McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish spot

A commercial that seemed to exploit child bereavement with hopes of increasing Filet-O-Fish sales was met with huge backlash from those who have lost a parent or other family member. It prompted McDonald’s to immediately pull the ad and issue a formal apology. It’s evident that consumers don’t enjoy being unnecessarily triggered in the name of a fish sandwich.

Kylie x Kendall Jenner Vintage t-shirt fail

The Jenner sisters printed some T-shirts featuring vintage images of celebs, including Ozzy Osbourne, Notorious B.I.G and Tupac, but with their own faces slapped on top. They didn’t have permission to use such images, though, and were served with cease-and-desist papers almost immediately.

ColourPop’s questionable shade names

Cosmetic brand ColourPop launched a new line of lipsticks with all newly named shades. However, the darker shades were named problematically: “Yikes,” “Dume” and “Typo” all attracted negative press.

Reformation posing in factory

An Instagram post of a model posing in a $200 dress in front of people who appear to be garment factory workers came off as super condescending, and Reformation agreed. It ended up deleting the post just minutes after posting because of comments.

Misguided Photoshops stretch marks

For a campaign on body positivity, instead of hiring real models with stretch marks, Misguided Clothing decided to Photoshop them on their models, which was easily seen as fake body positivity.

Colgate’s frozen dinners

Not sure who thought this was a great idea, but this did come to fruition and failed very quickly. I guess people weren’t too keen on trusting Colgate with things other than dental health.

Ink! Coffee Praises Gentrification

When this coffee shop posted that it was “happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014,” people were not having it, and some even vandalized the shop. Not the brand’s proudest PR moment, to say the least.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Virtual Reality in Puerto Rico

Mark Zuckerberg was trying to showcase the newest VR Facebook feature while also raising awareness in different parts of the world. Where he missed the mark was using Puerto Rico, which had just been hit hard by Hurricane Maria. Laughing and high-fiving with his VR partner in the midst of Puerto Ricans’ grief came across as incredibly insensitive.

American Airlines AAirpass lifetime ticket

Maybe American Airlines didn’t think it would get that many people to take advantage of its lifetime first-class ticket program in the ’80s—priced at $250,000 at the time. But it did, and it ultimately cost the brand millions per year because of the demand.

“Today, experience is the battleground for brands to win,” Accenture Interactive’s Brian Whipple recently told MediaPost.

For a brand’s consumers, a set of experiences amount to a new world that embodies the brand’s personality and values. And guess who knows a lot about creating those worlds and those immersive experiences that get people to stick around and buy into their surroundings? Game designers.

Like video itself, video game design is a multidisciplinary art that requires holistic creative thinking to bring big ideas to life. Such creativity is second nature to game designers, who work with the multidimensional skillsets and the expertise in the time-based, interactive psychological insights that marketers need in the quantum age.

“As with everything else game designers do, we do it for the experience it creates,” Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games, wrote in his book The Art of Game Design. “There are certain feelings: feelings of choice, feelings of freedom, feelings of responsibility, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of friendship and many others, which only game-based experiences seem to offer.”

Take out the word “game,” and Schell’s passage reads as though it’s come straight from a brand brief.

Look at any brand experience through story, aesthetics, mechanics and technology—the foundational building blocks of game design—and you can find a world the consumer can encounter and interact with. And getting that to happen is certainly every marketer’s goal.

As marketers and advertising agencies move to incorporate experience design in brand building offerings, they must appeal to emotion, as game design does. Without an expansive, generous vision of the world of the brand, it’s easy to let the technology lead the ideas, and when that happens, commonplace experiences can result.

In some ways, game designers have it easier than brand builders. They get to control all the variables in their world building: the culture, the emotion, even the physics. Marketing, by contrast, must be influenced by many outside variables: a compressed sales funnel, fragmented attention, complex consumer consideration calculus, myriad distribution systems, intricate targeting strategies.

