← Ahead of the Curve with Coco Mocoe
Ahead of the Curve with Coco Mocoe
"Maybe social media doesn't matter": The Empty Marketing of the Kamala Harris Campaign
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Coco Moco
I remember in college, the dean of the School of Journalism, in our very first lesson freshman year, she asked us what the First Amendment was. That is the right to freedom of speech. Out of all of the other amendments, why was that the first one that our founding fathers added? He said that they purposely made that the first one because they knew the power of words and of the proud. How one of the first things that a big power will take away historically is the people's right to freedom of speech. I remember watching the movie Freedom Riders and it's a true story actually based in my hometown of Long beach about a group of students who were in gangs and they were fighting and the teacher taught them about it. Just it's a really great movie. You should watch it. But in the movie Freedom Riders she talks about how violence and genocides often start with jokes, dehumanizing a group of people so then they can later justify their violence on them. How Germany would print caricatures of Jewish Europeans in newspapers years before they escalated to mass violence. She said that words matter, that they can be weaponized and they can also be enlightening. They are more powerful in changing the course of history than any weapon. What does this have to do with marketing? I went into marketing because I believed in the power of words. I believed that views, followers and engagement meant power. Brands spend millions on marketing every single year. And a fun fact is that the Barbie movie spent more money on marketing than actually creating the film. So they spent $150 on marketing and the film cost $145 million to make. Attention is the one resource that there's no formula to attain. Even the richest and smartest people in the world spend their lives trying to get attention and figure out the formula and fall short. What's interesting about attention is that it's often immeasurable. Except during a presidential election. Harris and Kamala HQ ran a once in a lifetime marketing campaign and yet it didn't matter. It didn't move the needle at all. Today's episode of Ahead of the Curve with Coco we are going to be examining the marketing efforts behind the recent presidential election. We will be examining Trump versus Kamala Harris and why I personally think that Trump ended up winning over people that were on the fence. I've been grappling with the idea that maybe social media and the Internet is not as real as I thought. I had to ask myself, is this all non consequential? I want to preface this by saying that this entire podcast is based on my opinion and I'm obviously not a political expert. I do not claim to be. I'm only looking at this from a branding lens. I will also probably say things that maybe you don't agree with or maybe are an opinion one way and it'll change later if I get information that enlightens me further. But right now, as I'm filming it the Monday after the election, this is my opinion. This is what I think happened. This is what I can decipher from a marketing standpoint what I think it means for the future from a marketing standpoint. The contrast here is that Harris and Kamala HQ ran one hell of a marketing blitz. The TikTok account, Kamala HQ got over 5 million followers in less than two months and yet she lost the popular vote to Trump by over 3 million. I wanted Harris to win. And I do subscribe to Astrology. You guys know that I do think that it's more important than ever that we do not fall to conspiracies and become blue Anon. Protecting democracy in our voting system is more important than ever. And with the information that we have right now, it seems more Americans want to Trump. So let's discuss why. Now, this is not going to necessarily be about people that were on one side extreme or the other. You know, people lean left, people lean right. I really wanted to figure out people that were on the fence, people that like, were not sure who they were going to vote for overwhelmingly leaned towards Trump this election. Last election, people on the fence leaned towards Biden. What happened? Also, do we owe Hillary Clinton an apology? Because everyone said that, like she got blown out of the water by Trump when she ran in 2016, yet she still won the popular vote and that was not the case this year at all. So what exactly changed? Why did so many Americans on the fence from a branding lens? Again, I'm not talking about politics, I'm not talking about economy, because those things I don't know. Simply from a branding lens, why did they lean towards Trump? And at the end of the podcast, I will discuss the shift of many podcasters and influencers towards the far right, why that might be, and why the left doesn't have that same pull. If you want to hear the extended episode at the end where I will cover that, you can become a paying coconut on substack@cocomoco.substack.com you will get access to every single extended episode that I've released. So if you want hours more marketing content to listen to today. And you will also get the Friday Trend Report. So thank you and if not, if you're just listening to the free version, thank you so much anyways. I'm so grateful to all of you. Let's talk about why I think Trump won from a branding perspective and then I'll specifically talk about the influence that I believe short form versus long form had on this election, because I think that played a huge, huge role that I'm going to get to as well. Trump is an image