The new media designs of political

consultants: Campaign production in a

fragmented era

Author: Michael Serazio

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Post-print version of an article published in Journal of Communication 64(4): 743-763.

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RUNNING HEAD: Political Consultants

The New Media Designs of Political Consultants:

Campaign Production in a Fragmented Era

AUTHOR: Michael Serazio ([email protected])

Assistant Professor of Communication, Fairfield University

ABSTRACT: New media technologies have been lauded for their potential in de-

monopolizing gatekeeper power and rejuvenating democracy. This research inquires into

how those changes in the media environment are affecting (and being affected by)

consultants involved in the production of political communication. Drawing upon dozens

of in-depth interviews with these elite operatives, the paper highlights how strategies are

developed, practices are executed, and messages are encoded given increasing

fragmentation and narrowcasting. It examines these consultants’ roles in managing the

news agenda and political discourse by expanding partisan spaces online for content

creation and narrowcasting more nuanced, flexible messages to targeted niches. The

study concludes with consideration given to how these efforts might hinder certain public

sphere ideals.

KEYWORDS: new media, political communication, campaigns, consultants,

fragmentation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: The author thanks Solomon Messing, Lee Shaker, Daniel

Kreiss, the journal editor and anonymous reviewers, and the interviewees for their

generous time and insightful assistance.

 Political Consultants 1

The New Media Designs of Political Consultants:

Campaign Production in a Fragmented Era

“There is a cliché that says talk is cheap. But to strategic political

communicators, talk, and the control of talk, is power” (Manheim, 1991, p. 7).

“Campaigns are in the content business.” – Steve Schmidt, Republican campaign

strategist (Hagan, 2012)

Over the course of two decades, the Internet and other new media technologies

have profoundly affected the ways and means of political communication. The 2012 U.S.

elections offer an opportunity to take stock of these patterns from the perspective of

consultants and strategists tasked with advising candidates and legislative leaders and,

more specifically, to chart their assumptions and practices as journalism and advertising

fragment as institutions. Drawing upon a unique qualitative dataset – dozens of

interviews with these elite operatives involved in producing and encoding campaign

communication – this research examines their roles in managing the news agenda and

political discourse by expanding more partisan online spaces for content creation and

narrowcasting more nuanced, flexible messages to targeted niches. The study concludes

by considering how these efforts might impede the ideals of the public sphere.

Literature Review

New Media and Politics

From the telegraph and newspaper to radio and television, advances in

communication media have long prefigured changing campaign practices (Trent,

Friedenberg, & Denton, 2011). As networked interactivity subsumes mass broadcasting

as the “core organizing principle of [today’s] communicative environment,” scholars

 Political Consultants 2

need to inquire how contemporary technologies are forcing candidates to rethink strategy

and messaging (Bruns, 2008, p. 14). Since the 1990s, the Internet has radically altered

campaigning, offering a variety of new avenues for communicating with voters (Davis,

Baumgartner, Francia, & Morris, 2009). Some contend that we are living through a new

“communication revolution” in U.S. history: “an era of information abundance, fracturing

the communication monopoly of old-style organizations and allowing many resource-

poor new voices to be heard” (Bimber, 2011, p. 7). As such, sanguine proclamations

abound about the potential for this technology to rejuvenate democracy, with the hope

that the Internet might level the playing field for long-shot candidates and enrich the

depth of our political communication. Much of that optimism is based on the premise

that the Internet heralds greater pluralism for marginalized groups and signals a

grassroots undermining of elitist monopolies on information (Chadwick, 2006).

Some have suggested that because of these fragmented channels, traditional

information gatekeepers are seeing their powers wane as the long-dominant agenda

setting paradigm no longer so adequately reflects reality (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008, pp.

708–709). Amidst a more “complex, chaotic communication environment,” one of the

critical questions for researchers is how operatives seek to set the news agenda

nowadays: If the “top-down, centralized, industrially organized media apparatus” of mass

broadcasting was supposedly “relatively easy for political elites and other actors to

manage, manipulate, and control,” how, then, are campaigns being reactive to and

proactive about these new conditions (McNair, 2009, pp. 217, 219)? Because most

political content still results from “deliberate manipulation by social elites and their ‘spin

industry,’” “skillful communication manipulators can use two-way interactive

 Political Consultants 3

communication just as effectively as uni-directional communication to steer people”

(Louw, 2005, p. 124). Given those technological changes, this research asks: How are

political consultants working to manage the news agenda (RQ1)?

Data, Segmentation, and Targeting

Segmentation can be defined as “the art and science of using the available

information about the audience, which is to say the work product of all that rating and

data-mining, to best advantage” (Manheim, 2011, p. 50). Thanks to sophisticated

technological advances, data mining and message segmentation were one of the most

prominent storylines during 2012 election. Conventional wisdom has long held that,

“The more specific and tailored the message, the more effective the piece” (Trent et al.,

2011, p. 332). A related term, “narrowcasting,” dates back to the early 1990s; just as

computer databases had streamlined the processing of political information for direct

mail, both e-mail and Web page customization followed suit (Howard, 2005, p. 8).

Micro-targeting specialists were soon reaching out to voters based upon statistical

probabilities of persuasive effectiveness (Sides, Shaw, Grossmann, & Lipsitz, 2012, p.

