I was listening to a rather interesting seminar on Tuesday, which took place at Wanha Satama in the sunny Helsinki (not an oxymoron after all). The occasion was Markkinointiviestinnän Viikko (Marketing Communication Week) and the topic of this particular seminar was whether it is possible to do politics in the future without marketing. The speaker was Esa-Pekka Nykänen from the Bob Helsinki ad agency.
Esa-Pekka discussed how in this day and age your values and the stage you happen to be in your life (say you just became a parent) affect more on your voting behavior than your social class. So far so good. We all agree.
He pointed out how parties are fighting a losing battle for the attention of their constituencies with organized interest groups (such as labor unions), one issue bands (such as Al Gore), Non-profits and Civil Society (such as Fair Trade, Oxfam etc). The interesting point here is that where before the political parties could rely on the news media to channel their policymaking and communication objectively to the potential voters on the other end of the tube, they can’t anymore. Now it’s like playing the game called Phone -each person that passes the message along gives it a new subjective spin. The political parties not only need to make their message rise above the other actors’ messages, but they also need to fight against the channel itself.
According to Esa-Pekka the rules of the game have changed, so the political communication needs to change as well. Where the other participants in the game use entertainment media, marketing communication and social media (online communities, blogs etc.) in addition to the normal news media to push their message through, political parties have no option but to follow suit. Does this mean that when in Rome, play with the voters’ feelings by using the same dirty marketing tricks as the Romans do? To make a point, perhaps, but to put it differently: You cannot serve the public if the public cannot hear what you’re saying or gets someone else’s version of it.
Esa-Pekka pointed out that part of the Finnish news media establishment has changed from a sole mediator of the information into its interpreter, with a mind of its own. Also here in the putatively overly transparent and democratic Finland,
the policy makers need to recognize the fact that the channel has
started to make value judgments of its own.We know that this has been the case for some time in the US, where for example Fox News channel makes sure that the democracy happens by reporting what the politicians said even before the interview takes place. This is not that surprising coming from the Washington DC Disneyland, but it is something that we Finns find hard to accept at home. The loud objections by the weathered Finnish political journalists during Esa-Pekka’s presentation were a good proxy for how we still tend to see our media landscape here in Finland . The news media is regarded being as objective as ever, and where there has been stylized version of the facts, it is believed to be by the marketing agencies hired by the political parties -Something that is still seen almost on par with a criminal felony among the popular press itself.
The big question Esa-Pekka posed in the seminar was whether one can do effective politics in the long run by leaving the dialog and the interpretation of the policy making to the media alone. A positive change to the widely spread academic habit of not giving answers to the questions you pose, Esa-Pekka answered with a firm No! -We can’t do effective politics in the long run without marketing. Maybe we should accept (or even appreciate?) the fact that Spin Doctors are part of effective political communication.
All this doesn’t need to mean that we start making negative ads on other candidates. Quite the contrary. We saw that such tactics do not work in Finland, and now we should bring in people who know what does work. We should try to make sure that the message goes through and is understood as it is intended to be understood. This can only happen by understanding that the design of the message will influence the conclusions we draw from the facts it contains. Along the lines of Dan Pink, I’m a believer that now when we have come through the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution and Information Revolution we are currently undergoing a Conceptual Revolution where design and story play an increasing role in making sense of the world around us. As an integral part of our life, politics should reflect the current and not the past. Similarly political communication should move into the Conceptual Age to be in sync with the people it is meant to address.
And as Esa-Pekka put it: ‘…[If that happens] the politics might even start to gather interest from an increasing number of people’. I could live with that.
