3 marketing lessons from Kamala Harris’ 'weird' campaign messaging

When Kamala Harris announced her campaign for president on July 21, there were only 107 days until the Nov. 5 election. If you’re a project manager, you have definitely done the mental exercise of scoping that timeline, especially when you considered how creatives would take it. But the campaign strategy took shape almost immediately. Unlike the “We go high,” hope-filled campaign that former president Barack Obama ran, Harris’ campaign quickly and successfully got its hands dirty with one word, stolen from the middle school playground and executed in a gloriously obvious way: weird. Calling the GOP and their candidates weird is so delightfully dumb, so utterly transparent. It hits back in a way that is both insulting and difficult to dispute. It can cover every sort of evil from hypocrisy to hand size. And the best part? We all know what they are doing. They are not trying to hide it. They are not trying to make it cute or give it a nice wrapper. They are just putting it out there, seeing it work and then running like hell with it. It’s as fantastically stupid as seeing that people on Reddit thought Michael Cera invented CeraVe—and turning it into a whole Super Bowl campaign. More: Brands and the election—how to avoid controversy in partisan times Whichever side of this election you find yourself on, you can’t miss the lesson here: We can all benefit from letting our strategy show a little more. Here are the three takeaways for how we can stir some of the weird magic into our modern messaging. Be obvious Look, letting your strategy show has been a cardinal sin of advertising since long copy was en vogue. But, in modern times we’re not talking at people. Every person with a phone is a content creator and modern advertising is a conversation, an invitation for participation. You want to get the most out of your money? Give the people the brief right there in the work. Of all the texts I’ve received from the Dems asking me to donate, not one asked me to call the GOP “weird,” but the execution of this strategy was so obvious in the sheer number of times they have said it that anyone can execute against it in slack chats, TikToks and conversations with Uber drivers. I can’t help but be reminded of the JCDecaux campaign from David Madrid that posted 100-year-old Marina Prieto’s Instagrams in its vacant ad spaces until all of Spain was hunting her down to have their photo taken with her, proving that OOH still works. Say it first No one stopped to wonder if saying “weird” was ownable, or if someone else could say it. They started saying it. And then when the GOP tried to use it against the Dems, the cringiness was palpable. Modern brands know who they are, but they are not afraid to try things that have not been done. Like BRAT and coconut emojis and trips to buy vinyl, brands are defined by the sum of the choices they make rather than a tight and coordinated narrative 18 months in the making. Get to the point Brevity is a gift. No one is waiting for brands to get to the point, even if they shelled out for a world-class director. Showing your strategy works only if it is this tight, one-word succinct. No one is trying to speak for a brand that is “inspiring play in the everyday, starting with breakfast.” No one knew that weird would work. But they didn’t over-invest in it or overthink it. So, it didn’t matter whether it worked or not. Brands keep asking for faster and cheaper. But the key is that you can succeed faster and cheaper only when you are willing to put bolder on the table as well. This is not a test-and-learn approach, it’s go and grow. \ If the Harris campaign worked as we have in advertising the last 50 years, it would have been 60 days out from the election before it managed to get its message out. And it would have been a really lovely film, crafted to perfection and we’d have missed the weird and wonderful ride we have been on since day two.

3 marketing lessons from Kamala Harris’ 'weird' campaign messaging

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