127). George W. Bush’s reelection campaign inaugurated many of these tactics to great

success, including the synthesis of consumer data with voter records to model and

segment more individualized marketing schemes (Issenberg, 2012). In 2008, Barack

Obama’s tech team continued to refine these capacities, including the development of

algorithms to predict and address (or avoid) strong positions on hot-button issues (e.g.,

abortion) during voter outreach. Indeed, the Obama campaign represented “the fullest

realization of trends in the political field toward crafting better means of collecting,

storing, analyzing, and acting upon data about citizens, their online behavior, and their
 Political Consultants 4

social relationships” (Kreiss & Howard, 2010, p. 1033). For example, they exploited

online cookies for those who had visited the official Web site and could then receive

unique messages about, say, education policy if they clicked onward to a parenting blog

(Green, 2008). This allowed Obama to maintain “hope” as a brand, while micro-

targeting negative messages “under the radar” of news coverage (Hagan, 2012).

Political parties and particular campaigns now harbor enormous databases of

personal information including an individual’s name, address, phone number, voting

patterns, political donations, estimated income, race, family members, and even mortgage

value and magazine subscriptions (Sides et al., 2012, p. 76). Aristotle Inc. has been a

leading firm in this business of “political data mining,” which also includes the

interlocking connections between those individuals featured in its database (Verini,

2007). With unprecedented access to voters’ identities, strategists now see their work not

unlike “the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers” and seek to

“train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats” (Duhigg, 2012).

However, research has not yet explored how this refined knowledge influences the

encoding of political communication. Thus, this project inquires: How are segmentation

opportunities affecting the development of campaign messages (RQ2)?

Methodology

This project thus represents a study of political communication from a “cultural

production” perspective with an emphasis on changes in strategy resulting from

technological change (Peterson & Anand, 2004). Cultural industries are those that “deal

primarily with the industrial production and circulation of texts” or, more abstractly, a

collection of institutions “that are most directly involved in the production of social
 Political Consultants 5

meaning” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007, p. 12). Communication research has not traditionally

treated political campaigns as form of cultural production, instead pursuing Hollywood

films, prime time television, or, on the non-fiction side, daily newspapers as the usual

sites for this kind of inquiry. Yet the consultants involved in the election process should

be likewise analyzed for their efforts to “encode” the texts of a given campaign – whether

those be advertisements, press articles, or speeches – for they, too, are involved in

creation and circulation of (political) meaning (Hall, 1980). Indeed, Frank Biocca

usefully likens these professionals to “semiotics engineers,” in that they attempt to

“prime certain schemas” (Medvic, 2001, pp. 43, 47). I specifically seek to understand

how this new media environment is “restructuring… time, space, and place in daily work

processes” for these professionals as informed by a changing “media logic” (by which I

mean, the “specific forms and processes which organize the work done within a particular

medium”) (Deuze, 2007, p. 110; Klinenberg & Benzecry, 2005, p. 8; Serazio, 2013).

Like Philip Howard’s (2005) work, this has been an “empirical study of the social

construction of new media” in politics (p. 74). It views news websites, online

advertising, and social media outreach as “strategically crafted artifacts that reflect the

cultural-historical context and as campaign resources that function as tools for

communication” (Foot & Schneider, 2006, p. 12). Like Daniel Kreiss (2009), I have

conducted open-ended interviews with key actors complemented by press articles and

online material (p. 282). Such work builds on scholars who have earlier based their

research on in-depth conversations with campaign consultants (Dulio, 2004; Magleby &

Patterson, 1998; Medvic, 2004), though, as Doris Graber (2004) points out, less than 10%

of articles published in political communication journals rely upon this method. Yet by
 Political Consultants 6

using grounded theory to discover patterns (rather than measure pre-selected phenomena

through quantitative surveys), semi-structured interviewing of elites is especially

effective in yielding an “in-depth understanding of a phenomenon and discovering

aspects of that phenomenon that researchers did not anticipate” (Brians, Willnat,

Manheim, & Rich, 2010, p. 365, italics original).

Curiously – though not surprisingly – there is a relative dearth of scholarship that

has explored the work of consultants within the political communication literature. As

Sarah Allen Gershon (2012) noted, few scholars have examined these kinds of elite actors

that exert influence on political discourse. More research is needed on “the role of media

consultants in the heat of the campaign,” as some ask (and I attempt to answer here):

“What kinds of assumptions do consultants make about journalists and citizens in

designing campaign messages, attacks, and counterattacks?” (Gulati, Just, & Crigler,

2004, p. 251) Scholarship, moreover, needs to account for those assumptions in the

context of fast-changing media and technology environments, and inquire with those

“professionals who work behind the scenes with data to identify voters and coordinate

collective action” through the “technical practices of electoral campaigns” (Kreiss &

Howard, 2010, p. 1045; Kreiss, 2009, p. 282). It is, of course, understandable that the

practices and perspectives of these consultants would be kept “off-stage” from academic

(much less journalistic) inquiry. From its earliest years, political consulting has been, by

design, conducted out of view (Friedenberg, 1997, p. 2). Yet this absence also

symbolizes a wider deficiency in political communication research – a literature less

often oriented to the production or encoding-side of those mediated messages (Rogers,

2004). Gershon’s (2012) work on press secretaries offers a methodological template, as

 Political Consultants 7

my interviews were also “designed to examine the methods representatives (and their

staff) use to communicate their messages to constituents” (p. 165).

Between June and December 2012 – a period optimally timed for election

discourse – I contacted 108 potential interviewees to participate in the study. The targets

chosen stemmed from a combination of purposive and snowball sampling – strategies

considered effective for a “relatively limited,” “hard-to-reach,” and “somewhat

interconnected” population like campaign consultants – and conversations were

conducted until tests of “completeness” and “saturation” had been achieved (i.e., “an

overall sense of the meaning of a… theme or process” was gained with little new material

elicited from subsequent interviews) (Schutt, 2004, p. 151). Of those contacted, I

ultimately secured 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews lasting, on average, 37 minutes

each (Lindlof, 1995). 1 (Although longer interviews are certainly always desirable, it was

often a challenge obtaining even that much time with these elite professionals.)

