I remember being genuinely shocked the first time I discovered that businesses in Europe closed down for the summer. I was working on the Sony account at immediate future, and our role was supporting EMEA markets with their social, blog and influencer activity. A client told me, “Well, there’s no point in sending anything to the markets then; they won’t be around”.
It sounded great, but also deeply strange and vaguely alien for everything to just stop. I imagine there’s an element of being transported back to school days, and that European office-based workers return in September refreshed with a new set of stationery that they WILL keep looking beautifully pristine.
Because yes, in case you haven’t heard, summer’s over, and September is here. And while it may be tempting to start thinking about your end of 2024 wrap-ups and 2025 planning, there’s still just under a third of the year to go. We’ve also got the final boss of 2024’s “year of elections” to get past. The public has already been to the polls in the UK, India and France, but the all-encompassing soap opera that is the US Presidential election still has two months to play out.
Clearly, the result of November’s showdown in the US will go a long way to defining the meta-narrative we apply to this “year of elections”. History is written by the winners, after all. But some trends are already bubbling up, ready to take their place at the forefront of the inevitable “ten things you can learn from political campaigning” pieces coming to LinkedIn in December.
The successful campaigns so far, most notably the Labour Party and Vice President Harris, have been characterised by a distinctive laissez-faire air. The social media teams for both campaigns have enjoyed the freedom to experiment and push the boundaries we’ve not seen from left-leaning parties during previous election cycles. Many people felt that the same “don’t give a f**k” attitude was vital to the success of Trump (2016 edition), Vote Leave and Boris (2019).
In Campaign’s (£) write-up of Labour’s successful social media approach, the team behind the work specifically call this out.
When Campaign spoke to the Labour Party’s campaign organisers, one said: “We spent a lot of time studying how successful right-wing campaigns embraced risk. They were really good at that, whereas left-wing politicians tend to play it really safe and quite straight.”
Labour focused on speed, empowering the social media team and local MPs to explore freedom within a framework. There was also a significant financial investment behind Labour’s approach, outspending the Conservatives by a considerable margin.
The Democrats have caused a stir in recent weeks with a similar fresh take on social media communications, making a deliberate break with the past to compete more directly with their Republican counterparts. The success of the Vice President’s team may have been as much by accident as by design - the swiftness of the change of candidate meant a small group of people had to mobilise quickly. There was no time to overthink a strategy; get posting with the memes and be prepared to ride the different social media waves until they run out of juice.
The vibes coming out of the US certainly make it seem like the Democrats remain a step ahead of their Republican counterparts when it comes to innovative campaigning tactics. The latest, as reported by 404 Media, involves the use of TikTok-style split-screen “content sludge” videos.
The genre typically involves mixing two unrelated videos, with one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom. A typical setup involves Family Guy at the top with some ASMR-esque, visually stimulating video at the bottom. The Kamala Harris campaign team has created less extreme versions of this format, with political messaging at the top and clips from video games at the bottom. It’s all a little bit “how do you do, fellow kids” in its execution, but it is consistent with the Harris campaign’s overall “very online” vibes.
But while it’s easy to get excited about the new tactics on show across the political campaign spectrum, such as the rise of memes and the importance of TikTok, we shouldn’t ignore the significant role that well-established but less sexy platforms and tactics play in successful campaigns.
Yes, the Labour Party’s use of memes and TikTok was eye-catching, but another significant factor in their success was one that successful parties have used since 2016: Facebook. The freedom Labour provided to its local candidates played out most clearly on Facebook, where engagement with local Groups and candidate Facebook Pages helped secure significant jumps in engagement and exposure. Facebook may still be a wasteland when it comes to newsfeed sharing. Still, its status as a utility in people’s lives, particularly relating to their local area, means it’s still a channel where it’s possible to reach audiences at scale.
However, despite the perceived importance of social and video in political campaigns, there’s actually very little evidence that these tactics have a significant impact. Any form of measurement is an inexact science, and that’s even more of the case when it comes to election campaigns, given they only happen every four years or so, and so many intertwining factors go into how people decide to vote.
However, the evidence in the UK is that while the memes and the TikToks grabbed media attention, they didn’t necessarily stick in the mind. The team at BritainThinks published their election diaries report recently, and one of the headlines was that the UK’s 2024 General Election was essentially “content-free”.
The diarists struggled to recall notable moments beyond the biggest headlines (Rishi leaving the D-Day commemorations early, Rishi not having Sky TV growing up). The general vibe was that voters were ready for a change after 14 years of the Tories and that all Keir Starmer had to do was, in the words of RuPaul, not “f**k it up”.
That vibe arguably also went a long way to explaining why voter turnout was historically low in 2024. There was a vibe from very early on in the campaign (perhaps even from when Rishi called the election in the rain) that the result was a foregone conclusion. Those vibes were particularly prevalent among young people - who were the least likely to vote - the very same young people Labour sought to galvanise and mobilise with its heavy focus on memes and TikTok.
But even with the limited evidence of the impact of social media advertising on the result of elections (apart from Facebook), it’s doubtful that we’ll see any candidates or parties moving away from those platforms any time soon.
Labour’s memes and reaction videos might not have directly led to higher voter turnout among young people, but they did contribute to the overall “time for change” vibe. We’ve seen the same thing happening with Kamala Harris in the US - Kamala’s nomination alongside her “Brat summer” moment has suddenly given the Democrats a burst of essential energy. That momentum is tough to measure but can be extremely powerful.
Such is the irresistible power of that momentum that there have been a series of attempts to try and manufacture it in recent years - particularly by Russian misinformation campaigns. And thanks to a recent FBI investigation coming to light in the US, we have a new trove of information to see how state-backed Russian agencies try to seed their messages.
The focus in 2024 has obviously been pro-Trump but specifically on encouraging Americans to think “America first” and agitate for reducing support to Ukraine. Alongside the tactics we’ve become familiar with (fake profiles, fake pages, fake posts), the latest Russian approach has targeted influencers.
According to The Atlantic, several YouTubers were recruited (via a company called Tenet Media) and paid six-figure sums to create videos seeding exactly those pro-America, anti-Ukraine messages.
Leaving aside the worrying fact that some online creators were prepared to take the money with few questions asked, there is once again scant evidence that the influencer-led approach delivered for Russia. The videos in question allegedly only received an average of 8,000 views each, and the man behind the campaign grew frustrated with the lack of impact: “I know this is not an obligation, but we are falling behind with numbers”.
But that’s ultimately the challenge with vibes, trends and the overall zeitgeist. It’s virtually impossible to predict what will catch on and become famous. Sometimes, a series of events come together to create a feeling greater than the sum of its parts. Countless brands, agencies and campaigns have tried to conjure up that mood and those feelings over the years - very few have been successful, no matter how much money or political influence they might have.
The best advice is still to focus more on staying close to what’s happening in the world, attempting to spot the trends and the vibes as they bubble up. That approach may create opportunities to find a trend wave you can ride or a vibe you can tap into and generate some value for your campaign or initiative. If you get lucky, you might find something you can utilise - but remember, just like the summer, those moments can be fleeting. Enjoy them while you can.