architect. The two elections that he won, he positioned himself as it's me versus the machine. He struggled to do this in 2020 because he was the president. He was literally the machine. America loves an underdog. He knows that. We even see this with music artists and how they position themselves. If you are the underdog, your fans will rapidly defend you. The moment that you become ungrateful or too big for your birches, I think is the saying your fans turn on you even more than the general public. A great example of artists either wanting to position themselves as the underdog or genuinely thinking that they are the underdog would be when Harry Styles won Album of the Year at the Grammys a few years ago. During his speech for getting the most highly coveted award of the night, he said people like me aren't supposed to win these, which was funny because I think he genuinely meant it. And yet he is the archetype of people that win those awards. He was one of the highest performing and top awarded artists of the entire year. He got into the music industry as a teenager when auditioning for X Factor and has really like been so talented and he has a great team behind him. Like why he thought that he was the outlier was like a clear indication that either he wanted to position himself as an underdog or he genuinely did think that he was an underdog. Another example of this would be Taylor Swift. If you even just listen to the way that she talks to her fans in her concerts or anytime she wins an award. She really is great at positioning herself as I'm just this little girl who didn't think that I could win an award this big and yet she's one of the most brilliant, acclaimed, most listened to artists in the world. I also think that what happened with Big Machine Records and her now re releasing her albums, while that was not her fault, like them selling her records, it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to her because this re releasing via Taylor's versions really positioned herself as her versus this big music machine. Scooter Braun. To her fans it is her versus the industry. Whereas I would argue that Taylor Swift, at least now has way more social and financial capital than Scooter Braun. To her fans, like, it's her versus this really big, scary guy. And yes, he has his issues and he's unethical, I agree. But it is interesting that, like, as long as you can position yourself as this underdog, people will rally behind you. With Trump, the two elections that he won was when he positioned himself as him versus the status quo, him versus the big government. Him. He always uses the word deep state. Like, what that even means, I don't know. But it's him versus the deep state. He knows that Americans love an underdog. It is baked into our country's identity. Growing up in history class, we are taught that the colonies were this little small band of people that fought against one of the biggest nations in the world and came out on top, that we gave other nations hope to fight off their own colonizers. And when middle of the spectrum Americans must decide between two candidates in an election, they often go for the underdog or the person that's challenging the status quo. This seemed especially potent this year because you had, of course, like, I was listening to Pod Save America and different podcasts, and they're like, no, the economy's never been better. But on a personal level, like, I know so many people that were laid off the last two or three years. The economy is really struggling. Like, people on a personal level are struggling. Prices are really high. And whether that's Biden's fault or not, people see it as, like, they just wanted to change. And Trump was really good at positioning himself as that change. Whereas when Biden won, people were upset about the way Trump handled Covid, et cetera. And so Biden was able to position himself as the much needed change. Now, the positioning of an underdog would be a catch 22 for Harris, because as a black South Asian woman, she is already in a bind. She must go above and beyond to prove her worth. So if she leaned into this imaging of being an underdog, the other side could have used that against her and been like, see? Exactly. She's not qualified. Whereas Trump, even if he does position himself as this underdog or outlier who doesn't really know government, and that was his superpower. He's always going to get the benefit of the doubt because, you know, the privilege of manhood. And I thought I was crazy for thinking that the underdog angle mattered. And when I made a video about it, I was like, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. But then I was listening to Pod Save America and they didn't say the word underdog, but they did mention how Trump, every time he's won, he was able to position himself is like him versus like the big guy, like him going up against the incumbent, him going up against the machine. And that the time that he lost, it's because he was the machine. He was no longer the underdog. So I'm not crazy political experts. Pod Save America, they're these hosts that work with, they worked on Obama's campaigns and they mentioned that in their kind of recap of the election and what went wrong. And I also think another thing that ended up kind of hindering the Harris campaign was so many celebrity endorsements. So the Democrats used to be for the working people. If you guys want a great synopsis of this, you can read Bernie Sanders kind of open letter to the dnc, or not the dnc, but just the Democratic Party after the election. He puts it a lot more eloquently than I could. And the actual DNC and these