And where a game’s world is largely the vision of its designer, the world of a brand results from a collaborative partnership and a range of external factors: a collection of systems the brand must make coherent.

Nevertheless, agencies would do well to look for talent with a gaming mindset for creative and strategy roles because the psychological insights they’ve used to engage gamers of all kinds relate directly to the marketing strategies in digital life, fragmented media attention and the burgeoning integration of ecommerce into so many daily contexts.

Think about voice-driven experiences for marketing and commerce, which require conversational threads, new interactive ecommerce ad formats on Instagram and Google or the interactive advertising available through connected TV. All require immersive and emotional design thinking. And the more immersive formats on the horizon and beyond will demand that creatives go ever deeper.

Though it may be difficult to recruit professional game designers into an advertising agency, there are resources available to agencies today.

And for any game designers looking to make the career transition, agencies are certainly well-suited to receiving them. Many young creative and strategy professionals at agencies grew up playing digital games of all kinds, and many older digital creatives have worked on game-like experiences in Flash and HTML5.

The principles highlighted in Schell’s book should be comprehensive and inspiring enough to inspire strategists and creatives to enhance their thinking and expand their horizons.

The book—or, indeed, the job description—that directly correlates game design principles to campaign and customer experience strategies may still be in draft form. But for agencies, looking for game design experience in their new hires can bring them closer to tapping these principles for competitive advantage. And for agency professionals, studying the craft of game design can enhance and expand their strategic thinking to achieve a more experientially inclusive approach to marketing.

Netflix has done a lot for vegans, with documentaries explaining the health benefits of pursuing a plant-based diet and the buzz around companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat making the vegan dream of a world free of animal-based protein almost a reality. Slowly but surely, more people are becoming genuinely interested in learning how to live a vegan lifestyle.

Becoming a vegan is a huge life decision, and those of us who have already gone through the transition can significantly help those flirting with the idea to take the next step. However, people keep making fun of vegans. How can we spread the word without sounding like a song on loop? Is it possible to communicate veganism’s benefits with a realistic, guilt-free approach? The answer is yes.

Make it sound like a fun challenge

Raising awareness of the mistreatment and slaughter of animals is important, but most of the time it creates a denial effect among people who actively choose to ignore or avoid unpleasant facts. Those people tend to not acknowledge where their food comes from. For this reason, refrain from only pointing out all the negativity and instead communicate veganism as a fun, healthy challenge to partake in. You can propose, for example, a meat-free Monday to friends or family. People love a good challenge, and veganism can also be about trying something.

Celebrities are a good source of inspiration when it comes to delivering a message. Recently, Beyoncé and Jay-Z proposed a vegan challenge to their followers and fans. The couple announced a vegan contest as part of the Greenprint Project, which aims to improve the environment by switching to plant-based meals. The challenge was also inclusive and nonrestrictive in that fans were not supposed to go completely vegan to enter the contest.

And that leads to another important point: Veganism is not all or nothing. It is OK to start slowly. It is OK to limit our meat intake at the beginning.

Play with the concept

You can’t food-shame or guilt people into caring about the planet. Again, becoming a vegan is an extremely personal choice, and you can’t force people into it. Instead, lead by example. You will see those who are close to you starting to get curious and become genuinely interested in learning more if you don’t pressure them. It’s important to remember that veganism is not some weird cult or religion with the sole purpose of converting or evangelizing people. On the contrary, veganism is about understanding that we do have a choice when purchasing a product or preparing a meal. Veganism is understanding that we can eat, wear and use products that don’t exploit or kill animals. Only by leading by example can we can inspire others to make similar choices.

Once you go vegan, you’ll discover a whole new world of vegetables, legumes and fruits. You’ll get more creative, and soon your friends and family will start getting curious about your fun and colorful dishes. You will find yourself cooking for friends and family, and eventually, they will even try to impress you with their own vegan dishes. After all, people love a good challenge. Vegan cuisine is simple, but it certainly requires a bit of imagination and willingness to try new things.

