If I have been saying one thing for the past four years on this site, it is that Democrats need to learn how to dominate the media in a 24/7 news cycle, something Republicans learned years ago.
Now, in the NYTimes, an unusual op-ed by Charlie Warzel posing prominently as an editorial is citing Bloomberg’s highly successful foray into Presidential politics as proof positive of just that. The title of the piece is instructive:
Mike Bloomberg Is Hacking Your Attention
Shamelessness and conflict equal attention. Attention equals power.
The article begins with a laundry list of things that Bloomberg is investing huge sums of money in, such as short snippets with a sassy attitude on every media outlet, shameless payouts to media influencers to plug for him, nasty personal comebacks on Twitter when Trump launches nasty personal attacks against him. The more brazen and outlandish the response the better.
The article notes that Bloomberg is flooding the media with money, so much so that costs for everyone else go up. But there is more going on here than simply buying those smarmy bio-ads that drove the Bill Clinton and Obama campaigns, or doing typical saturation marketing of those types of ads in major media markets to little effect as Hillary did.
In fact, the article points out that what is counterintuitive in the Bloomberg campaign is the noticeable absence of personal campaigning or marketing at all. It is more a war for attention than an appeal to emotionally bond with him as a person. The message appears more to be something like we are at war and here is some incoming:
After news broke that the president mocked Mr. Bloomberg’s height in a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity, the Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman Julie Wood fired back with a Trumpian line of her own: “The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.”
What the Bloomberg campaign seems to have bought into is that, when you lean into the potent combination of content creation and shamelessness, any reaction it provokes is a good reaction. This strategy provides a certain amount of freedom to a candidate when you don’t care what people think of you — as long as they’re thinking of you.
This is not to say that only Bloomberg has thought of this, or that such brazenness is the only model. The author notes that AOC has been doing this for some time albeit in a far more classy and natural way:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs a similar playbook online, but hers is far more genuine — the product of being a millennial who is innately very good at social media and who also happens to be a congresswoman.
The Bloomberg campaign is far less organic. This week’s Instagram meme campaign is a great example. Though it was a shameless attempt on behalf of the 77-year-old billionaire to buy off teenage influencers, the campaign perfectly exploited attention by being inscrutable. “It’s the most successful ad that I’ve ever posted,” one of the influencers told The Times. “I think a lot of it came from people being confused whether or not it was real.”
And all of this fits perfectly with another article in the Times from yesterday, about a former video journalist from Vox, Carlos Maza, who, after getting smothered by a right wing smear campaign on YouTube and denouncing YouTube as unethical and reckless, is fighting back by setting up shop there to turn its Eye of Sauron against itself. Here is what the article says about how Maza sees the media landscape:
Mr. Maza’s critique extends to the traditional media as well. He believes that media outlets have largely failed to tell compelling stories to a generation raised on YouTube and other social platforms, and that, as a result, they have created a power vacuum that bigots and extremists have been skilled at filling.
“On YouTube, you’re competing against people who have put a lot of time and effort into crafting narrative arcs, characters, settings or just feelings they’re trying to evoke,” he said. “In that environment, what would have been considered typical video content for a newsroom — news clips, or random anchors generically repeating the news with no emotions into a camera — feels really inadequate and anemic.”
The takeaway from all of this is obvious. First, always believe what I say (lol, ok, that is my contribution to the meme at hand). But, second, we aren’t in Kansas anymore Toto, and we’d better start figuring out what that means before Trump kicks our ass once again.