I bought a conservative membership seven years ago for this race, and now I'm getting text messages about something, right? People are connecting those dots. And then things like that we saw in the conservative party, right? Like, hey, this guy's left our caucus, he's left our cause, you should call his office right now. What

Zain 41:07

What do you kind of make of, give

Zain 41:09

give me the top line, text messaging in political communications right now, being exploited? Do you see this as opportunistic? Have you used it? This can go anywhere, but I'm just kind of curious where your heads up when i say text messages and political comms text

Carter 41:25

text messaging is the most effective style of communications right now it's

Carter 41:29

it's the only thing that we can get over 60 response rates on we're

Carter 41:33

we're getting huge open rates on texting uh you

Carter 41:36

you know they're going to people people see them people tend to respond to them immediately and when you're using uh various uh texting platforms i use avocado in most of my campaigns right now um they're

Carter 41:49

they're super duper easy to send peer-to-peer texts uh so that you know everybody gets responded to you know all these conversations open up when you send 20 or 30 000 texts and you have uh 20 operators standing by you can be texting back and forth uh

Carter 42:06

uh with all those people for for

Carter 42:09

for hours and hours i mean it's a it's a really really spectacular way to communicate with people and

Carter 42:18

conservative party says these things don't just happen um texts are composed by people they you know they may go to everybody but this isn't a random automated text that you have pre-programmed in the event that someone crosses the floor um

Carter 42:34

um this was a choice that was made uh they communicated it they got caught with with their pants down. And then they got a little bit of a spanking. So they backtracked and called it an automated text, what really pisses me off. And I really think that journalists need to step up. Journalists need to figure out what all the tactics are. Journalists need to start holding the politicians to account. Because any journalist who wrote that this was an automated text message or whatever language they use, doesn't

Carter 43:01

doesn't deserve to be a journalist anymore. This was a mass text text that was written by the Conservative Party, uploaded onto the platform with the ability to respond to it.

Carter 43:15

That's an unbelievable thing. This is the same thing that we saw when we saw the robocall.

Carter 43:24

every time there was a robocall directing people to the wrong poll,

Carter 43:27

texting is now the same thing. Robocall used to be super duper efficient. You guys, when we were were working together robocall we could get like 10 12 response um now i just did a robo here we got less than one percent response yeah

Carter 43:41

yeah the world changes and as we

Carter 43:46

reuse the texting medium eventually it too will drop to one percent eventually

Carter 43:53

that list as much as we'll kill

Zain 43:54

kill the tactic in the sense or we'll we'll make it so yeah like Like, Corey, for the longest time, people are saying, you know, text messages were the last unpolluted thing that you had. Spam calls were a thing. Spam emails were a thing. But texts were like, you know, unpenetrable. Well, not anymore in the last half decade or so, especially from politics. Your thoughts when I kind of throw out text messaging and political communications. Do you agree with Carter that it's the most effective thing? And, you know, even if it is, what do you think the current relationship looks like between politics and texting going forward? yeah

Corey 44:26

yeah so i just checked and i have four spam texts on my phone in the past four days uh yeah that's still not like to the level of when we were like

Zain 44:34

like how do we what's the spam text like how do you you sort out how do you sort out your well

Corey 44:37

you i mean i'm just look at them and you can see oh

Zain 44:39

oh yeah i see what you mean i see what you mean

Zain 44:42

like numbers that are just sending you

Corey 44:44

yeah it's like hi it's

Corey 44:45

it's x from y here's this thing and sometimes it's you know uh somebody

Corey 44:50

saying hey charlie how are you doing and they want you to reply i'm not charlie to start a of conversation and try to issue

Corey 44:56

it and all of that it's definitely a polluted area right now

Corey 45:01

can you say about um i

Corey 45:04

i guess you know i i'm a little hung up even on we're almost treating the conservative party what they did with that text uh in quebec writing as the equivalent of some of these other tactics but it wasn't i mean what was it yeah so wild

Corey 45:18

wild about this particular one is what Stephen said. The suggestion that they would go so hard as they would go off to the supporter list and say, call this person, tell them to resign. And then when everybody got mad about it, they said it was automated.