No one wants to sound like that obnoxious vegan guy at a dinner party. Yet vegans constantly find themselves being ridiculed over their choices, and the bad guys who exploit animals and ruin the environment go unnoticed. How is it possible that a healthy, environmental and cruelty-free life choice can receive so much hate? Vegan-splaining is a tedious job. What about financial institutions, banks and governments that openly don’t give a damn about the environment or global warming?

In the meantime, the small yet extremely rewarding accomplishments we achieve on our road to communicating a vegan lifestyle will continue to make a difference in people’s perception on veganism.

The creation of content isn’t the hard part. The means of content creation and distribution have gotten so much easier. As a result, content production and consumption have soared.

With such quality and quantity of media, people view advertising as wallpaper, something to be ignored or avoided altogether and having to pay the money often required to do so. No slight intended to wallpaper lovers—I love a good statement wall, myself. The challenge lies in figuring out how to introduce your brand to your audience while creating quality content.

So, what’s a marketer to do? How do you take advantage of the proliferated means of production for all kinds of content? How do you build a relationship between your brand and prospective customers before they’re even in the zone to buy your product or potentially before they even shop and find you?

Get in the zone

This zone is right where your brand needs to play. With inexpensive distribution and hosting, a media landscape that has endless targeting possibilities and the ability to retarget many interactions to create a customer path, the content world is your oyster.

I’m not saying you won’t be advertising, but you’ll be advertising in a different way, sharing content that is inherently more appealing, entertaining and top of the funnel than your standard campaign. Then you can retarget based on engagement with this content, making every step down the funnel more efficient. For most categories, despite any protestations to the contrary, you can’t just pour ad funds into the bottom of the funnel and expect your cost of acquisition to work out in the end.

One bonus that should help in the financial return department is creating evergreen content that will stay relevant over the long term. If you can get your team to think of high-quality content more like capital expenditure and less like operating expense, then you’re on the way to building your brand in the most powerful way and rewiring how your company thinks about brand investments.

With all those caveats and provisos, here are steps for putting high-quality content behind growing your brand and avoiding the more traditional, expensive, overtly commercial and ephemeral investments in advertising.

Develop a content strategy

In this context, what really matters is generating authenticity at scale. You don’t want content that’s off-brand, bad or, the kiss of death, boring. You need content that represents your brand yet is entertaining enough to stand on its own: something that is made for your audience and fits into their life, something that prospects can use to connect with, get to know and learn the kinds of problems you solve.

Develop and vet creative concepts that align with your strategy

So often, the tactical pressures of marketing causes marketers to skip this step—at their peril. When creating a concept, you want to get the most creative and strategic people in a room with the content developers. It’s best to have concepts of your own in mind but also to recognize that you’re likely working with people who might be much better at storytelling than you are. Be open to this.

Focus on telling the story

Creative content can provide audiences with a continuous, intriguing story and also allows brands to connect in a more meaningful way. You’re not selling anything; you’re communicating something of value, connecting at an emotional level. If you try to pitch your wares or sneak in something that you think will help you sell, no one will pay attention. Be entertaining, be useful, be real.

Develop your marketing campaign

In most instances, you’ll want to leverage traditional media channels to reach prospective customers. Beyond that, consider how to best leverage existing channels—social media, your website, email—to reach current customers. One of the great benefits of developing compelling content for prospects, unlike traditional advertising, is that it also allows you to connect with current customers in a new way, adding value to their experience. Remember that your content often has a longer shelf life than functional benefits and features that change quickly.

Once you have compelling stories to share and a marketing plan behind it, publish them and make them easy to enjoy. The experience of consuming the content is just as important as the quality. Make it accessible and optimize the experience across channels so it can be enjoyed anywhere and at any time.

With entertainment content, consumers are trading their time for value and gaining awareness or insight into a company’s brand and offering, a very different approach from a disruptive ad. Delivering that value through authentic content is a surefire way to nurture your customer relationships and grow the business.