Preexisting personal contacts with the press secretaries for a Republican

congressional representative and a Democratic presidential candidate proved useful at the

start of this research; both of these “key informants” granted me interviews of their own

and assisted in making introductions to other colleagues working in the field on both

sides of the aisle. Snowball sampling from that yielded about half of the total number of

interviews completed; I “cold-contacted” others (whose names had appeared in press

coverage as prominent and relevant) with a short e-mail explaining the project and

soliciting their participation. To that end, I deliberately sought out a diversity of vantage

points to contribute to the research questions and eventually achieved an even ideological

split between Republicans and Democrats. Moreover, I hoped to capture a heterogeneous

 Political Consultants 8

mix of professional capacities including 9 self-described general consultants (handling a

variety of roles), 8 digital or Web strategy specialists, 7 press secretaries or

communication directors, and 7 advertising producers, as well as other, even more

particular roles like opposition research, speechwriting, blogging, and media buying.

It should be noted, however, that these roles were fluid and represented only a

single snapshot in time within a tumultuous industry. Because interviews began with a

brief description of the participant’s experience, it quickly revealed those who moved in

and out of various campaign and staff roles as well as in and out of the public and private

sector (with many opening their own small firms). An interviewee, to give one example,

might have started as a junior press aide to a U.S. senator, done work as a state

communications director in a presidential campaign, served as staff director for his

party’s U.S. senate communications team, and ultimately founded a digital opposition

research firm. The majority of interviewees were based in Washington D.C. and worked

at the higher echelons of campaigning and political communication on behalf of

individual candidates and national parties (i.e., at the presidential and congressional level,

in state and national races), though some mentioned occasional issues-based advocacy for

assorted interest groups. I also wound up netting a diverse sample of ages and career

lengths from those fresh out of college to those closer to retirement with several decades

of campaign experience, though the majority were in their 30s and 40s and skewed

exceedingly male (all but 2 of the 38 participants).

Interviews followed a semi-structured schedule and covered topics including their

background, typical work activities, technological changes, partisan media venues, news

and campaign cycle management, and audience targeting. The two most basic and
 Political Consultants 9

essential roles of the political consultant – the creation of campaign advertising and the

development of message strategy – were the primary focus of interview discussions

(Devine, 2008, p. 29). A major part of the operative’s job is to sway the political agenda

through decision making about these tactics – indeed, some claim that the main battle in a

given campaign is actually over setting the priorities of problems as opposed to differing

policy prescriptions for solving them (Dulio, 2004, pp. 72, 76; Sides et al., 2012, p. 133).

The following section illuminates the practices and perspectives of these elites in

manipulating the modern media environment toward those ends.

Findings

Expanding the Spaces for Political Content

For political consultants like this opposition research firm’s president, the

“playing field” for political content has widened dramatically relative to earlier decades:

[The] thing about new media is that there are just much more, there so many

more venues to get your message out then there were when I started and so there’s

a lot of – there’s a lot of space to be filled, right? … You look back on it and it

was just your – the big three, the cables, the networks, the major newspapers …

There were things that – if they didn't make it into your 14 column inches,

whatever it is that you were allotted for the day, before everyone had a blog and

was posting online, you know, 15 times a day – if it didn’t make it in, it didn’t

make it in. But now there’s always a venue to get your information out, so things

that at some point might not have been a story, you’re given more space to kind of

cultivate those stories. Because there’s always something out there … that needs

to be filled. We’re a very news-hungry country.

 Political Consultants 10

Interviewees shared a sense, both good and bad, that the political communication

machinery had become a “beast” needing to be fed constantly, in the words of one media

consultant at a digital strategy firm, and that “if you have enough contacts, you can get

pretty much anything posted somewhere.” On one hand, this fissure of control from what

had been a comparative information monopoly in the heyday of traditional gatekeepers

empowers the consultant: “It used to be that if you tried to pitch a story to the local paper

and they said no, well, that was the end of it and your story didn’t get out. Now you

[still] have an opportunity,” one congressional deputy chief of staff told me, adding that

this also enabled him to push back against inaccurate coverage independent of the source,

rather “than just being at the mercy of a newspaper or its top editors” to run his qualms.

On the other hand, this expansion of potential channels has forced consultants to

reorient themselves to a much wider range of potential output, as one presidential

campaign’s press secretary explained:

Whereas the old model, there used to be, there were … gatekeepers, whether they

were editors or producers or reporters or columnists that decided what they

wanted to write about and everybody focused their attention sort of on influencing

them or creating news hooks so that their message could get picked up – instead,

now, because you have information that’s more mobile, you can create your own

content and drive it across different platforms.

This enlarged perspective on delivering political content registers across a variety of

digital touch-points. E-mail and social media are increasingly thought of as “much better

ways to communicate with your constituents than trying to get one story every six

months” in the home district newspaper, particularly as those outlets have fewer
 Political Consultants 11

resources devoted to Washington, according to one congressional press secretary.

Similarly, one political advertising agency’s president spoke of online video capacitating

longer-form approaches than the 30-second spot had previously constricted (e.g., 30-

minute “films” like the anti-Romney King of Bain that appeared in 2012). Another

presidential candidate’s press secretary explained his “flood the zone” logic for search

engine optimization where “what you do is put a million things online, so that there’s so

many things out there that you overwhelm with good shit and the bad shit moves down.”