rallies leading up to voting for Harris and Election Day, it was almost like a pseudo Met gala. You had Lady Gaga performing, you had Katy Perry performing, you had Beyonce come out in Houston. You had Taylor Swift writing an open letter in support of Harris. And yet none of that, none of that moved the needle at all. It makes me wonder if a lot of these huge pop stars, either their fan base is very like underage teenagers that are super vocal and can't vote and. Or my theory is that a lot of their fan base is also just not American. And that's why they don't really move the needle in American politics. For example, Brazil and the Philippines, they're huge fans of American media and culture. And so they have really big fandoms for American pop stars that might not translate over to American politics. Now, I don't want to mistake the. The American people, I think are have this growing resentment towards celebrity culture. And I don't want to mistake that for a resentment towards their art. I think people still value art and work. Concert sales are at an all time high. Box office. Movies like Barbie and now Wicked are bringing in millions of dollars before even opening night. But if you look at celebrity events like the Met Gala or just red carpets, people are giving more and more pushback to those events than ever. Celebrities without art leads to resentment. There's this disenchantment with Americans towards celebrities. And I do believe that Trump would have had way more celebrities at his conventions if he had access to them. I just, I think he's kind of shut out of that world in a lot of ways. But what ended up working in his favor is he turned towards podcasters, which I'll get to. But in terms of empty marketing, I think that is where these celebrity endorsements were an example of. But also more specifically, the Kamala HQ accounts which took over social media. They were tapped into Gen Z type humor, if you want to know, like, the flavor of marketing that Kamala HQ was doing, it was very much like Duolingo coded. I'll never know until the day I die how all of these business accounts get access to the music libraries. Because when I run business accounts, girl, I can only use like elevator copyright free music. I'm like, how are you guys getting access? Oh, anyways, I'll never know. I'll never know. But comma HQ was targeted at Gen Z. Their logo was even inspired by the Pop Crave logo. Pop Crave is friends of the podcast. I. I know the two people that run it and they're good friends of mine. We love Pop Crave. Okay, but the Kamala HQ Instagram grew to 1.2 million followers in two months. They posted meme headlines that almost look like they were pulled from like Reddit, the Onion, and it was like Harris on campaign trail. While Trump muses about being shot on TikTok. They have 5.7 million followers that they grew in two months. And they often leaned into memes like brat sommer or you just fell out of the coconut tree. They clearly had this Gen Z sense of humor, and yet it did not move the needle at all. At all. Whereas Trump did hours long, unedited podcasts, the strategies were a clear example of the influence of long form versus short form. And I did a TikTok about this as well. If you guys saw it and you're from that TikTok. Hi, but this is the part of the podcast where I'm going to talk about specifically the influence of long form media such as podcasts versus short form media such as viral TikToks, and why I feel like this election is another example strictly from a branding perspective, not economics, not whatever. From a branding perspective. Why I always say, I will go to my grave saying that long form media is so much more influential than short for media, even if it gets less views and engagement. If you guys want a really great deep dive into the podcast world and its embracing of Trump, you can listen to the Colin and Samir show. They just did a podcast episode on this and I will link out that down below in the show notes, they literally created a spreadsheet and went through how many podcasts Trump appeared on on YouTube, how many podcasts Harris appeared on. And Harris, I think they said, only went on like 4. And it only accumulated 4 million views. Not only that, but Harris, for example, was super buttoned up. So when she went on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she only had, like, Alex Cooper had to go to Harris's location and recreate the Call Her Daddy set for Harris to film in. So Harris did not show up to her set. She went on, like Shannon Sharp's podcast and a few others, but that was it. And then they sent Mark Cuban on some other podcast to kind of advocate for her in, like the Bro V. The Bro sphere, such as the Andrew Schultz podcast. But they were saying that Trump, I think they said that he appeared on like 16 videos and podcasts long form in the lead up to the election. J.D. vance and some of his top advisors, Elon Musk, they were appearing on almost two long form podcasts a week. They had those people flying around town going on so many podcasts. And Trump, for example, went on the Joe Rogan show, which was three hours long. Trump appeared on the Aiden Ross live stream, which was completely unedited, which is so crazy. So as you can tell, like, the Trump campaign, even though he says the wrong thing a lot of times, even though he makes mistakes, even though he is kind of a loose cannon, he went on so many of these shows was completely unedited, unfiltered. The Aiden Ross livestream, like, you literally can't edit a live stream. And yet a lot of these really seasoned politicians, they are used to being so buttoned up. So, like, everything