Although it has been a relatively short time since the whistleblower charges, to a large extent we already know that we’re in for a mind-numbing, omnichannel media blitz that will suck the oxygen from the room. These are table stakes for the Trump era, which in late September spent over $700,000 in five days asking Facebook users to join the “Official Impeachment Defense Task Force.”

Even if this sounds over the top, we may want to buckle up anyway because we could just be getting started. Both Trump and congressional Democrats are about to find their footing on messaging and counternarratives. They are bound to up the ante on television, radio, social, programmatic, CTV and even smart speakers. As a result, brands and service providers that often depend on Q4 and building holiday momentum through paid media are about to face significant headwinds.

How long will the impeachment fever last?

The Clinton impeachment and subsequent trial ran from October 1998 to February 1999. If the past is prologue, this fight is supposed to play out over a similar four to five months.

That would be the expected timeline if we were talking about a traditional chief executive and a normal congressional process. However, the behavior of the president and Congress since before inauguration day pretty much guarantees a constitutional street fight that will drag on well past the nation’s attention span. News cycles will be saturated and the courts will delay. Impeachment could simply collide with the 2020 election. In fact, team Trump has already conflated the election with impeachment.

Brands will have to compete with politics for audience

If, as reported, impeachment is being timed as a referendum for the 2020 election, the cable news and Twitter feeds are going to blow up, and ad spending will go through the roof. Both Democrats and Republicans recognize this issue as a potentially galvanizing moment to pry loose wallets. Trump raised $15 million in the first 72 hours following the impeachment announcement and has already spent $2 million just on Facebook ads fighting impeachment. But that’s just a fraction of the reported $308 million Trump has raised this year and the $156 million his campaign has in cash on hand. Democratic candidates, while somewhat slower to respond, are also building up war chests on this issue.

It’s almost inevitable that brands—especially those in the second tier, direct-to-consumer and local franchises with smaller budgets—are going to get caught in the crossfire and get outbid on much of the important media real estate in Q4, regardless of whether it is linear TV, display or on social platforms.

During the holidays, which is precisely when consumer brands most need exposure to buyers, they’re likely to be priced out of top-tier media spots. Of course, a lack of media availability has been known to occur in the three months leading up to presidential and key congressional elections in the past, but because of this early cash spike accruing because of Trump and the Democrats as well as the potential longevity of court battles over impeachment, brands could be facing a media squeeze that could drag on perpetually for a year with no end until consumers walk into the voting booth in November 2020.

Remember, it’s really about the economy 

Some brands will be able to weather a yearlong political ad war, depending on their reliance on national reach and direct consumer access, but others may not. Brands will need to get creative about programmatic outreach to local markets and the precise consumers that represent their buying audience. That might mean postponing some of the big-brand development strategies of big-box stores with cost-effective media access.

Qualified reach through programmatic and addressable TV might become all-important in order to side-step the political furor of the cable wars and the consumer fatigue that will be created until this is all finally settled.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, bid shading is only a Band-Aid that makes buyers feel better about not addressing the real challenge of developing efficient programmatic bidding strategies.

Bid shading has become popular because of the industrywide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions. In a second-price auction, the highest bidder wins the auction but pays only the second-highest bid. In a first-price auction, the winner does not get this benefit; they pay exactly what they bid. The shift to first-price auctions caused marketers to see their costs suddenly increase.

Bid shading was invented to appease disgruntled marketers. By helping them adjust their bids for each request, bid shading helps mitigate the massive cost increases associated with first-price auctions.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that bid shading covers up a more systemic issue: Most programmatic algorithms are poorly designed and suboptimal. First-price auctions helped reveal this problem by exacerbating it, but bid shading is not the right solution. 

The reality is that any efficient programmatic buying algorithm has to consider the expected cost of the inventory before deciding to bid on it. If your algorithm does not consider the expected win price before bidding, as with bid shading, then fundamentally your algorithm is suboptimal.