Corey 45:32

There's not many ways I can read that that aren't just an outright lie. It's not as though they had all of their MPs covered with all of the different possibilities from which they would leave. And it was instant. The minute they left, this thing was going to drop it was like a you know like a dead hand like the old soviet nuke thing like i'm sorry uh you know mr leader of the opposition but the system is set and the minute somebody resigns from caucus this thing goes it's

Zain 45:58

not we tell them that they support justin trudeau and that we tell them they support justin

Corey 46:02

justin trudeau and we tell them you know their supporters to get them to resign that's insane the the closest i could believe the thing i could maybe believe leave is there's a protocol that if somebody leaves the party that you go email the supporters and perhaps you even do this but as has been pointed out by so many people online somebody

Corey 46:23

somebody still has to write that email somebody still has that or that text message somebody still has to load it into the system and somebody has to say go and if

Corey 46:32

if you are doing that without the leader's permission when the leader has been there for two days you you do not deserve your job right like Like maybe

Corey 46:41

maybe you could argue they were overzealous and trying to show what a great foot soldier they were for Pierre Poliev.

Corey 46:46

Well, they kind of screwed things up for him, didn't they? That showed terrible judgment if it was somebody more junior.

Corey 46:52

I believe it was somebody more senior because that's the only thing that makes even the remotest bit of sense.

Corey 46:59

And we just shouldn't give them a pass for this. Like I know we live in a very post-truth world, but

Corey 47:06

let's, can we at least pretend that things that don't make sense should be called out for not making sense like this this was not an automatic message carter

Zain 47:16

carter i know you guys are itching to get into the particular so let's talk about the particulars of this right uh pierre

Zain 47:21

pierre paul you have a couple days in this is almost you could say his second controversy because there's the david aiken calling david aiken from the parliament press gallery from global news a a liberal plan for liberal supporter i'm paraphrasing but he pointed out and david aiken was wrong in terms of his we'll get into that as well in the over under lightning round but carter this

Zain 47:40

this tone this scorched earth tone that we saw from pierre and his team you know it's resemblant of what we saw here like it's the same thing it's it's not like oh pierre paulieff that guy would would would green light a message like this it's like no this is the type of of tact that we're seeing uh talk Talk to me about the specifics here. Like, who do you think comes out winning and losing? And do you think Pierre has to maybe check himself, as Corey mentioned last episode, don't get too high on your supply. Do you think he has to check himself as it relates to not just tactics, but messages like this against a former colleague?

Carter 48:18

Listen, I think the mistake that the Conservatives made today was walking away from the text.

Carter 48:25

I think they should have owned it. I

Carter 48:27

I think they should have said, listen, this guy got elected under the conservative banner. He chose to walk away from the conservative banner. We were emailing the conservative members in that riding to tell them that they should take action against someone who's no longer part of our caucus.

Carter 48:44

We want a by-election in that riding because

Carter 48:46

because it was earned by the conservatives, not by this member of parliament.

Carter 48:50

I think that they should have just doubled down on it. you

Carter 48:53

you know that was the sin um

Carter 48:57

you're if you're in a political party you're in the political party to beat the other guys and as soon as someone crosses the floor from you they're the other guys so

Carter 49:05

so the mistake for me wasn't the

Carter 49:09

mistake was walking away from the text now could the text have been written differently sure it could have been written differently could it have asked for a different outcome sure it could have but at the end of the day i don't have a problem with saying you

Carter 49:19

you this person should resign because he stepped stepped out of caucus. That's actually been a longstanding position of many parties. If you step out of the caucus, you should resign.

Carter 49:29

Of course, no one does that because, you

Carter 49:32

you know, while they do get elected for the party, they stand as individuals and they get to hold that seat until the next election. So I

Carter 49:42

don't have a problem with the tactic. I think that, again, the problem was the reaction. And as far as Pierre Poliev goes, the guy's a fighter.

Carter 49:51

That's what they elected. They want someone who will go in with brass knuckles and kick the shit out of people.

Carter 49:56

That's what this party wants.

Carter 49:58

That's what the party wants. That's what they should do.