is planned. The way they shake the hand of another world leader is, like, rehearsed. Because if the camera's over here, your hand has to be on top to show that you have the power. And then if they put their hand on top, you put your other hand on top. And then if they grab your other hand, you grab their elbow. Like, it is so polished. And these podcasts felt really counterintuitive for a polished politician. And yet Trump was able to move the needle because he was sitting for hours on these shows. He also went to, like, McDonald's. He and, like, worked, which, like, it's so bizarre. But yeah, he went to McDonald's. He went to. He was like in a garbage truck at one point. He was willing to try everything. And him going on these long form podcasts, I think the Joe Rogan show was like three hours long. Initially, I didn't think that it would move the needle that much, but when I was watching the coverage of the election on msnbc, they were talking about how Trump, like they were talking to ASU students that were voting in a swing state. And the journalist kept saying that a lot of the men that he was asking who they were voting for, that they said that they were voting for Trump because he went on the Joe Rogan podcast. So again, I'm sure they already knew they were going to vote for him. Maybe it was just confirmation bias, but a lot of these other podcasts tried to get Harris on and she didn't go on and call her Daddy's defense. Tried to get Trump on. He didn't go on. But call her Daddy is not the type of podcast that is going to ask hard questions. And if they are, they're going to be pre rehearsed and like probably approved by a PR person. Whereas some of these other shows that Trump went on, like, obviously a lot of them were kissing his butt, but they were unedited. It was just these really long conversations. So when Trump was focused on doing all of these really long, sometimes kind of fringe podcasts, Kamala HQ was being run by these Gen Z kids that were like, not kids, they're adults, but they were like leaning into this duolingo ification of tick tock and posting memes and posting 10 second videos that were, yes, getting tens of millions of views. But a podcast with million views that is an hour long is going to have way more influence and actually get people to show up and vote than a 10 second TikTok that's 10 seconds long that the person forgot. They even watched the next three videos that they scroll to. I always say in every episode. You guys, can you tell me the last podcast you listened to, who's the person's name? Why did you click on it? What was the title? What did you learn? You probably can tell me all those things if I told you right now. Recite to me the last 10 TikToks that you watched. What was the topic? What was the order that you swiped in? What was the name of the username? What was the topic that they covered? What was the captioning? What were the hashtags they use? You could not tell me any of that, right? It's not memorable. Long form is memorable. And we're even seeing this with the amount of podcasters that are selling out, like these tours and podcasters are the new rock stars. Okay? So think about Jake, Shane, and therapists. His therapist YouTube show will maybe get like a hundred thousand views an episode and his TikToks will get 10 million views. But his therapist podcast is what is selling these, this nationwide tour that he's on. So you know, the cancel pocket, that's a whole other issue. But like they were going on these tours that are grossing so much money because it is a podcast. No one is going to show up. No one's going to buy a ticket to sit in a stadium and watch you do the Renegade dance for 10 seconds and then walk off the stage. That's not how it works. Podcasters bring in so much money. So I think that Trump understood the influence of podcasting or he just wanted to get as much attention as he could. I think also part of it is that he knew in some ways he was rejected by mainstream media, rightfully so, like causing an insurrection will do that. And he was kind of pushed out by some of the bigger social media platforms. And so he knew that he had to find a new way and podcasts were this less buttoned up media platform that was willing to have him on and it ended up swaying the election in his favor. So I think that is so fascinating to think about. Now in the next portion of the podcast I'm going to talk about maybe why we see more of these podcasters and influencers being embraced by the right and the left doesn't have any sort of like magnet, like we don't have a magnet for this influence in new media. So I want to talk about that and that will be in the paid portion. So if you want to hear me talk about this anymore can go to cocomo.substack.com become a paying coconut and you can hear me chat for a little bit longer. Thank you guys for bearing with me. I don't love talking about politics, but I felt that this was something that I really wanted to cover. I think that this election was an example of short form media empty marketing versus long form media influential marketing. And I'm grappling now with like, do short form media? Like, is marketing even matter anymore? Like it didn't sway the election at all. And Kamala Harris ran one of the best marketing campaigns I've ever seen. It like, it, it, it freaks me out to think about. But I'd love to know your guys thoughts. You can leave your thoughts in the reviews if you're not a paying member of the sub stock. If you are on the sub stock, you can go to the comments of this post and discuss there. Thank you guys paying members? I'll see you on the other side. Hi. Paying coconuts.