To understand why, consider a situation in which two pieces of inventory are both equally likely to incrementally drive a conversion if you win them. The difference between the two pieces of inventory is that one can be accurately predicted to cost twice as much as the other. An intelligent algorithm would choose to bid on the cheaper inventory first and only bid on the second if the budget is sufficient, given the inventory forecast. On the other hand, an algorithm that does not consider the expected win price would value these two pieces of inventory equally, and therefore ultimately spend the budget on inferior inventory. 

To put this another way, bid shading allows buyers to price only requests that they would already have bid on. Bid shading is looking to find the right price for an impression, not the right impression. So, for brands, using bid shading does not make your ad more likely to reach the target audience, nor does it increase the likelihood of converting a customer. At most, it might help you save money on advertising costs—but if that money is going toward reaching the wrong people anyway, that does not make it much of a comfort. 

Another issue with bid shading is that it inherently lacks transparency, which makes it difficult for buyers to know if they are being charged a fair price and leaves them open to fraud and mismanagement. And, as agency Hearts & Science notes, “no single party in the programmatic supply chain sees all bids,” which affects the ability of DSPs and SSPs to set fair prices for impressions.

First-price auctions are soon going to the standard; if this is news to you, then you are in real trouble. For this reason, the industry’s reliance on bid shading is likely only to increase.

This will leave open an opportunity for those willing to invest in algorithms and machine learning. Machine learning (and particularly deep learning) is a necessary tool for effectively bidding in first-price auctions. Artificial intelligence is capable of dynamically bidding differently for each impression depending on its likelihood of influencing behavior and its likely cost. It also has the ability to find potential customers who might previously have been overlooked. Not only does this reduce the amount of money wasted on bids that are too high, but it also ensures that brands are spending their money in the right places.

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Our world is dominated by performance marketing like algorithms, big data, retargeting and more. It’s easier than ever to discern a clear picture of who is using your product. But the question we should be asking ourselves is why they’re using it. How do they see themselves? What are their aspirations? What’s important to them?

Every audience is comprised of actual humans with very real wants, needs and values. While it can be difficult to parse those out, it’s critical to developing not only a marketing strategy, but a product or service that resonates with your audience and is additive to their life.

It’s even more critical as Gen Z comes of age. By now, we all know that Gen Z has a laser sharp radar for inauthentic brands. In a report published on CNBC last year, which surveyed females between the ages of 13 and 24, 67% agreed with the statement that “being true to their values and beliefs makes a person cool.” This generation of digital natives can easily detect a disconnect between what a brand says and what it does. A deep understanding of what people want is the first step in building a brand with values that are aligned with its consumers.

As they say, the first step is always the hardest. How do you get your audience to reveal their truths? Getting meaningful feedback from consumers takes meaningful investment from marketers. As experiences become more and more valuable to millennials and Gen Z, crafting a consumer insights project that’s dynamic, engaging and offers a new experience to your participants is essential to drawing out useful insights. Consider your audience, their preferred communication styles and a balance of activity and conversation. And most importantly, make sure that you have the right moderator to build trust and rapport with your consumer group. Then it’s time to ask questions and listen.

Distilling those conversations and understanding your audience’s fears, dreams, needs and wants isn’t only the basis for a marketing strategy, but should serve as a brand’s north star. A set of consumer truths empowers every function in an organization to ask themselves how they’re serving the consumer. From marketing to product to customer support, it gives every role an opportunity to connect with and understand the consumer. And while it’s an excellent way to create alignment across company teams, it’s an even better way to ensure that a brand is consistently demonstrating their ideals to consumers.

Gen Z, the largest generation in the U.S. today, are not unquestioningly loyal to brands, but skeptical and well-informed. The brands that will succeed are those that understand their wants, needs and desires and make them their own.