Zain 50:01

Corey, finish this off on this particular note. You know, Carter said this is the most effective form of communication in politics. He may not be wrong because this worked. Like Alan Reyes was out in media saying, what the fuck? I'm getting a lot of phone calls, right? A lot of harassing, threatening, abusive. inclusive uh cory do you agree with carter that this was fine to send knowing that you've got a riled up group of people and when you tell them to call you kind of know what sort of call they're going to give at least a portion of them this former member of of your of your caucus what do you think of carter's point here that that the issue here was not doubling down uh not the fact that this message went out originally i

Corey 50:38

i think intellectually what steven says is makes sense right why would you back away from this the doubling down tactic yeah

Zain 50:46

which we've talked about yeah except

Corey 50:49

except there are other quebec mps there are other people within the conservative party of canada in quebec and

Corey 50:56

likely did not like this very much they they probably thought he was being harassed by these messages um the

Corey 51:04

the the strongest indication we have of any kind of unrest in the Conservative caucus is not this resignation. It's the fact that he had to back down from this and say it was wrong to send this text

Corey 51:17

Because I guarantee you what happened was the tall foreheads and the MPs in Quebec said, what the fuck are you doing? This is totally unacceptable. I can't believe you would do this to somebody, people who knew the MP. And that's why there was a backing down. Because if you just assume he was absolutely on an island and everybody hated him,

Corey 51:37

stephen's tactic makes perfect sense it

Corey 51:39

makes perfect sense but that's not what happened and it and it became something different and that tells me that people were not satisfied with the tactic in the conservative party of canada carter

Zain 51:49

carter i want to talk about this you know i bundled these three together to go broad i want to kind of now go narrow and unbundle the three examples i've posed if

Zain 51:57

if you're rebecca schultz we're going back to the email that that her campaign sent their friendly socialist you

Zain 52:02

you know one thing we haven't done in this on this podcast cast, talk about Rebecca Schultz for this long. So if you're a campaign strategist on her team, if you're one of her co-chairs, are you actually kind of fine with the fact that this email went out, that this was a story that was covered, that people were like, oh, my goodness, I thought I got this email from Rebecca Schultz? Or are you kind of like, ah, shit, if you're a campaign strategist saying this is not the type of coverage we want? How would Stephen Carter, if you were on her team, react today to this news?

Carter 52:30

I think that the timing's wrong. I

Carter 52:32

think if you're going to court this type of controversy, you'd court this type of controversy early

Carter 52:41

the ballots are being filled out. They're being mailed in as we're speaking. And I think we're nearing the deadline, as a matter of fact.

Carter 52:50

So you don't want this type of controversy now. Where you wanted this was two months ago. Will

Carter 52:57

Will she resign as a candidate? Will she double down? Will she stay in? And, you know, that type of controversy could work really well to

Carter 53:03

to really, and if she survived it, then

Carter 53:05

then you're a winner, right? And now you've got the ability to capture

Carter 53:09

capture the attention for the rest of the campaign.

Carter 53:13

Now it's just too little too late. And she just looks like she's

Carter 53:17

she's grasping at straws and reaching, you know, reaching too far for the brass ring.

Zain 53:22

Boy, what do you think here from the Rebecca Schultz perspective? You got some coverage. Your name was pumped up in media. Yeah, you know, it hasn't, it's been a while since the Ronna Ambrose, Brad Wall, hey, this person's got a lot of endorsements phase of the campaign. We haven't really heard from her in any, I shouldn't say meaningful way that, you know, she's probably, she's running her own campaign, but like her name's back in media. We're not, I've mentioned Danielle Smith once today. So, you know, I mentioned Brian G and Rebecca Schultz. So what do you think? If you're on her team, do

Zain 53:51

do you agree with Carter that timing's wrong, but it's not terrible?

