Wrong Newsletter?

If you're looking for my Populist Decoder newsletter then click here to subscribe - this is not that newsletter, it's the much more intermittent Rootcause one!

I'm on holiday, which is why the Decoder has been on a brief hiatus, but it also means I've been on Instagram a lot.

Which in turn means I've got a bee in my bonnet - again - about just how far behind the curve most of our conceptions of effective political communication are.

The trickle of data that reveals the generational shift away from traditional media power is becoming a flow.

• GB News had higher initial daily audience figures than BBC News last month (and whilst that's a carefully chosen phrasing, the challenge is real as they take to the US market).

• 54% of all people use social media as their primary gateway to news (and most traditional media have paltry offerings on social).

• ⅓ of American teenagers are 'almost constantly' on TikTok (and X is growing its right-wing user base).

• People watch a billion hours of YouTube content a day (and on its best day BBC 10 O Clock news hits 2 million hours).

Yet here in the UK many senior figures seem to only care about the cachet of traditional media brands.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Until now it's always been the case that we all mostly lived in the same media environment. Whatever you read or watched it followed the day's news, because that's how news worked.

But it doesn't always work like that anymore.

I've been putting my Populist Decoder together for a couple of weeks and I can already see how political content on platforms like TikTok is wildly different to the stories being discussed in Westminster.

The Manchester Airport attack sentencing is a good example. Millions of TikTok views, not many column inches.

But progressives simply have to up their game on social.

If you don't believe me, here are three vignettes from my Instagram feed this week that show populist communications at work.

1. Former Apprentice contestant and self-styled salt of the earth geezer Tom Skinner popped round to JD Vance's Cotswold bolthole for a BBQ. I haven't seen write-ups to say who else was there because I'm on holiday but Skinner is exactly the kind of messenger populist authoritarians dream of. He's been chatted up by Rob Jenrick and Dom Cummings in recent weeks as well as posting regular 'London has fallen' rants. He has 700k followers on Instagram - more than the daily readership of any UK print newspaper. Contrast his pally, sweaty arm round the shoulder of the VP with the cagily apolitical disclaimers added by most attendees at Keir Starmer's 'Creator get together' at Downing St. Then ask yourself which one feels more authentic.

2. My brief analysis of the leading UK political parties on Instagram revealed a clear winner - guess who? Yup. Reform. And that's not just because they've got more followers (265k) than the Tories(220k) and the Lib Dems (68k). I'm going to share more of this analysis in my Populist Decoder newsletter at some point but Reform's clever and consistent use of 'Case Files' to highlight criminal behaviour by non-UK citizens and also using localised crime data to produce crime totalisers not only creates emotive, shareable content - it hangs together around a single theme - unlike every other major party's grid.

3. A pair of seemingly random guys (CAST records and Dan Heard) took it on themselves to drive to Marseille to collect a boat and sail it across the English Channel ILLEGALLY (sic) to prove a point about the UK's lax attitude to migration. They failed in quite comic circumstances but clever management of their accounts doesn't show this unless you watched it unfold - which over 130k people did - including several thousand via live broadcasts, the content of which is incredibly hard to monitor. For all their moronic behaviour the story was entertaining to follow and they had a clearly engaged audience - watching felt much fresher and real-time than packaged journalism.

We often hear people say 'we need to learn from how the other side are doing things' but do we actually mean it?

Because if we do then none of this should be a surprise.

I've had more to say about this mismatch of intent and action in recent weeks but I haven’t said it anywhere near as well as this searingly accurate, withering take down of ‘left-wing academics’ by Meditations For The Anxious Mind (363K followers if you’re wondering).It's not a masterplan, it's just working with the grain.

Populist success on social media isn’t all part of a masterplan (although money and coordination help) it’s also a result of working with the grain of modern information environments.

Here’s three quick lessons from the examples above.

1. You can't manufacture influencer alignment with political positioning. People either agree with you and are willing to support you or they are not. If you can't find people to support you then you need to consider why.

2. There's still (!) chronic under-investment in social strategy across political communications and public policy type organisations.

3. Doing interesting things in real-time is really interesting!

If you got this far, thanks for reading and don't miss out on the Populist Decoder!

Jonathan