This spending bonanza is fueled in part by the divisive political climate. But another big factor this time around is the crowded field of well-funded Democrats for whom cost is no object as they fight for traction in the crucial months ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

Of all the tactics in the modern campaign marketer’s toolkit, video is turning out to be the fastest growing and most strategically important. Video viewing habits are rapidly splintering across new screens and platforms while traditional TV is no longer a viable fallback plan for broadcasting a candidate’s message to the American populace. More than ever, political campaigns need to embrace a proactive approach to video, looking beyond analog—and even social media in some instances—to find more impactful ways of engaging audiences across the broader digital landscape.

Prioritize digital as pathway toward engaging millennials 

This election year will mark another major inflection point in the future of TV. In the recent midterm elections, millennials surpassed boomers as the largest voting block for the first time, and more than two-thirds of this younger cohort are primarily watching content through streaming services as opposed to cable or satellite.

Political advertisers need to revamp their overall approach to TV, allocating additional budget to digital channels such as OTT and connected TVs (CTV) and leveraging more data than ever before for targeting purposes. This shift will be most stark for Democrats, as they look to make up significant ground this cycle. In 2016, for instance, the Trump campaign invested more than 40% of its media budget on digital while the Clinton campaign devoted just 2.5%.

Diversify media plans amid continued brand safety concerns

Social media is too big for any campaign to ignore. But advertisers must also proceed with caution, lest they ignore the steady drumbeat of cautionary tales that seem to overwhelm the news cycle every few weeks. There will always be inherent dangers in placing ads alongside user-generated content, which by nature is unpredictable and prone to include extreme or unsavory viewpoints. As the reputational and transparency risks of social media increases, savvy political advertisers should invest greater effort into diversifying their portfolios, looking for ways to engage target audiences beyond the confines of the walled gardens, which are reportedly planning to de-politicize ads in the coming election season.

Experiment with video

As video campaigns are increasingly distributed through digital channels, there is an opportunity for political advertisers to drive goals beyond brand awareness. Many campaigns this cycle have added calls to action at the end of their online video, OTT or CTV campaigns, inviting prospective voters to watch more clips about a candidate, signup for email alerts or rank the issues they’d most like to hear discussed in the next primary debate. Retargeting campaigns can further engage committed voters to take additional steps, such as making a donation or volunteering to canvas in their neighborhood.

Politics has always been a stubborn and volatile business for marketers, with strong incentives against deviating from what has worked in the past. But as the pace of change in consumer video habits accelerates, winning campaigns will need to adopt a more agile approach. This is especially true in the realm of TV, where prospective voters are no longer passive channel-surfers but wired multiplatform mavens ready to engage.

And the times, they are political. In fact, about 57% of consumers say a company’s stance on social or political issues is important when considering where to buy a product or service.

Our increasingly political culture is exerting new pressure on brands in all industries to stake their claim on controversial topics. In the minefield of modern politics, how should brands approach polarizing issues, if at all?

Know thyself

As a brand-builder, know what your brand stands for. This includes knowing your stakeholders inside and out. What matters to them, and what issues do they care about? These insights will be invaluable when determining whether to get involved or not.

To avoid alienating some consumers, many brands have chosen to stay neutral on controversial topics. But be aware that consumers will hold brands accountable for silence as well as action. If disappointed with a company’s action (or inaction) on a social issue important to them, 47% of consumers will stop buying from that brand.

Pick your battles

Carefully choose the moments you insert your brand into the cultural conversation. Once you enter the fray of a polarizing topic, you can’t easily leave the arena.

This means that leadership must be on the same page, or you could end up in a vicious cycle of damage control, thanks to a rogue executive’s comments (as the team at Papa John’s knows all too well).

And what happens if your brand is swept up in scandal or controversy beyond its control? Always revert to what your customers and employees value most. By using your brand strategy as the North Star, the course of action should become clear, whether that course is to engage, set the record straight or ignore it altogether.

Show your commitment

A brand’s activities can be perceived as pandering if they aren’t supported with meaningful action or contributions to a cause. Determine the extent of your engagement on the topic, otherwise, it could look like you’re capitalizing on a movement or trend, which could backfire spectacularly.

