The Long Con

[Cain]

The overlap between marketing and politics is inevitable when both of them cater to the lowest common denominator and the biggest possible audience. History is full of marketing men who had successful careers working in politics: Walter Lippmann, Ivy Lee, Tim LaHaye, and the notorious self-promoting usurper Edward Bernays. Nothing changes, either. In 2008, Brian Collins and company won the Ad Age prize for Marketer of the Year. Their project? Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

[...]

Information Marketing is probably a better training ground for a political operative than politics itself, these days. The A/B Testing loop, the segmented lists, the auto-responder cycles, the CRM funnels, analytics and response rates: it's all the same language now. Marketing and politics both rely on the techniques of Branding, and the outcome is very much the same, too. From our low voter turnout to the high return rates for "information products," this is not a system geared for customer satisfaction.

Source.

Rick Perlstein has a look at the other side of this equation: the way in which politics and databases are used for advertising purposes, and in particular the strange relationship between American conservatism and snake-oil salesmen:

Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers. Who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs? That's why, for instance, the other day I (and probably you) got an advertisement by way of liberal magazine The American Prospect seeking donations to Mercy Corps, a charity that helps starving children in the Third World. But back when I was getting emails every day from Newsmax and Townhall, the come-ons were a little bit different.

[...]

Soon after reading that, I learned of the "23-Cent Heart Miracle," the one "Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about." (Why would they? They'd just be leaving money on the table: "I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product," read one of the testimonials. "I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven't had open-heart surgery.") Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta.

Perlstein believes this isn't just coincidence, either:

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

In 1961 Richard Viguerie, a kid from Houston whose heroes, he once told me, were "the two Macs"—Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur—took a job as executive director for the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The organization was itself something of a con, a front for the ideological ambitions of the grownups running National Review. And fittingly enough, the middle-aged man who ran the operation, Marvin Liebman, was something of a P. T. Barnum figure, famous on the right for selling the claim that he had amassed no less than a million signatures on petitions opposing the People's Republic of China's entry into the United Nations. (He said they were in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever saw the warehouse.) The first thing Liebman told Viguerie was that YAF had two thousand paid members but that in public, he should always claim there were twenty-five thousand. (Viguerie told me this personally. I found no evidence he saw anything to be ashamed of.) And the first thing that Liebman showed Viguerie was the automated "Robotype" machine he used to send out automated fundraising pitches. Viguerie's eyes widened; he had found his life's calling.

Following the Goldwater defeat, Viguerie went into business for himself. He famously visited the Clerk of the House of Representatives, where the identities of those who donated fifty dollars or more to a presidential campaign then by law reposed. First alone, and then with a small army of "Kelly Girls" (as he put it to me in 1996), he started copying down the names and addresses in longhand until some nervous bureaucrat told him to cease and desist.

By then, though, it was too late: Viguerie had captured some 12,500 addresses of the most ardent right-wingers in the nation. "And that list," he wrote in his 2004 book, America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Over America, "was my treasure trove, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, as I started The Viguerie Company and began raising money for conservative clients."

Fort Knox: an interesting image. Isn't that what proverbial con men are always claiming to sell?

The lists got bigger, the technology better ("Where are my names?" he nervously asked, studying the surface of the first computer tape containing his trove): twenty-five million names by 1980, destination for some one hundred million mail pieces a year, dispatched by some three hundred employees in boiler rooms running twenty-four hours a day. The Viguerie Company's marketing genius was that as it continued metastasizing, it remained, in financial terms, a hermetic positive feedback loop. It brought the message of the New Right to the masses, but it kept nearly all the revenue streams locked down in Viguerie's proprietary control. Here was a key to the hustle: typically, only 10 to 15 percent of the haul went to the intended beneficiaries. The rest went back to Viguerie's company. In one too-perfect example, Viguerie raised $802,028 for a client seeking to distribute Bibles in Asia—who paid $889,255 for the service.

Read the whole thing.

[LMNO]

Well, crap.  Further proof that we can't get money out of politics, because politics is simply money.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Reading this whole damn thing (the link) tonight.

Good find, Cain.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Holy shit. It's the exact same setup as religion only I wouldn't have to do all the pious superstition schtick that I couldn't really stomach. Politics, on the other hand ... I was born for that kind of swindle