Dillon St. Bernard, Team DSB’s Founder & Digital Director, wrote a must-read essay to 25,000 readers in COURIER’S FWIW newsletter:
We’ve spent years analyzing the shifting media landscape and diagnosing what went wrong in past elections. The postmortem has been performed by everyone, including those of us who live and breathe digital comms and the several politicos whose complicity helped spur us into this mess.
One of the biggest takeaways has been a mandate for comms teams to expand the tactics they use to reach people: more appearances on new media, more coordination with creators, more direct-to-camera videos. More, more, more.
Campaigns and organizations are increasingly producing daily content across every possible platform, complete with a meticulous content calendar, an underfunded communications budget, and a dream.
Here’s the problem: being fluent in the tactics without first establishing your values is why so much content continues to underperform, even when it looks technically “good” on paper.
Too many people are putting out communications without knowing what they actually want to communicate, so the content they publish is devoid of any principles or conviction. AI may have nothing to do with it, but it’s slop all the same.
The result is an inauthentic online presence that feels hollow. As elections get closer and trust in legacy institutions and systems continues to erode, principles and conviction are what truly resonate with audiences and make (or break) their trust…
