which it’s most likely to persuade me, why bother filling me in on all of the other issues?
In theory, market dynamics will continue to encourage campaigns to reach out to nonvoters. But an additional complication is that more and more companies are also allowing users to remove advertisements they don’t like. For Facebook and Google, after all, seeing ads for ideas or services you don’t like is a failure. Because people tend to dislike ads containing messages they disagree with, this creates even less space for persuasion. “If a certain number of anti-Mitt Republicans saw an ad for Mitt Romney and clicked ‘offensive, etc.,’” writes Vincent Harris, a Republican political consultant, “they could block ALL of Mitt Romney’s ads from being shown, and kill the entire online advertising campaign regardless of how much money the Romney campaign wanted to spend on Facebook.” Forcing candidates to come up with more palatable ways to make their points might result in more thoughtful ads—but it also might also drive up the cost of these ads, making it too costly for campaigns to ever engage the other side.
The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument. As the number of different segments and messages increases, it becomes harder and harder for the campaigns to track who’s saying what to whom. TV is a piece of cake to monitor in comparison—you can just record the opposition’s ads in each cable district. But how does a campaign know what its opponent is saying if ads are only targeted to white Jewish men between twenty-eight and thirty-four who have expressed a fondness for U2 on Facebook and who donated to Barack Obama’s campaign?
When a conservative political group called Americans for Job Security ran ads in 2010 falsely accusing Representative Pete Hoekstra of refusing to sign a no-new-taxes pledge, he was able to show TV stations the signed pledge and have the ads pulled off the air. It’s not great to have TV station owners be the sole arbitrators of truth—I’ve spent a fair amount of time arguing with them myself—but it is better to have some bar for truthfulness than none at all. It’s unclear that companies like Google have the resources or the interest to play truthfulness referee on the hundreds of thousands of different ads that will run in election cycles to come.
As personal political targeting increases, not only will it be more difficult for campaigns to respond to and fact-check each other, it’ll be more challenging for journalists as well. We may see an environment where the most important ads aren’t easily accessible to journalists and bloggers—it’s easy enough for campaigns to exclude them from their targeting and difficult for reporters to fabricate the profile of a genuine swing voter. (One simple solution to this problem would simply be to require campaigns to immediately disclose all of their online advertising materials and to whom each ad is targeted. Right now, the former is spotty and the latter is undisclosed.)
It’s not that political TV ads are so great. For the most part, they’re shrill, unpleasant, and unlikable. If we could, most of us would tune them out. But in the broadcast era, they did at least three useful things. They reminded people that there was an election in the first place. They established for everyone what the candidates valued, what their campaigns were about, what their arguments were: the parameters of the debate. And they provided a basis for a common conversation about the political decision we faced—something you could talk about in the line at the supermarket.
For all of their faults, political campaigns are one of the primary places where we debate our ideas about our nation. Does America condone torture? Are we a nation of social Darwinists or of social welfare? Who are our heroes, and who are our villains? In the broadcast era, campaigns have helped to delineate the answers to those questions. But they may not do so for very much longer.
Fragmentation
The aim of modern political marketing, consumer trends expert J. Walker Smith tells Bill Bishop in
In part, this approach to politics is on the rise for the same reason the filter bubble is: Personalized outreach gives better bang for the political buck. But it’s also a natural outcome of a well-documented shift in how people in industrialized countries think about what’s important. When people don’t have to worry about having their basic needs met, they care a lot more about having products and leaders that represent who they are.
Professor Ron Inglehart calls this trend postmaterialism, and it’s a result of the basic premise, he writes, that “you place the greatest subjective value on the things in short supply.” In surveys spanning forty years and eighty countries, people who were raised in affluence—who never had to worry about their physical survival— behaved in ways strikingly different from those of their hungry parents. “We can even specify,” Inglehart writes in
While there are still significant differences from country to country, postmaterialists share some important traits. They’re less reverent about authority and traditional institutions—the appeal of authoritarian strongmen appears to be connected to a basic fear for survival. They’re more tolerant of difference: One especially striking chart shows a strong correlation between level of life satisfaction and comfort with living next door to someone who’s gay. And while earlier generations emphasize financial achievement and order, postmaterialists value self- expression and “being yourself.”
Somewhat confusingly, postmaterialism doesn’t mean anticonsumption. Actually, the phenomenon is at the bedrock of our current consumer culture: Whereas we once bought things because we needed them to survive, now we mostly buy things as a means of self-expression. And the same dynamics hold for political leadership: Increasingly, voters evaluate candidates on whether they represent an aspirational version of themselves.
The result is what marketers call brand fragmentation. When brands were primarily about validating the quality of a product—“Dove soap is pure and made of the best ingredients”—advertisements focused more on the basic value proposition. But when brands became vehicles for expressing identity, they needed to speak more intimately to different groups of people with divergent identities they wanted express. And as a result, they started to splinter. Which is why what’s happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is a good way of understanding the challenges faced by Barack Obama.
In the early 2000s, Pabst was struggling financially. It had maxed out among the white rural population that formed the core of its customer base, and it was selling less than 1 million barrels of beer a year, down from 20 million in 1970. If Pabst wanted to sell more beer, it had to look elsewhere, and Neal Stewart, a midlevel marketing manager, did. Stewart went to Postland, Oregon, where Pabst numbers were surprisingly strong and an ironic nostalgia for white working-class culture (remember trucker hats?) was widespread. If Pabst couldn’t get people to drink its watery brew sincerely, Stewart figured, maybe they could get people to drink it ironically. Pabst began to sponsor hipster events—gallery openings, bike messenger races, snowboarding competitions, and the like. Within a year, sales were way up—which is why, if you walk into a bar in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods, Pabst is more likely to be available than other low-end American beers.
That’s not the only excursion in reinvention that Pabst did. In China, where it is branded a “world-famous spirit,” Pabst has made itself into a luxury beverage for the cosmopolitan elite. Advertisements compare it to “Scotch whisky, French brandy, Bordeaux wine,” and present it in a fluted champagne glass atop a wooden cask. A bottle runs about $44 in U.S. currency.
What’s interesting about the Pabst story is that it’s not rebranding of the typical sort, in which a product aimed at one group is “repositioned” to appeal to another. Plenty of white working-class men still drink Pabst sincerely, an affirmation of down-home culture. Urban hipsters drink it with a wink. And wealthy Chinese yuppies drink it as a champagne substitute and a signifier of conspicuous consumption. The same beverage means very different things to different people.
Driven by the centrifugal pull of different market segments—each of which wants products that represent its identity—political leadership is fragmenting in much the same way as PBR. Much has been made of Barack Obama’s chameleonic political style. “I serve as a blank screen,” he wrote in
(To be sure, the Internet can also facilitate consolidation, as Obama learned when his comment about
