May you live in interesting times

If the idea of America can be encapsulated in one adjective, I'd pick "flexible."

As a country, we flex in all kinds of directions and yet manage to hold together -- whether the flexing was born from our own souls or in response to external forces. America, despite and in tribute to itself, seems quite adept at adapting.

I didn't vote for Trump. I didn't want to flex in the ways his candidacy asked America to. But enough of us Americans wanted to give the marketer a try, and so here we go. The Great American Experiment continues. 

I write about ideas in the realm of marketing and advertising and sometimes technology, so that's the lens through which I'm viewing a lot of what just happened. The story of Trump's victory is a marketing story. So on that level, I'm exorcising some demons.

This Was a Revenge Story - Not A New Idea

Great marketing is built upon human insights. It's based on leveraging tensions in culture. VW's historic "Think Small" ad and its brethren worked precisely because of the culture of their time; they offered a distinct alternative to the status quo in automobiles. 

Trump's appeal was and is based on tensions, too. As David Wong describes it, the tension is, "...primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban." Trump didn't present a newfangled idea, he regurgitated one that's as old as the hills: Them vs Us. Trump sold his audience a story of collective revenge on the 2008 election. And he likely sold himself a story of personal revenge, to slights real and imagined from decades ago, as McKay Coppins wrote in Buzzfeed.

Revenge is easy to sell. Much harder to sell, as Clinton discovered, are new and substantive policy ideas. 

It's the Internet of 2016, Stupid

Clinton ran a machine based on the Internet culture of 2008, the same technical philosophy that won Obama the White House. But eight years ago was a radically different time in Internet culture. In 2008, segmentation, processing power, geo-location, multivariate optimization, and e-commerce used to be much more the province of the elites. Not so in 2016. As Naval writes in his piece, "American Spring..."

"YouTube killed TV and Twitter ate the news. Donald’s tweeting from his jet and Bernie’s kickstarter went viral. Software is eating politics and the elites have lost control."

If Trump deserves any credit, it's for hiring Brad Parscale and letting Parscale do his thing. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg's behind-the-scenes piece on Trump's digital infrastructure is a must-read in comprehending how to run a presidential campaign in 2016. In Trump's machine, software is king. So is being frugal, using off-the-shelf components, and focusing on the data. Always the data. 

Forget the messaging if you can for a moment. Trump won the Presidency spending radically less than Clinton. Hundreds of millions less. He won without much TV, without a ground game, without a huge staff. The Internet of 2016, and the "why not me?" confidence of bootstrapping marketers like Parscale made it happen. 

Let's be clear. I'm not celebrating the awfulness that came out of Trump's mouth. He has a lot to atone for. I'm just envious of his team's chutzpah in taking on impossible odds. 

Façades and Authenticity

Say something repugnant today, laugh it away as a joke or "locker room talk" tomorrow. And get away with it. Or, in an equally grotesque manner, be the winner soaked in ugly rhetoric who now talks quietly about healing the nation. If the polling industry took a dive last night, so, too, did authenticity. It's going to be really hard to believe any public figure after Trump. I'd really hesitate to position any brand based on "authenticity" from now on. Trump has sucked the word dry of meaning. A majority of Americans didn't just buy a well-polished, carefully practiced façade yesterday. They endorsed the lie well told, with eyes wide open. 

But we are flexible, if we are anything. 

America will survive Trump.