Back in the 1990s, I worked for an organization marketing to engineers. When surveyed, this group insisted they preferred their information straight — no pretty pictures, plain text emails, just the facts.
When we tested their self-reported preferred delivery methods against a combination of evocative imagery and more emphatic text, guess which won? While highly educated engineers wanted to see themselves as “above” falling for the crass tactics of marketing and propaganda, they were just as susceptible as the rest of us.
This reminds of today’s Democrats and their approach to communication. Pitching for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, President Obama stated, “Joe Biden sent you a check during the pandemic. Just like I gave people relief during the Great Recession. The thing is, we didn’t put our name on it because it wasn’t about feeding our egos.”
Obama seemed to find it unseemly to demand credit for an act of duty. Noble, but, in 2024, grossly misguided. Even Biden has now acknowledged that he paid a high price for failing to aggressively and regularly tout his achievements. His “put your head down and just do the job,” ethos put him in the political ‘if a tree falls in the forest,’ conundrum. If you do things that benefit Americans, and they don’t know you did them, politically, it’s as if you did nothing.
Many Democrats expect the media to do this work for them. This is incredibly naïve in today’s information ecosystem, in which “truth,” in and of itself, has no news value. Media will present a politician’s lie with the same credibility as an undeniable truth. Somewhere in the 14th paragraph, you may get notice that the statement is false, but how many even read that far?
It is no longer the political press’s job to sort truth and fiction. That’s not considered “objective.” They report what political actors say and respond to pressure from them. Democrats still live in the world of “All the President’s Men,” in which noble journalists uphold American ideals. They live in a media museum.
Democrats still believe, like the engineers at the top of this piece, that an “intelligent, well-informed public” thirsts for unvarnished truth. They have not yet realized that the tools of marketing and propaganda do not work only for lies — especially when, per the National Literacy Institute, 54 percent of adults read below an sixth grade level. Marketing and propaganda tools can also be used to spread the truth.
Case in point: University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public studied social media content regarding the 2023’s Lahaina fire. The top YouTube video discovered on the social platform X was a surprise. It was, in fact, a deep dive into the actual causes and circumstances of the fire, free from misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Democrats need to speak in a language audiences understand. It’s the language of social media, of reality television — not of think tanks, policy papers and wonkfests. Marketing and propaganda are not dirty concepts to be sniffed at. They are America’s lingua franca in 2025. Speak them, or be ignored.
Leonce Gaiter is a writer who also works as vice-president of a marketing agency. His latest novel is a modern take on the bildungsroman called, “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom.”