Given that “thirsting for and need for more content than ever before,” a candidacy

announcement no longer simply entails dropping a press release and holding a “pseudo-

event,” as once might have sufficed, said another political advertising agency’s president,

but rather also cueing up an online video component which requires earlier coordination

in terms of creative production. Thus, the diffusion of messaging might start with

planting items in the blogosphere, across social media, and through targeted ads until

“mainline news sources” later subsume them – which represents, in his words, “the

capacity to sort of get things in the bloodstream in more ways than in the past.”

Contemporary political communication strategies like these seek to marginalize

and bypass traditional journalistic arbiters: “If you don’t have to worry about the

mainstream media and the 30 people sitting in the White House press room or covering

Congress to get out your message, you’re a step ahead of the game,” explained one

strategic media consultant. Those gatekeepers may find their agenda-setting powers

waning relative to the momentum of stories and issues fomented in new media spaces.

One opposition research firm’s president thus sees the flow of political information

evolving from a “top-down” structure to something more “circular” in nature: “It doesn’t
 Political Consultants 12

matter where [a story] starts, it can get the legs that needs” nowadays. Another

opposition research specialist summarized:

[Before] we could capture the [attack] information, but disseminating it had to go

through traditional sources meaning you had to sell the story to a reporter, so I did

a ton of off-the-record meetings with reporters and trying to explain why this was

newsworthy – that’s not necessary anymore. It’s changed journalism and it’s

changed research – if we want to go up with something, if we find somebody

saying something stupid, we just upload it to our website … You don’t need

reporters anymore to disseminate your information … They’re no longer the

gatekeepers of what gets into a story – they’re more, they now are responding as

much to what’s going on as controlling it. And that’s changed campaigns

tremendously.

Without question, the increasingly availability of more partisan, “echo chamber” news

venues aids this effort, as the specialist further described:

Ten years ago, if I wanted to break a story, we had to sell it to a reporter. Now, I

can sell it to someone local or in the blogosphere who’s much more likely to be

on my side… [Then] I can go and say to reporters, ‘Hey, look what’s on site X,’

and, ‘This is getting some traction – you may want to cover it.’ And it also makes

the job easier for reporters because now … they can write it as, ‘This is what’s

happening during the day,’ and they don’t have to take as much heat from

campaigns because they’re not the ones who wrote the [original] story … The

opposing press secretary can yell at them, but they’re saying, ‘Look, this is

already out there; I didn’t break this. I’m covering it and it’s a story.’
 Political Consultants 13

The deputy communications director for a national party committee echoed this in

describing these tactics of getting a “more conservative or liberal website” to put a story

or issue “in the water and it might force [the mainstream media] to cover it.” That said,

these consultants still see the primary function of partisan spaces online as oriented

toward organization, mobilization, and fundraising. For instance, blogosphere

powerhouses like RedState.com and DailyKos.com are thought best for rallying

volunteers and gathering petition signatures. Moreover, because the vast majority of

those who visit a campaign’s website usually already support the candidate, little, if any,

space should be wasted on persuading imagined moderates relative to pursuing e-mail

addresses and donations, according to the vice president of a digital strategy firm. To

that end, consultants said they’re often on the lookout for issues to ignite fundraising

success and see the Web as vital in building for that infrastructure; Ron Paul, for

example, was cited as particularly effective in this regard in recent campaign cycles,

triggering millions in online donations with “hot button” attacks on the Federal Reserve.

By contrast, consultants suggested that the best strategy for the opposition’s echo

chamber was, plainly, to avoid and ignore: “You didn’t respond to their press inquiries

unless you absolutely had to. You basically wrote them off – there’s no benefit I can get

from talking with these people, so why do it?” asked the campaign manager for one U.S.

senate candidate. “They’re just out to get me – they want blood. That’s what they’re

looking for.” There was, moreover, little use in bothering with the audiences for that

opposition media either: “You’re not going to change their mind. They are who they’re

voting for and there’s nothing that anyone can say on television that’s going to shift their

decision,” said the president of a direct mail and opposition research firm. Not
 Political Consultants 14

surprisingly, this also means that, as effective as the echo chamber might be perceived as

for some goals and processes, it holds little utility for consultants seeking out undecided

or swing voters – some of whom, the president of a political advertising agency posits,

“regularly tune out anything that’s in the echo chamber … so you have to figure out a

way of really disassociating yourself from politics to try to get their attention in the first

place.” One interviewee, the member of a presidential campaign’s advertising team,

lamented that such polarization had basically delegitimized many otherwise useful news

sources as potential reference points in his ads.

One additional perception of the new media environment – and the efforts

outlined here to manage it – might also be noted: the increasingly pervasive sense that, as

the newspaper industry crumbles, turnover saps institutional knowledge in newsrooms,

and reporters find themselves stretched too thin, consultants might be able to fill the

vacuum of investigative journalism with their own opposition research packages. Part of

this is because, for instance, if a general assignment reporter is now picking up the work

of what had formerly been a dedicated statehouse scribe, that requires “a lot more

education of the media by folks on my side,” the deputy communications director for a

national party explained – “education,” of course, being polite code for “spin.” But, more

significant than that, a direct mail and opposition research president pointed out, reporters

are being asked to do in a few days’ time what it might have taken campaign staffers a

few months’ time to compile – and what might be a liability for democracy can be turned

into a partisan advantage:

You used to be able to kind of pitch an idea to a reporter and they would do their

research and they would write their article. Well, now, you have to prepackage
 Political Consultants 15

everything and hand it to them and that’s the way it’s kind of evolved. I mean,

it’s good for my business, because campaigns can’t rely on reporters to do their

research for them – they need to hire folks to do it, because that’s the only way

it’s going to get done now.

