Cliches may be cliche, but they still contain a grain of truth. Case in point: history is written by the winners.
For a recent example, let’s look at Real Madrid. For any non-football fans, Real Madrid won the Champions League this year, becoming European champions for a record 15th time, the sixth time in the past ten years. An astonishing feat, especially when you consider no team had retained the famous big-eared trophy in the modern Champions League era - until Real Madrid did it in 2017.
The prevailing narrative is that Real Madrid’s win was inevitable. As I watched the game unfold, my hope stayed with the underdog - but my head told me Real Madrid would score eventually. They always find a way, says the narrative. And so it came to pass.
However, the narrative of inevitability only holds because Real Madrid won. They came close to not winning - close to not even getting to the final. There was a penalty shoot-out vs Manchester City in the quarter-final; we all know (cliche alert) penalties are a lottery. This time, luck was on Real’s side. In the semi-finals against Bayern Munich, Madrid needed two late goals to progress. Even in the final, Dortmund squandered two glorious chances to take the lead.
The winner’s narrative of inevitability only tells us one part of the story. We love that kind of narrative because it is simple and easy to remember. The best stories always are. Right now, the UK’s 2024 General Election narrative is still taking shape, with a few candidates in the mix for “defining factor”. But it will be the final result that will ultimately define how we remember the campaign.
The trouble is, just as with football, the memorable meta-narrative obscures the details and potentially overstates the role of certain factors and campaigning platforms. The truth is always more complicated than the stories we tell ourselves. It often takes time and in-depth research to explain why certain campaigns were successful, and others weren’t.
Two papers I’ve read recently illustrate this “time and complexity” point well.
Firstly, a team of researchers writing in PNAS attempted to analyse the effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 U.S. presidential election. They did this by working with Meta to deactivate around 35,000 users’ Facebook and Instagram accounts in the six weeks before the election.
The study found that six weeks off Facebook, in particular, did indeed make people less informed about the news - indicating we do pay attention to what we read when browsing our newsfeeds. This trend also applied to misinformation - time away from social media reduced knowledge of fake news.
Most interestingly, the study found “no significant effects of social media access on polarisation”. While the authors highlight the difficulty of conducting bulletproof research into the effects of social media on human behaviour, their results unequivocally puncture one of the meta-narratives around politics on social post-2016.
The paper also answers the killer question—did Facebook and Instagram play any part in deciding how people would vote? They did, but not in a significant way. The numbers would only be meaningful in a “close election,” said researchers. So, while social media clearly has affected political campaigning, its effects may have been overstated—both the positive and the negative.
The second study is a little older (published last year), but the findings echo those looking at the effect of Facebook and Instagram on elections. This time, researchers aimed to understand how impactful Russian election interference was in deciding the 2016 US Presidential election.
They found that only a small minority of social (mainly Twitter) users were exposed to material shared by the Russian Internet Research Agency. In fact, only 1% of people saw 70% of posts (chiming with other research showing Twitter is a tiny bubble all of its own). People’s exposure to mainstream media and politicians' direct addresses dwarfed the Russian misinformation they saw.
As with the Meta study, the researchers found no meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in political attitudes, polarization, or voting behaviour (thanks to
’s custom GPT for writing that line).Looking at more recent examples, I’ve read two fascinating pieces about the scale of the ruling BJP Party’s election campaigning in India. Given the size of the country and the sheer length of the electoral process, it’s an entirely different campaigning landscape.
However, we see some similar trends to those defining our meta-narratives in the West, especially as the result has now been announced (a win, but a narrow, Real Madrid-style win).
Modi’s party has a sophisticated, federated model for running WhatsApp groups nationwide. These WhatsApp groups share a mix of planned central HQ messages alongside more locally relevant posts. The sheer number of groups and party volunteers running them makes any content matrix Excel sheet I’ve ever written look puny by comparison. And clearly it does work - but perhaps not with the direct ability to influence behaviour some people would suggest.
Similarly, the party has been experimenting with officially sanctioned deepfakes to add the same level of scale to individual politicians. While that may sound scary, the reality is a little more prosaic. No one really believes the deepfakes are real, and hilariously, the end of the Wired piece reveals just how poor quality the AI-generated robocalling is. We’re still a long way from the first AI election.
Jonathan Liew, writing in the Guardian on a completely different subject, used the phrase “the intoxicating elixir of novelty”, which I wrote down because I loved it so much. He applied that epithet to the current elite football management merry-go-round. But you could equally apply it to campaigning. We love ‘new’. The typical 4-5 year window between General Elections is enough time for campaign planners to try and gain a competitive advantage with some new tactic. Over the past 15 years, these have been typically powered by technology. Hyperlocal campaigning. Micro-targeting. Real-time advertising. Memes and reaction videos.
Often, these tech-powered experiments become enshrined within the winning narrative - either being key to success or blights to be stamped out to preserve electoral integrity. Humans have an innate desire to make sense of events in their immediate aftermath, to develop a narrative that helps us understand why something happened as it did. The truth often takes a lot more time and reflection to unpick - hence the winner’s narrative taking prevalence and undue responsibility being placed on the role of technology in a campaign’s results.
The truth is far more prosaic. There are any number of factors that go into our decision-making. Many of these are perfectly rational; plenty more completely irrational. It takes time and effort to understand why we make our decisions, whether that’s who we voted for or which brand of washing powder we buy.
As comms people, we should avoid getting distracted by the latest things and focus on the fundamentals of our craft. Put adequate time into preparation and understanding the landscape. Don’t take anything about your audience and your challenge for granted. Arguably the biggest failing of the Remain campaign was underestimating how people felt about their country—the Brexit bus was just wallpaper.
Preparation should also apply to channel planning - making sure you’re covering all of the available options and not just defaulting to Meta adverts because they’re easy and provide metrics that look good on paper. Focus on meeting your audience where they are. That’s not a binary decision between arbitrary labels such as “traditional” and “digital”. It means making sure your message is inescapable during your campaign.
And the message needs to be crisp and simple. To my mind, no one has bettered the brute simplicity of “Get Brexit Done” in any campaign of the past five years. You can argue that it’s a meaningless platitude; it’s harder to argue against its effectiveness, against the dynamism inherent within the words.
The fact that history is written by the winners is a testament to the power of narrative, and no narrative is more powerful than the stories we tell ourselves. But before we get too swept up by the latest thing that allegedly swung it for the victors (it was Don Carlo’s laidback approach! It was the memes!), we need to take more of a critical eye to events and understand the real factors at play. Sometimes the truth, that Real Madrid have very good players who have won Champions Leagues before, is far more prosaic than the prevailing narrative would have you believe.