Corey 53:55

well i mean it depends on what lens i'm looking through it we're

Corey 53:59

we're in an age where demagogues and carnival barkers do very well and the public

Corey 54:03

not seem to be inclined to punish them for behavior that would be considered downright sociopathic in other angles of life the metaphor i always go back to is imagine that you were in a workplace and you had a disagreement with a colleague and they sent an email like this being like hey i'm a supporter of zayn's uh he's a a total fuck so uh you know by all means do what he wants because i love it when total fucks get their way i'm a really big asshole sincerely i'm

Carter 54:32

have you hold on a second reading carter's

Zain 54:34

carter's emails back i'm

Carter 54:35

i'm not supposed to send that like this

Carter 54:38

this would have been great advice earlier um this is very upsetting kept you

Zain 54:41

you in most of your jobs longer look

Corey 54:44

sociopathic behavior um but to carter's point about like this is two months after it could have any effect i sort of agree but i just try to imagine being on one of those campaigns it's it's the last days it's clearly not working people are not showing up anymore you're not getting the volunteers everyone knows it's over

Zain 55:01

over you think this was burn list hail mary combined i don't even know what

Zain 55:06

this was because i ultimately think um

Corey 55:08

it doesn't it doesn't help anyone

Corey 55:12

anyone at all maybe she's trying to show she can be a big fighter of the ndp and position herself for cabinet but this

Corey 55:19

this is maybe a bit of an example of what we were talking about earlier where it's gotten attention you know there's no such thing as bad publicity vibes going on right now i don't agree with that but maybe they feel that i'm sure their kpis were up hey how'd the campaign go yesterday media mentions way up social media traffic way up do you know how many responses we got to that last email you know how many click-throughs we got do you know how many click-throughs we got steven right oh my god but including

Zain 55:47

including included the lady of the ctv news story who marked it as unread and then had to open it again for the b-roll for the camera which was which was great so you got you

Zain 55:57

two from her at least yeah

Corey 55:59

are kpis they're not actually metrics that matter at the end of the day uh this

Corey 56:03

where i'm kind of getting to run the

Corey 56:05

effective comments of like Like communications activity, a good communicator will, over time, confirm that the KPI moves the real metric, you know, the thing that you're targeting in the long term. I

Corey 56:16

I don't get the sense that politicians are actually doing that anymore and political staff. And it's not that different from any workplace where somebody comes up and says, yeah,

Corey 56:25

yeah, did you see I increased the corporate account by 1,000 followers? And someone says, oh, that's really great. Good work on the corporate follower increase, right? To what end? Why? Why are you doing this? What are you going to do with those 1,000 followers? Who are those 1,000 followers? Do they matter to the organization? How does it improve the bottom line? And ultimately, I think that those communications tactics, I'm

Corey 56:45

I'm not saying social media is not valuable. People have found ways to make an awful lot of money. But if it's not aligned to your business and your business objectives, it's

Corey 56:52

it's a waste of time and it's just feel-goodery.

Corey 56:55

And I think that right now there's

Corey 56:57

there's a lot of political campaigns that are over that are just looking to feel good.

Zain 57:02

but carter you know i don't want to extend this point but that's quite common with a lot of campaigns that even in the you know everyone's got a boss everyone's got a candidate and and often most people are like the candidate says hey how are we doing and you're like it's up like that report cory we just mocked up how many times have we heard a version of that from our social media person on a campaign or from our like i'm not even joking right like it's how many times be

Zain 57:26

be honest zane how many times have

Corey 57:27

have you put a report like that together i'm

Zain 57:30

i'm trying to think back to our consulting days together right and and clients who perhaps had less than ideal amounts of understanding on the platform could be sold could be sold anything right like it's up up is good right like up up is like it's more more is good uh and and it's often it's almost like this joint hallucination i don't want to ask deeper question and i don't want you to ask a deeper question because we both know that there's some shallowness beyond the top line like carter you're smiling because i i think there's a kindred spirit element to this here but talk to me about this i

Carter 58:07

i mean how many times did we sell that what we really needed to do was

Carter 58:10

was grow the number of uh facebook uh

Carter 58:13

uh likes on their page right we need to really increase their page likes um

Carter 58:19

and i mean facebook at one point facebook likes really

Carter 58:22

really mattered you know 2008 to in 2010, the

Carter 58:26

the number of Facebook

Carter 58:27

Facebook likes on a politician's page had a near 100% correlation to victory.