Narrowcasting the Political Message

For those consultants veteran enough to fondly recall its simplicity, the pre-1980s

broadcast era was a time when “you could literally roadblock communications,” as one

strategic firm’s president put it, by buying time on the three major networks, ensuring

that “everybody watching TV was seeing the message,” but that “now, that’s virtually

impossible to do.” Yet for all the hype surrounding digital segmentation and targeting in

the 2012 cycle, conversations with many consultants revealed that they saw these

opportunities as but the latest outgrowth in a consistent trajectory toward niche media.

One president of a political advertising agency pointed out that his firm has, for many

years, sent out as many as 15-20 pieces of different mail on behalf of a client, because,

for example, “they know that this guy is interested in sports, fishing, or he owns a gun or

this person over here is a soft moderate that is a soft Republican we need to win over.”

The advent of cable was recalled as a watershed foreshadowing further development of

this unique messaging; he described how they could then “cherry-pick to certain

audiences,” running education policy appeals on the Lifetime network, for example, to

women in a single city’s suburbs. By the 1990s, with e-mail becoming more widespread,

the capacity to drill down on single-issue advocacy became more robust, one U.S. senate

press secretary illustrated:

 Political Consultants 16

If you have a group of people who like guns on e-mail, it’s easy to just blast a

message out to them on, like, they who like guns. We do a lot of things like that

that mainstream media might not pick up on – so, like, we do a lot of interviews

with Hispanic media; a lot of interviews with Christian websites; a lot of

interviews with hard-core conservative media online.

In that sense, as another congressional press secretary confirmed, segmented media

opportunities have been around for a “long time,” if you count how he would “emphasize

different things when talking to a reporter from National Review … [compared] to

National Public Radio,” but “online media … have just made that 100 or 1,000 times

more [feasible] with outlets along those lines and more volume along those lines.”

Because of that, one strategic media consultant revealed, the first touch-point in reaching

out on a particular issue might not ideally be The New York Times or Washington Post, a

few of the dominant agenda setters of old, but rather a specific website that tracks the

issue closely to generate blogosphere and re-tweeting momentum more “organically,”

which can then filter upward to those mainstream gatekeepers.

The existence of narrowcasting traditions throughout previous decades should not,

however, minimize the enthusiasm heard vocalized for refinements in the process in the

latest cycle. Keenly aware that “the line is becoming blurred between the computer

screen and your television screen,” one analyst at a media buying firm noted, consultants

are eager to serve more geographically and even “psychographically” targeted online

advertisements. Likely the chief advancement in the 2012 cycle to that end was in

“cookie-ing” the voter file, which a small handful of companies had achieved in

combining national voter rolls with “anonymous” data warehouse packages containing
 Political Consultants 17

demographic and lifestyle information associated with browsing histories (from, say,

Amazon, eBay, and WebMD), so as to deliver more personalized messages online.

Others point to the increasing digital utility being plumbed in zip code precision – as

found on Pandora or YouTube, where one online advertising firm’s president touted

capturing almost 50,000 views for a hit piece in a single congressional district. The voter

file is also increasingly being overlaid with cable systems, such that candidates can avoid

buying ad inventory in “uselessly” partisan neighborhoods, the media buying analyst

said: “If I have the ability to target specific voters [like that], it’s worth approximately

twice to four times because it’s cutting out a population that I just don’t want to talk to.”

As one strategic media consultant told me:

It’s that much more precise to the point that they not only know what your tastes

and interests are; they know enough about your tastes and interests and

proclivities and inclinations that, if I’m a union guy and … [I] may not be …

especially supportive of gay rights, it’s not going to be a gay canvasser who calls

me. It’s going to be a union guy who calls me or visits me or drops me an e-mail.

The question for future elections is how this increasingly granular detail about the

audience for a political message might alter the nature of its content and reorient the

creative process toward more flexible output. If you are, for instance, “someone from

Florida who likes Sarah Palin, who loves motorcycles and shooting guns – you can cater

a message straight to them,” said the press secretary for a former U.S. senate leader.

Moreover, according to a congressional campaign manager, “This allows you to talk

about issues that traditionally never would have been talked about in a campaign because

it’s not something you’d put on television.” A targeted advertising firm’s managing
 Political Consultants 18

director offered a concrete example of this: He delivered online ads to known commuters

living within five miles of a 200-mile stretch of highway claiming that his client’s

opponent would quadruple the tolls if elected. Specifying to interests like that is “the

wave of the future,” as the head of one presidential digital team claimed; in part, because

“people are so willing, whether they know it or not, to share so much personal

information online” that “if you have the resources, you can really slice and dice a

database to the nth degree.”

Part of the peril, however, that accompanies the lure of partisan outlets is

maintaining equivocality in how messages are encoded – an equivocality that becomes

more difficult to manage the more fragmented (and even individualized) that new media

delivery affords, as he described:

Campaigns are ambiguous because there’s always worry that they’re talking to

people they shouldn’t be talking to – so there’s always the fear, well, the bad guys

can hear me say this, so I’m not going to be too specific. Rather than, ‘I’m going

to ban gay marriage,’ I’m going to talk about the sanctity of marriage. Or instead

of talking about abortion, I’m going to talk about protecting the unborn. Or, my

favorite – and I did this a lot – instead of talking about protecting the 2nd

Amendment or making sure the government doesn’t take our guns, we talked

about protecting our constitutional rights.