Remember Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad that was mocked for trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement? Nobody likes an opportunistic brand appearing to exploit politics for financial gain. Once you decide to enter a politicized conversation, enter boldly or not at all. Retweeting a meme doesn’t count. Internal action and external advocacy are what give real meaning to a brand’s words.

Prepare for backlash

Inserting your brand into a hot-button issue involves risk, and some backlash is inevitable. While scrutiny will come from a variety of sources, bold moves can galvanize your most loyal supporters into becoming true advocates.

Consider Patagonia’s lawsuit attempting to block the Trump administration from removing protections for two national monuments. Their action garnered significant support from the brand’s followers and contributed to a 7% sales bump the following week. Ultimately, you have to weigh the risks of alienating some customers against the benefits of turning casual fans into devotees.

Brands need to carefully consider what role—if any—they want to play in political discourse. Political issues are so polarizing because they deal with the rights of individuals and the well-being of communities. Any brand participating in the conversation needs to demonstrate the empathy that’s necessary to make a meaningful impact. As a brand asserting its point of view in the political sphere, tread carefully, purposefully and with eyes wide open to the potential risks.

With thoughtful planning and deliberate execution, brand builders can take a stand and earn the of loyalty of today’s more politically-minded consumers.

Considering that social media is evolving to a more mature medium, it is worth asking what the role of social media should be in the next presidential election.

Perhaps the first element to mention is that social media has become a more complex universe, with users increasingly sharing content on so-called “dark social” platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which are not trackable and very hard for candidates to influence. Due to a combination of increased polarization, privacy concerns and simply not feeling comfortable sharing certain ideas publicly, users are more likely to express such ideas in these types of channels. According to a recent study led by We Are Social, 63% of respondents mentioned that they prefer to share content and recommendations on dark platforms rather than on open ones.

At this stage of the race, a considerable part of the electorate is far from having clear preferences, and thus platforms such as Facebook and Instagram should be playing an essential role in building capital for candidates through the generation of awareness and trust. But in practice, we are not seeing any clear differentiation in the way candidates are deploying their social strategies, most of them having a predictable, self-centered presence. All of them use Instagram as a photographic diary of their activities where the main sin is vainglory. More than 95% of their pictures and stories are about them posing with children, farmers, workers, auditoriums full or supporters, etc. It’s an old and fake trick that does not surprise anybody.

Obviously, some candidates need to prioritize their image to generate face recognition. But others like Warren, Sanders and Biden do not need to be the main characters of their accounts. They should, instead, use Instagram to convey a vision of America, not a vision of themselves. A very good principle to follow would be to take less selfies and instead focus on portraying more personal stories in an authentic way. It is very important to be aware of users’ mindsets as they check their Instagram feeds and also allows for a better understanding of the different roles and peculiarities between the use of posts and stories. The goal should be to interrupt less and to add more value to users’ feeds.

All eyes will be on Facebook throughout the election cycle considering the very controversial role the platform played during the last presidential election. But most of the candidates, however, are not using Facebook in new or innovative ways that could allow them to stand out from the field. Most of them are doing exactly the same thing: commenting on the news, posting media clippings from all their media appearances (more egotism) or just inviting people to join and support them. They should know by now that a successful social strategy is not about asking people to follow or like them. Social media is a space for creativity and experimentation. People reward innovation and new proposals that offer them inspiration, connection and relevance.

Perhaps the most important consideration candidates and their social teams should be making is that emotional value has to be at the center of their social media presence. Never forget that voters become aware of a candidate through the emotional connections they are able to generate, not through rational appeals or arguments.

Also, marketing is greatly about distinctiveness, yet very few of the candidates have brought something to the table that can truly provide them with a unique identity before voters. Sanders, Buttigieg and Williamson are perhaps the ones who are doing the best job at having a unique visual layout.

We know social media is going to keep evolving during the campaign, and we’ll see if candidates are able to innovate, present a new vision and create more relevance for voters. We’ll also see who will be best at turning sceptic citizens into followers and followers into voters. Let’s keep the conversation going.