Post by Eric Blair / Redsky

Eric Blair • Feed

Deeply considered and smart piece from @espiers.bsky.social. It has a line that sharply undercuts the whole Shor / Future Forward / Blue Rose approach of message-testing as strategy. "They think they're competing against political messaging, [but] they are competing against [all] entertainment" 1/

aug 27, 2025, 7:56 pm • 51 16

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Why is this important? Because Blue Rose and Future Forward ad/message tests are testing against OTHER POLITICAL MESSAGES. But Spiers is right; that isn't the important measure. The important measure is what holds attention. (related to @anatosaurus.bsky.social on what gets ppl talking.)

4) The content is all too often bad commodity content. It's boring aggregation with no voice and no wit and no new angle. It includes strident Dem messaging that has been tested and workshopped to death and doesn't reflect the real world discussions people are having. Meanwhile, the right produces stuff that's provocative, is not afraid of contradictory messaging, is experimental, and trusts the people actually writing and scripting and shooting the content to figure out what works best. Dems want to dictate it from top down, sometimes directly to satisfy donor preferences. I am also convinced that some of the politicos running these things simply cannot tell the difference between bad content and good content, because they have a different standard for voters than they do themselves. They think they are competing against political messaging and they are competing against whatever a potential audience member might find more compelling, including literally everything in the world of entertainment. The intuition to work with influencers is smart because influencers have already demonstrated that they know how to build and talk to their audiences. But when you demand that they take your direction about how to do that, you lose the entire value of working with them in the first place. If you already knew how to do that, you wouldn't need them to begin with. Dems who work with influencers need to understand that they will never be as good at talking to audiences as the influencers themselves are.

aug 27, 2025, 7:56 pm • 13 2 • view

And doing that would mean testing against literally all entertainment. (Impossible.) So in one swoop we have highlighted the complete hollowness of the poll-testing approach that centrist leadership, consultants, and donors love so much.

aug 27, 2025, 7:59 pm • 12 1 • view

The Shor types think they're testing what 'works.' But they're really testing something else, something ineffective. The problem is that they're selling their tests as 'what works,' and thus foreclosing any experimentation. Spiers gets that right too. We need to take risks, and innovate.

6) We need to try things knowing that most of them will fail, and be much more risk tolerant with content. This is how we innovate. I think right and left media are heavily asymmetrical so I try resist direct comparisons (e.g, one side is willing to weaponize conspiracy theories, the other is not.) But one thing that the right does that the left does not is spread a lot of money around, try everything, and not flagellate themselves endlessly when something fails. Every time I talk to people about funding liberal media projects, they bring up Air America. Air America!! Air America had a six year run, and it died FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. It has zero relevancy to our media environment here in the year of our lord twenty twenty five. First of all, there should have been twenty Air Americas and not one, and second of all, it is beyond pathetic that the attitude is, we tried it once and it failed so no point in ever trying it again. There are smaller investments that Dems have made but they still fit the bill above: small, run by political operatives, not too risky. The most risque thing Dems have funded so far is Pod Save America, and I like those guys, but it's a podcast run by political operatives that preaches to the choir. And look, preaching to the choir is important. It motivates people to go a step beyond voting. It keeps engaged people engaged and hopeful. But we need broader efforts and those require more money and more risk. For all of the talk about building a new media

aug 27, 2025, 7:59 pm • 23 2 • view

message-testing has its role! It can help select different versions of tactical messaging. But it is no substitute for strategy. The best strategic messages may well test poorly! Experimentation, taking risks, vibing w/ culture, motivating ppl: that's what's needed, not bloodless quantbrain-ism.

aug 27, 2025, 8:05 pm • 11 0 • view

Message-testing as strategy basically cedes all persuasion to other actors. That's a catastrophic error. Using carefully focus-group tested messaging hurts Democrats' credibility with voters. We are clearly in a crisis and receiving messages from the Ds that sound like corporate HR speak is bad.

aug 27, 2025, 8:11 pm • 6 0 • view