Carter 58:36

Facebook stopped showing posts

Carter 58:39

posts to people who liked your pages. And now you have to do 100

Corey 58:43

paid anyway. It's more than that, Carter. It's Goodhart's law. When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement. So yes, you could see a correlation on social media hey the most the most likes means they win almost 100 as

Corey 58:57

you said but they didn't win because they had the most likes they won because they were the most popular there was a third variable there which led to the most likes just going to the likes and building up the likes as much as possible does not make you a winning candidate yeah

Carter 59:11

yeah i also think the medium was different then but yeah you're largely correct but

Zain 59:15

but but carter there's a flip side to this too right like where we've worked on campaigns and and those who people almost want to be lied to in some ways there's like a desire to be like it's working or being like it's it's happening and and you kind of you know sometimes have to step back and be like well we don't know yet we need more data or we need more information or you know this is not necessarily indicative of this type of success so let's not you know you know or one thrust of of an ad wave can't do x y and z said there's a really interesting tension here uh and i'm getting way deep into the weeds but frankly that was the point of this episode uh when we talk about social media metrics and advertising metrics uh especially in political and political adjacent sort of work you

Carter 59:58

you forget the first lie that we tell in political campaigns and that's a lie that we tell ourselves right

Carter 1:00:02

right the lie we tell ourselves is that we're doing really well and it's all going to work out um

Carter 1:00:08

how many times have i thought we're going to win a campaign and

Carter 1:00:10

and we weren't even close right

Carter 1:00:12

right like we weren't even close the metrics weren't there especially on things that are riding level it's harder you

Carter 1:00:18

know on something like a mayor's race or the prime minister you know uh

Carter 1:00:22

uh premier you can see the polling where you're going to go and

Carter 1:00:25

and it's a it's a lot harder

Carter 1:00:27

harder to lie to yourself because the poll you know they have a lot more information but

Carter 1:00:32

but at our riding by riding level uh or

Carter 1:00:34

or award by award level i

Carter 1:00:36

mean i've lied to myself like a jillion times i i know that we're

Carter 1:00:40

we're gonna win we're gonna going to win we're going to win based on kpis or measures that that ultimately didn't matter and

Carter 1:00:48

there is only one measure that matters at the end of the day how many votes did you get and

Carter 1:00:52

and we've lied to ourselves time and again and

Carter 1:00:54

and i think sometimes that the

Carter 1:00:56

the lie that we tell ourselves pushes

Carter 1:00:58

pushes a confirmation bias in us to find the the

Carter 1:01:01

the the evidence that supports the lie that we've told ourselves and that's supposed to be what separates the professional from the the amateur and

Carter 1:01:09

and I'm not sure that it does as much as I'd like to believe I

Carter 1:01:12

think it's too easy for me as a professional to

Carter 1:01:15

to sometimes fall into into

Carter 1:01:17

into my own trap of creating the narrative of what we're going to believe and

Carter 1:01:21

and sometimes you know sometimes it works out Corey Corey

Carter 1:01:24

Corey I think is has long told the story about the Denchi campaign in 2010 when

Carter 1:01:28

when I walked him through what was going to happen sometimes

Carter 1:01:30

sometimes it does happen that way other

Carter 1:01:32

other times you walk through what's going to happen and it does not happen on me.

Zain 1:01:37

Yeah, it's quite fascinating. Corey, I'm just going to round out on this. Brian, Jean, and the social media memes. Is this also an act of desperation, lying to yourself, saying that these metrics are generating something when all that matters is what's being filled out on those mail-in ballots, what's being filled out by voters right now? Talk to me about this in the particular now with Brian, Jean, and where his campaign stands, especially as these social media campaigns

Zain 1:02:04

cards if i can call them as a proxy to that yeah

Corey 1:02:07

yeah i mean quite possibly and certainly that would be my assumption i don't think that he's fundamentally changing the outcome he's just changing the conversation but that

Corey 1:02:16

that that matters less the longer we go into this campaign because people will have made their decisions they will have locked them in certainly it's too late to sell any memberships on it and what he's trying to do is make sure that he's a little higher on the rank order i

Corey 1:02:31

i would would imagine than Travis Tabes you know that's his hope his one hope is that he can be a little bit ahead of Travis Tabes and there's one poll from Leger that suggests maybe he is we