Framing ambiguously is more difficult in a media environment more splintered along

partisan lines, where the potential for catering to a narrower electorate niche is

heightened and “that message can be taken and blown up nationally and it can blow up in

your face as a representation of what you believe,” noted one press secretary who served
 Political Consultants 19

both a former House and Senate leader: “Whatever you’re saying can come back to bite

you in a big way … You have to stay ambiguous on the smaller slice of the populations

that you’re also targeting.” (GOP candidate Todd Akin, whose U.S. Senate bid in 2012

was derailed when he spoke of “legitimate rape,” surely understands this hazard.) On the

plus side, the friendly confines offered by a like-minded ideological outlet, as opposed to

a more combative journalistic watchdog, means that consultants can wield surprising

influence over the process, as one congressional communications director disclosed:

Before I put my boss on TV, I have an extended conversation with the producer of

the show about what we will and will not consent to be discussing. There are

some shows who – they’ll say, ‘We’d like to have you on to discuss a highway

bill that Congress is considering’ and you’ll say, ‘No, the only thing I want to talk

about is my energy bill on the floor this week.’ And some of them will say, ‘Oh,

OK, well, that’s fine.’ … There are some shows that are very friendly – generally,

you put them on Fox News, if you’re a Republican politician, I can send them our

talking points in advance and some suggested questions for the host to ask and

that’s exactly how the interview will go down.

As the director of a political advertising agency added, “Truthfulness is important, but I

tell a lot of first-time candidates, when you’re doing an interview, you’re not really there

to answer the reporter’s questions. You’re there to get your agenda across.”

Some, like the media buying analyst, believe the true potential here is the real-

time “testability” that targeted online advertising offers in terms of gauging, mid-

campaign, whether one ad persuades and mobilizes better than another: For instance,

“This ad works better when we said, for women, when we talked about, the guy said
 Political Consultants 20

‘legitimate rape’ not just saying he wanted to ‘blur the lines on rape.’” That kind of

granular information can then feed back into the production process, potentially making

the advertising output more nimble and narrowing the message further, but also requiring

that consultants accommodate lower budget shoots and edits to achieve a wider (if

cheaper) range of micro-targetable inventory. An online advertising firm’s president

describes this rather fittingly as reaching “the end of data, meaning that we have better

data now than we have the ability to deliver on that data.”

Discussion

At present, an estimated 7,000 professionals now earn all or part of their living on

political campaigns in this $6 billion annual industry (Burton & Shea, 2010, p. 9;

Issenberg, 2012, p. 4). Notably, as this specialty of the public relations industry has

flourished, journalism has weathered a precipitous decline, with newspaper revenues

tumbling by more than $20 billion from their peak (Sass, 2010). By the turn of the

century, communication strategists outnumbered reporters and some believe “those with

the requisite resources to manipulate the democratic system for their advantage have

more capability to accomplish that than ever before” (Bennett & Manheim, 2001, p. 284).

This is certainly possible, but one key caveat should be emphasized here: This research

does not assume nor imply that these consultants definitively have effect on or power

over voters. Rather, this takes up their effect on or power over the media environment in

which political communication now circulates – a vantage point much less studied and

one, I believe, requiring the qualitative methodology and rich detail of thick description

utilized here. At a juncture of profound technological upheaval, campaign consultants

are working to manage the news agenda through means both wider and narrower than
 Political Consultants 21

before: in other words, a broader set of mediated portals is contributing to political

discourse and, simultaneously, a more circumscribed set of encoded messages is being

delivered through them.

As highlighted in the numerous examples in the preceding pages, there are now an

expanded array of venues and platforms that consultants can employ to deliver campaign

messages. The more that elites rely upon these new channels like online video, niche

blogs, and social media, the more it suggests a potential “disintermediation” of traditional

gatekeepers from political discourse. To be certain, powerful institutions of “old media”

still retain a critical influence in this agenda-setting environment, but they are seen

occupying less of a first-order, definitive role and are being “worked around” more

ambitiously than ever by strategists. Interviewees articulated ambitions to talk directly to

voters and constituents rather than through conventional mass media intermediaries.

Because the Internet represents, in a sense, an infinite news hole – relative to, say, 30

minutes of a nightly news broadcast or “14 column inches” of daily newsprint – there is

no limit to the amount of political content needed or desired to fill that space.

Consultants are, therefore, eagerly exploring new ways of producing (or co-producing)

and disseminating that content themselves. To them, the “mainstream media” is

strategized as much for playing “catch up,” as it is the starting point for those processes.

A wider array of channels, however, has also meant a “looser” sense of veracity

and rigor in those spaces, which can militate both for and against consultants’ purposes,

depending on the situation. “That pressure on [journalists] to break news, with all these

competitors, means that they might take liberties and make assumptions in reporting in a

way that they wouldn’t have 10 years ago,” complained one U.S. senate press secretary.
 Political Consultants 22

Others described what they felt to be a “much lower standard” for online content as

compared to its print counterpart, as a digital strategy media consultant explained:

I’ll be like, ‘How dare you put that up there or say that?’ And [reporters are] just

like, ‘Oh, well, that’s just for my blog; that’s not like a real thing.’ And I’m like,

‘Well, a lot of people look at that thing – a lot more than your stupid articles.’

The problem, for them, emerges when the digital first draft of “history’s first draft” gets it

wrong and, though it might be corrected in a subsequent update, “that first version is still

out there first and it’ll be picked up and e-mailed around and a lie can get halfway around

the world before the truth gets unspooled,” said one congressional press secretary.

Corrections, these consultants lament, do not seem to proliferate with the same velocity.

