CAPTCHAing Hearts and Minds
We're all just expecting the beeps and bloops, aren't we?
“What can you say to me to prove that you’re not a robot?”
That’s the one question at the other week’s interminable Sky TV Q&A with Sunak and Starmer that had me cocking an ear.
What could Keir Starmer say that’d show to a young potential voter that he wasn’t actually some sort of fun-free Terminator sent back in time to prevent John Connor’s birth by boring his future mother into some sort of soporific coma1?
The answer, it turned out, wasn’t some over-rehearsed pre-prepared remarks mechanically ticking off what a gestalt intelligence of think tankers thought voters wanted to hear.
14 years of failure
Son of toolmaker
Labour has changed
NHS NHS NHS
The other one’s the same. Sunak. Eugh. A man sadly repeating the same soundbites. Ooh, they won’t stop the boats we’re not stopping. Ooh, they won’t fix the economy we’ve tanked. Ooh, won’t lower the taxes we’ve spent years jacking up to historic highs.
Is it any wonder that people are turning to power-twunt Nigel “why does my surname sound French” Farage?
He might have no sane or deliverable policies. He might be a charlatan who doesn’t know what the IMF is. He might be as appealing as a cup of cold sick on a clear winter’s morn. But he does sound like a human being.
Admittedly a particularly deranged human being. But that’s because what comes out of his mouth comes out of his deranged booze-addled brain, instead of some morass of opinions homogenised from hundreds of polls, surveys, interviews and op-eds.
And it appeals to voters.
That’s because voters - just like leads, prospects, customers or whatever terminology you apply to them - are people.
And people don’t need CAPTCHA forms to suss out a robot. We can spot the mechanically reconstituted pink slime of a focus group or large language model a mile off.
What we respond to, from politicians, from businesses, from other people, is a clear message that we can tell the speaker believes in.
If you want to get past your customer’s mental CAPTCHA, you can try and brute force your way through with a DDOS attack built on billions of pre-assembled lines.
Or you could focus on a clear message. One that you, and they, can believe in.
And deliver it like you’re a person.
Message first. Tone of voice second. Success will surely come third.
After all, you wouldn’t like to sound like a politician, would you?
Something mint - this minifesto
What can I say? I liked my earlier list of things that creatives hate to hear so much that I went back in time to last summer, and used that conceit for the copy of the (finally) newly re-launched HNW website.
Is this a veiled attempt to get you to visit the (finally) newly re-launched HNW website?
No. It’s not veiled in the slightest.
Go to the brand messaging page and look at the nice bit of tone work I did about tone of voice (meta), then check out the message first marketing hub and look at some of the brand breakdowns. I did the IBM one. It’s great. And the Surreal one. That’s also great. And a Victoria Bitter one, which isn’t live yet. It’s great though.
Don’t miss out, make sure you’re subscribed to Unmemorable Title and I’ll start sharing my blog content in this newsletter. But probably alongside something mint, instead of crowbarring my own work into this slot.
I’m not an egotist, you know.
See the AI artist’s impression above. What can I say, The Starmernator is still pretty dull.