Corey 1:02:41

we can get into that poll probably don't need to it's a poll of all Albertans it doesn't really matter at all and most of the other data we have shows that he's a distant third on this particular one and so he's

Corey 1:02:52

he's in the conversation not clear to me he's in the conversation in a good way yes he's elbowed Daniel Smith out for a bit I actually even think perhaps he's going to get a few of of daniel smith's votes brian gene's best chance is that daniel smith fades so badly that she ends up in third and that he or and then he manages to get her votes and kick ahead of travis tapes but

Corey 1:03:14

i'm i'm pretty skeptical that this is the way to do it i'm

Corey 1:03:17

i'm going to give myself a little hedge there because i don't think a total implosion of the smith campaign is impossible i just think it's improbable carter

Zain 1:03:25

carter any final thoughts on brian before we move it on i

Carter 1:03:29

i just wanted to say that And I thought that Corey

Carter 1:03:32

Corey taking up a part-time job designing for Brian Jean was

Carter 1:03:36

was fantastic. Corey, those designs are

Carter 1:03:39

are truly memorable. Thank

Corey 1:03:43

them. The secret was to not care, but

Carter 1:03:46

still charge full rates. That's really the key.

Zain 1:03:49

Before we move on, did you guys know Zane Velgey has two white friends?

Zain 1:03:54

We'll move it on to our next segment, our over, under, and our lightning round. It's you two. uh carter and friends it's it's it's a bit of a stretch steven carter uh overrated or underrated um email

Zain 1:04:07

in political campaigns right now

Zain 1:04:09

now and in the 2022 world they're burned we're burning lists everyone gets them overrated or underrated email it as as a political campaign tool i

Carter 1:04:18

i think it's uh overrated um

Carter 1:04:20

um some campaign some campaigns especially uh the more ideological logical ones are able to generate some significant funding out of them um

Carter 1:04:30

they don't win elections they can only finance elections and i guess in that regard they can be underrated but for

Carter 1:04:37

for the most part i think they're overrated boy

Zain 1:04:39

email easily accessible everyone does it um shows some effectiveness but it's a toxic crowded environment overrated or underrated in in a 2022 political campaigning world?

Corey 1:04:52

Well, underrated. It is one of these things that's rapidly changing. But at the end of the day, you still raise a lot of money. You still raise a lot of interest. It's still a format that provides you a lot of control if you're a candidate or a political party.

Corey 1:05:06

You're always still building those lists.

Zain 1:05:09

Corey, I'm going to stick with you. Texting, overrated, underrated in politics.

Corey 1:05:14

Well, it's pretty clear that this is the big new trend, right? We're getting more political texts all of the time.

Corey 1:05:20

But I'm going to say it's overrated because it does feel to me that the CRTC is going to shut down on spam texting from political parties and

Corey 1:05:29

and just all entities much faster than they have on others because it's

Corey 1:05:34

it's not yet a wasteland. And I don't think they want it to be a wasteland. I also think that because you've got things like iMessage and MMS standards that there

Corey 1:05:42

there are going to be, you

Corey 1:05:43

you know, more levers they can pull to keep that kind of crap out of our inboxes.

Zain 1:05:48

Carter, overrated, underrated, text messaging and politics?

Carter 1:05:51

Underrated, it still works. As long as it works, it's, you know, you got to ride it to the end.

Zain 1:05:58

Carter, my final question is a prediction question. Of course, this is a classic Stephen Carter prediction. Corey, do you have anything just, I don't know, just to add some trauma to this? Yeah, sure.

Zain 1:06:21

Stephen Carter, this prediction gives you a lot of room to navigate because I want to talk to you, keeping in line with our theme for today. What's the next big thing in political communications in your mind? It can be a platform. It can be a type of communications. It could be hearkening back to old becoming new. What is the next big thing? Email was exploited. Text messages was exploited. Social media prior to that. What is the next big thing in political communications in your mind?

