When Many Forms Of Money Are Speech

Your Speech Isn't Green Enough

It's not my place, as a marketing and advertising consultant, to show my hand in politics. In my time as an ad man, I've worked both sides of the aisle, on both a candidate and commerce level, and at the core of the work, there's something of the ethos of a trial lawyer at work. You make the best case for your client, and trust in the marketplace of ideas to prove the merits of your argument. Whether or not I believe in, or patronize, a product or service should not ever be obvious to my client, because if we're in that mental space, we're in a place that's far from doing good work.

So this isn't where I join in the cavalcade of people who give you their opinion on the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, or offer up my take on the latest statement that has garnered headlines, awareness, approval and condemnation. If, for no other reason, that I'd like this column to have more of a shelf life than a fruit fly. But I will note that, from a marketing and advertising standpoint only, what's going on here is fairly revolutionary.

Thanks to social media, Trump no longer needs the media to communicate with his audience, but communicating with just that audience isn't, of course, enough in an era of fragmentation. What's needed is for the media to take these moments and reflect them to a wider audience.

This is, on some level, paradoxical. Trump's difference as a candidate, for good and ill, is that he is independently wealthy on a scale that differs from his opposition, so much so that he is able to speak off the cuff about, seemingly, anything. We've had candidates like this before -- Ross Perot is the obvious historical parallel -- but unlike Perot, Trump hasn't actually spent that hard on this endeavour, or even had to collect much from his flock.

Instead, it's the money that he's made in the first place, along with the decades of playing for media time, that qualified Trump's output as news. That output has produced undeniable ratings, to the point where Trump tried to leverage the higher ratings from his appearance into a paid fee, beyond what any other candidate would receive. (That, in and of itself, is revolutionary, since every candidate up to now has seen enough benefit from appearing on camera in the first place to not worry about also getting paid for it.)

Finally, it's meant that no network has been willing to just stop covering the candidate, because to do so would be to court lower ratings, let alone risk the ire of his supporters, or the candidate himself... with, of course, every other network willing to give air to the fire.

There's been some signs of weak polling for Trump in the past week or so, so maybe actual voting will stop the money -- err, speech. But there's a sense that the toothpaste has left the tube, and that the next political war won't be fought with the air power of big media spends. Instead, it might be the millions of unpaid voices on social media, all of which, of course, wouldn't have been there in the first place without the money.

Amazing system, this.

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