They shared a sense that the political news space online was being treated as more

provisional, temporary, and unfolding – a fluid, “makeshift” context where facts and

falsehoods seem to circulate with equal authority. Unlike prime-time network TV or a

morning newspaper, online political content has no analogous deadline, which accelerates

the pressure to post installments constantly – with sometimes-dubious results for

operatives trying to shepherd the news narrative. To some, the concept of factual

impartiality itself may well be under assault because of those changed conditions: “The

bounds of objectivity are not what they once were,” lamented one strategic media

consultant. An opposition researcher further remarked:

[It’s become] a he said-she said kind of argument. And that’s how the press plays

everything. And that’s been tremendously detrimental to the political process and

it’s leading to their death knell, because partisans on both sides want someone to

weigh in with: ‘This is right and this is wrong.’ So, with the lack of the media
 Political Consultants 23

being the judge, partisan fights have come in and said, ‘No – this is bullshit. No –

they’re wrong on this. No – they’re lying.’ So each side has gravitated to their

websites, which tells them their side is right and the other side is wrong.

It is for this reason perhaps that one pollster to the Romney campaign rather infamously

remarked during the last election cycle that, “We’re not going to let our campaign be

dictated by fact-checkers.” Curiously, even as there was a massive increase in fact-

checking pursuits in 2012 campaign coverage – with more political reporters “shucking

the old he-said-she-said formulation” – those “truth squads have had only marginal

success in changing the behavior of campaigns” (Scherer, 2012). Consultants may well

feel that campaigns don’t need to be accountable to “independent facts” if voters adrift in

a fragmented information environment won’t necessarily hold them accountable. For that

reason, one direct mail and opposition research head fears that this is a “slippery slope”

that could culminate “50 years from now, [where] politics could be this kind of

cartoonish reality, where facts don't matter.” The evidence here suggests that strategists

are, in fact, designing toward an environment like that which could arrive much sooner.

This is not, however, meant to propose that candidates did not try to manipulate

the media in earlier eras or that that today’s media is somehow more error-prone than in

the past. More information is available to voters nowadays: much of it accurate, much of

it inaccurate. What this research has shown is how campaigns and consultants see their

task of designing for selective exposure being influenced by new media change – how

they try to work with that news abundance in strategically useful ways. Where there is

greater pluralism in terms of those contributing to the national news narrative, there is

also, naturally, a more fractured political agenda.

 Political Consultants 24

In that sense, the means of managing political news have also gotten narrower.

With greater awareness of voter niches, campaigns are developing messages more

tailored and refined than mass broadcasting could afford – even as an overwhelming

majority of voters say they don’t want campaigns to micro-target ads to them based on

tracking of their online activity (Vega, 2012). This also points to an interesting tension,

as rhetorical ambiguity maintained some advantage in the “mass media” era – with

candidates avoiding concrete pledges and being wary of how they framed certain touchy

issues. Slogans, for example, were long designed to be “vacuous” and “allow

constituents to read what they want into them” (Steger, 1999, p. 676); even when

campaigns in the 1990s first had the opportunity to take advantage of online interactivity,

they initially resisted for fear of losing control over that tradition of ambiguity (Stromer-

Galley, 2000, p. 125).

Now that they can drill down with messages to more partisan populations

expecting to hear those definitive stances, that balance of vagueness and specificity is set

in greater flux. Consultants have better data to carve out more nuanced audience

segments, but might not be able to equivocate so nimbly when addressing them. The

“mainstream media” might, therefore, continue to represent the best platform for

delivering more centrist, bland boilerplate to swing voters and moderates, while a

“subterranean” ecology of individualized contacts and narrowcast partisan venues offers

space for more targeted, comparatively extremist proclamations. Issues that might not

have been addressed widely and openly might now be tackled through those narrower

channels – particularly if the advertising output can flexibly improvise thanks to digital

feedback mechanisms gathering mid-campaign audience reactions.

 Political Consultants 25

Finally, it is revealing to examine that “spatial” understanding that consultants

have of agenda setting in a multi-tiered news environment, particularly as new media

vehicles on the political “fringe” are enlisted – as decentralized nodes of power – in the

service of swaying the mainstream press narrative and conventional wisdom. For

consultants, an older model that upheld a comparatively “top down,” monopolistic

influence of traditional gatekeepers is morphing into something more unpredictable and

“bottom up.” By planting content and fomenting issues in spaces that marginalize those

gatekeepers’ front-line authority, strategists might drive stories from the periphery to the

center – cultivating an appearance of “grassroots” momentum among partisan venues like

blogs and social media. This makes campaign strategies, practices, and messages much

more complex and fluid than those of a generation ago.

Conclusions

There’s not a referee anymore … We’re not operating off the same set of facts. It

used to be that all voters watched one of the three different newscasts every night

and they were largely operating off the same set of facts. That’s not the case

anymore … Republicans and Democrats are sort of different, you know – they’re

different people in sort of a variety of ways … Ways they look at and approach

the world are different and now you’re just seeing media that is catering to the

fact that we don’t have a common canon of facts anymore. We don’t have a

common canon of like: ‘This is what’s going on.’

The lament of this U.S. senate campaign manager is an ironic one, for consultants

like him have, in fact, been instrumental in designing a public sphere toward those

fractured ends. As caveated earlier, his declaration of voter effect (i.e., “Republicans and
 Political Consultants 26

Democrats are different” because of that fragmentation) should not be taken at face value

as proven by this research for this was not the intention; this has been a study of the

social constructions of new media environments by operative elites, not empirical

outcomes on audiences and citizens. This investigation has offered a rare “backstage”

glimpse of the production and encoding of political communication as technological

advances restructure those strategies, practices, and messages. These changes have

altered the way that consultants are exploiting new media “stratementation,” or the

selective exposure to (and “individual reality construction” from) expanded options for

political information, which could, in turn, exacerbate partisan polarization (Bennett &

Iyengar, 2008, pp. 717, 722). It has long been argued that individuals seek out political

content consistent with preexisting biases; this research begins to illuminate how

consultant elites deliberately cater to that “information divide” amidst media change.

