SCABs

Make SCA great again – By @MadDavison

Mark Davison

By Mark Davison

 

Make SCA great again

 

This is going to be a great SCAB. I know all the best people and they helped me write it. And you want to know the best thing about it? I made Marc pay for it.

 

Following election, and what can only be described as the on going political turmoil that has followed, I’ve been having a think. Truth be told, the result hit me pretty hard. To say I was upset would be as much of an understatement as to say Mike Pence has a mild dislike of the gay community. I moped around for about a day, then spent the next week angry. But I have been able to sit now, with a little distance, and take stock of what happened.

 

From what I can see, there seems to have been a major failing by what is currently very cool to call the ‘political elite’. A failing both to understand how upset large swathes of the US was, but a greater failure to understand how to communicate with people.

 

Advertisers, social economists, and sociologists have long known that people don’t make decisions rationally. The general public and their judgements are influenced greatly but a number of different factors, a key one being what they do or don’t remember.

 

The thing is that while I, and maybe many people reading this like politics, find it interesting, and follow it closely, most people frankly just don’t have the time.  They live busy lives, and if ‘they are all liars anyway’ why should it really matter who says who or who wants what? Most people in a voting population, don’t have enough time in the day to spend on politics, and wouldn’t care to even if they did.

 

Why is this important? Because it makes politics like advertising. In advertising we are trying to get a message across to people who don’t care about it, and are to busy to find it even if they did. If the ‘elite’ running political campaigns realised this they maybe they would have better understood some of what made our president elect so effective.

 

Donald told stories – stories are sticky, they are something you remember.

 

Donald appealed to emotion – his speeches and debate appearances weren’t supposed to be clever, they weren’t supposed to make you think he was always right, but they triggered an emotion in you, and that meant you couldn’t forget them.

 

Donald had a tone of voice – he was consistent, not with what he said, but with how he said it. When he said something you knew it was from him, so much so that when he stuck to script, the press would report that he sounded odd, different, uncomfortable.

Donald used tangible examples that people could imagine – what was he going to do? Where was he going to build it? Who was going to pay for it?

 

Donald used repetition – And how many times did he say that he was going to build that wall? He didn’t change his campaign, he had one strapline and he used it through out.

 

 

It seems obvious now looking back on it. Why didn’t we spot any of these things before? And why didn’t any one who ran against him use them?  Maybe its because I have no had the benefit of nearly a term talking about all these things at SCA, or maybe hindsight is 20-20. Either way it doesn’t matter because if he can use them so can anyone else, which leads me beautifully into my final message.

 

At SCA we aren’t learning advertising, though that is part of it. We aren’t learning how to write great tv scripts, or design beautiful bill boards, we are learning to communicate with people. And so my new goal, as of today, is to learn as much as I can, and then take it into the world, to make sure that nothing like November 8th happens again.

 

 

 

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