Carter 1:06:53

um i'm seeing us move more and more back to old school i'm i'm seeing us give up on some of the main uh the the primary uh communications i think we'll be moving back to uh addressed mail and

Carter 1:07:06

and um unaddressed ad mail so

Carter 1:07:09

so i know that that's some one of the places that i'm moving towards is is

Carter 1:07:12

is getting into the mailbox which

Carter 1:07:15

which is old school

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

you've just been witnessed to another

SPEAKER_01 1:07:26

now back to your podcast already in progress

Zain 1:07:30

yes thank you for that yeah yeah what what carter what thank you yeah go ahead yeah yeah

Carter 1:07:35

our last episode on sunday was 100 reliant on

Carter 1:07:39

on the uh on the soundboard working this

Carter 1:07:43

is not reliant on it

Zain 1:07:44

it at all can we just do it can we just see if any other clips work uh cory uh just um actually maybe i'll ask you carter i'll just try one more clip jeb

Carter 1:07:52

jeb bush needs to survive this primary and compete

Corey 1:07:54

compete in a general jeb bush is not surviving this primary he's

Carter 1:07:58

he's totally surviving this primary rock it down on your calendar okay steven carter so hold on jeb bush is the guy i

Zain 1:08:05

i i want to spend an entire episode dissecting that clip because i feel like i was on your team there i was about about to save you be like hold on hold on do you want to couch this and then do you want to add an asterisk to this can i can i guide you something you're like jeb push is the fucking guy working on your calendar uh

Zain 1:08:20

uh cory hogan we we

Carter 1:08:21

we sounded drunk like it it really it

Carter 1:08:25

it gets more drunk every time you play it i think this episode

Zain 1:08:31

episode was for four people i think four people really enjoyed it the rest of the folks were like what the fuck was this but that you You know what? That's fine, Corey. That's every episode.

Zain 1:08:40

I'm asking you for your prediction, Corey. What's next in political communications, political marketing? Carter says we're going back to the old stuff. We've talked about, you know, we haven't talked about TikTok. We haven't talked about AI and its, you know, particular home in politics. You know, sometimes even hard to comprehend when we talk about that. So not to put words in your mouth, but your prediction, messaging, content, platform, technology. technology what's next uh in the world of political communications and marketing in your mind well

Corey 1:09:07

well it does feel like political communications and marketing is always just a step behind um

Corey 1:09:14

um us going to places without political communication and marketing and

Corey 1:09:20

tiktok was great until politicians came on it that kind of thing i do think that the next obvious area is really around um chat

Corey 1:09:28

chat like group chats and finding ways in and even getting like operatives to say you're gonna have people say if

Corey 1:09:35

if you're an operative go into your group chats and talk to your friends and pull them out we're seeing that it's all about communication one-on-one based on network and saying you talk a lot about network there because

Corey 1:09:44

because we are just increasingly shutting out the broadcast and and what will happen over time is that people will create these tools that allow you to automatically do it so you know one click and all of your whatsapp groups can have this conversation about about how great Joe Biden is. Look forward to all of this just being much more prominent, I think, in the next bit.

Zain 1:10:03

Relational organizing, also old becoming new again in some ways. Carter, you wanted to jump in before we end.

Carter 1:10:09

I just want to give one word of warning about something that could come that would be absolutely devastating, and

Carter 1:10:14

and that's deep fakes.

Carter 1:10:16

We should really be aware that

Carter 1:10:19

that deep fakes are now

Carter 1:10:20

now attainable and basically available to

Carter 1:10:25

just about any operative for any politician. And that's a little bit nerve wracking. In fact, I very strongly believe that that was a deep fake of

Carter 1:10:32

of me projecting Jeb Bush. Can we just listen to it one more time?

Zain 1:10:39

Just one more time.

Zain 1:10:41

Corey, just to make sure. I just want to make sure. I'm really glad that the board is working.

Carter 1:10:48

Jeb Bush needs to survive this primary and compete in a general. Jeb Bush

Corey 1:10:52

is not surviving this primary. He's

Carter 1:10:53

He's totally surviving this primary. Mark it down on your calendar. okay steven carter so hold on hold on the guy

Zain 1:11:01

real to me yeah yeah i think it's real i think it's real we're gonna leave it there that's a wrap on episode 1002 of the strategist my name is zane velgey with me as always cory hogan steven carter and we will see you next time

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