The concluding critique here, therefore, tackles only the potential outcome of those

methods for American democracy, based upon what has been learned from in-depth

interviews with those who scheme with these goals in mind (and hold the power to

reshape our political communication ecology to those ends). If these consultants are

successful in their efforts, I believe it threatens to endanger the common culture and

factual objectivity that undergirds the public sphere ideal (Habermas, 1989).

Others have voiced this complaint before, albeit without the insight of backstage

data provided here in the most updated form. For example, Michael Gurevitch, Stephen

Coleman, and Jay Blumler (2009) worried for the emergence of “distinct issue publics:

people who only want to be addressed on their own terms in relation to issues that matter

to them” (p. 170). Oscar Gandy (2001) has written of how this segmentation and
 Political Consultants 27

targeting is anti-inclusive (particularly toward non-voters) and subverts the Habermasian

model of informed deliberation. Thus, if “the first hurdle for any political targeter is

deciding who to leave out of such an effort,” we might anticipate more efforts toward

demobilizing exclusion in the future (Issenberg, 2011). A political media ecology in

which citizens hear only what they expect to hear from those they want to deliver it is, by

design, system set against any sense of common culture and shared truths: “The civility

in our system has eroded because of [this] as these new media have spread like wildfire,”

said one communication advisor to a presidential campaign. “I think if you were doing a

chart, you would see the shrillness and combativeness and polarization of politics has

increased as the new media has increased.”

This is, of course, empirically testable by future research. We can, at this point,

though, state that consultants’ efforts to build such a fragmented, data-refined

communication experience does not have, as its goal, diversity and circulation in terms of

the opportunities for citizens to encounter their political and cultural opposites. Lacking

any reservoir of good will toward opponents to draw upon – a reservoir filled, in part, by

consuming common information sources – the perils of such polarization are rife,

particularly when political leaders need to inevitably compromise with what could

become an unknowable “Other” across the aisle (earning them the enmity of constituents

already “stratemented” against each other). Producing for information cocoons online,

coupled with the decline of mass media newspapers and TV networks – and consultants

increasingly doing the research for reporters – could further splinter the “agenda setting”

model into more of an “agendas setting” model, as one director at a political ad agency

feared: “When everybody only had three places to go, you had a common set of
 Political Consultants 28

conveyance for how people processed stuff.” It is probably not surprising that, in this

emergent environment, three-quarters of Mitt Romney supporters believed that Barack

Obama was “intentionally misleading” voters and the exact same share of Obama

partisans believed likewise of Romney (Scherer, 2012).

This is surely partly because the postmodern purpose of segmentation and

targeting is to “deliver ‘different – and compelling truths’ to precisely the right segments”

(Gandy Jr., 2001, p. 144). To be certain, the Habermasian ideal was always just that –

more theory than reality in the history of the American republic; research such as this is

not meant to imply glorification of a bygone public sphere that never really existed in

practice. But what this study does illuminate is how campaign operatives labor to

manage political discourse and news agenda(s) in ways antithetical to those ideals, given

the opportunities and challenges that new media technologies afford. If consultants have

their way in shaping that environment on behalf of clients, a “common canon of…

‘what’s going on’” will be ever more difficult for citizens to access.

It has been shown here how political communication professionals utilize

increasingly sophisticated data to design texts and exploit spaces within a more

fragmented, partisan media environment. The consequences of those efforts include a

direct assault on many of the ideals of the public sphere. These may well lead to

campaign wins for individual candidates, but they could also portend eventual losses for

the machinery of democracy. The new media designs of these stage managers presage a

campaign production apparatus that is more decentralized, flexible, and segmented and

imperils traditional gatekeepers of information and communication, for better and worse.
 Political Consultants 29

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Endnotes
1
Participants have been stripped of identifying information to protect their anonymity:

Press secretary, U.S. Representative; Press secretary, Presidential candidate; Managing

director, Targeted digital advertising firm; Advertising consultant, Media consulting firm;

Communications director, U.S. Representative; Press secretary, U.S. Senator; President,

Opposition research firm; Executive vice president, Strategic consulting firm; President,

Political advertising agency; Media consultant, Digital strategy firm; Press secretary, U.S.

Senator; Deputy chief of staff, U.S. Representative; President, Digital strategy and online

advertising firm; Deputy communications director, National party committee; President,

Direct mail and opposition research firm; President, Political advertising agency;

President, Media consulting firm; Opposition research partner, Political consulting firm;

Political director, Political advertising agency; President, Media consulting firm; Senior

speechwriter, U.S. President; Analyst, Media buying firm; President, Direct mail political

advertising agency; Media consultant, Strategic communications firm; Vice president,

Digital strategy firm; President, Political advertising agency; President, Strategic

consulting firm; President, Media consulting firm; Partner, Digital strategy firm;

President, Political advertising agency; Partner, Media consulting firm; Chief blogger,

Presidential campaign; Strategic media consultant, Political advertising agency; Partner,

Social and digital media agency; Chief Internet strategist, Digital strategy firm; Chief

creative officer, Media consulting firm; Associate manager for policy, Social networking

company; Chief advertising consultant, Presidential candidate