What Politics in the Age of Pandemics Taught Me About Advertising
About power, behavioral science & misguided rhetorics.
Less than a month ago, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen gave a speech to the nation about new COVID restrictions to stop the third wave.
Denmark has a high level of trust in its government and more than 75% of the population has been vaccinated.
The PM’s speech was a clear message to those who haven’t:
Get it done — or else!
Unfortunately, it backfired completely.
The behavioral research project HOPE found that trust in authorities among the unvaccinated fell 11% after the speech.
And the PM’s Social Democrats nosedived from poll expectations and had a devastatingly bad election.
Here’s everything the speech got wrong — and how you can avoid it.
(Don’t) Let the Fools Die
The PM’s speech fell into a trap of tribal war — where too much communication often lands.
It pandered to the anger and frustration of the vaccinated majority; a feeling that my cousin expressed morbidly briefly:
“Let the fools die”.
I can understand the frustration — but fear-mongering to an angry mob is never the solution to a divided debate.
A study from Aarhus University finds that Scandinavians are more likely to blame laypeople for COVID, and that moralizing politics make people more likely to condemn and shame each other — dividing the gap even further.
Co-author of the study and leader of the HOPE project, professor Michael Bang Petersen, says that “radical transparency” is necessary to move outlier opinions with low trust in authorities.
Maybe Mette Frederiksen was too busy to read the research.
Because she went to war with the same old tribal calls that politicians have misused since humankind made the poor decision of inventing politics.
Data from the HOPE project found that trust in authorities among unvaccinated fell 11%.
The Prime Minister’s Speech
I translated the speech from Danish to English.
It’s long, boring, and poorly written.
So I put the entire thing and a few notes at the end of this essay for anyone interested or unfamiliar with it.
Here are the TLDR highlights:
“The infection must go down. Health services must be able to keep up. For this to happen, more people in Denmark must get vaccinated.”
“Vaccines are available. Appointments to be vaccinated are open, and it can not be said clearly enough: You who have not been vaccinated: Do it!”
“I think it's easy to live with the Corona passport. I think it gives a sense of security for the individual — if you go to the cinema or to a concert — you know that the other guests are also vaccinated or tested negative.”
“For all of you who have not been vaccinated, of course, it’ll be more difficult — and that's actually how I think it should be.”
“The political job right now is first and foremost to get the infection down. But in addition, it is our task to ensure that the very, very large majority of Danes who have been vaccinated, that you can get through this winter with as few obstacles and restrictions as possible. And that is why, of course, we in the government are also considering whether the corona passport should be used even more widely in our society.”
Is it really that easy to live with the COVID passport? And for how long?
Mette Frederiksen draws a brutal line between people who supposedly have it easy and those who deserve something “more difficult”. And she digs into the line with heavy-handed authority and misguided signals to the majority.
The strategy is transparent — but hardly what professor Petersen calls “radical transparency”. Rather it’s dividing rhetorics to build walls around the vaccinated majority which demonstrably leads to shaming, condemnation, and malignant public debate.
It might seem worth it if you want to suck up to my cousin and others who are ready to let the fools die.
But it is a wasted opportunity if you want to change minds.
The Predictable Results of Misunderstood Biases
Mette Frederiksen’s speech was a spectacular exercise in misplaced politician-speak and employing the wrong tools.
The prime minister relied on us vs. them and aggressive rhetorics instead of trying to move opinions.
The speech misunderstood the use of authority, outsider values, and variance in social proof.
This is what was overlooked:
Authority Bias: Faith in the Few
Sometimes we believe irrationally in positions of power.
It’s how the Milgram Experiment made otherwise nice people send (what they believed to be) painful electric shocks through innocent strangers — simply because someone in a white coat gave the order.
The test subject was named “The Teacher” and was instructed to punish “The Learner” with gradually higher voltage if the latter failed to answer a question.
It was in1963, and the experiment was advertised as a “memory study” done by the psychology department at Yale University.
It proved how easily good people can be nudged by authorities to do pretty bad stuff.
At least the good people who found a local university study interesting and decided to respond to the ad.
I don’t know if the Milgram Experiment would have drawn much interest from unvaccinated Danes.
Most vaccine skeptics live at the political poles where fringe beliefs, outsider values, and alternative facts have a stronger hold. And where faith in authorities and academia is decidedly lower.
If you are a university student or at least comfortable with the setting, “Teacher and Learner” is a power structure you know and maybe even respect.
But if you were the weird kid who couldn’t fit, if you were scolded by teachers and ridiculed by students, maybe you don’t love the model as much.
If you’re different, you put your faith in different systems of power.
Outsider Bias: F**ck the rules
I don’t mean to suggest that all vaccine skeptics are weird.
But some are.
The bullheaded pseudo-shaman who attacked the American capitol in January traveled a pretty weird road before he got diagnosed with a bunch of disorders.
In another essay, I wrote about my own journey with undiagnosed ADHD, neurodiverse communities, and the consequences of non-inclusive systems.
Here’s an addition:
My old guitar teacher somehow ended up a raving conspiracy theorist and straight-up vaccine denier.
Once he was a cool guy in a band teaching me rock n’ roll.
Now he spews out as much fake news as the internet will allow.
I don’t know if he’s got a diagnosis or not — but I’m pretty sure he’s some kind of crazy.
His response to Mette Frederiksen’s speech was preciously concise:
I don’t share his beliefs but I can sympathize with his frustration.
If you were born different, there’s a good chance you’ll identify with the outsiders — whomever they may be.
The constant feeling of being a little off (or is it everyone else?) drives you to find others like yourself. You look for your neurological tribe — or something similar.
Maybe the tribe you find isn’t exactly like you. But you have a common enemy: The voices of power and inflexible structures that you just can’t make happy without making yourself miserable.
If you’ve put all your faith in your subcultural identity, it’s usually at the expense of your trust in the bigger tribe and its authority.
Very angry or slightly mad?
Social Proof & Variance: Too Much of the Many
Broadly speaking, the proof of the many is great if you’re selling safety in numbers.
Robert Cialdini, author of “Influence — the Psychology of Persuasion”, explains how a chain of Chinese restaurants discovered that “Most Popular” wildly outperformed “The Chef Recommends” and sales jumped as much as 20 percent.
The authority of an invisible chef was not nearly as potent as the proof of the invisible many.
If you’re selling scarcity — the proof of the few — you can make esoteric authority work because you’re the gatekeeper of a limited edition experience.
But if your target audience has no reason to believe in a given position of power, alluding to experts won’t pull many psychological levers.
It’s important to remember in our current political discourse:
Both misused authority and broad social proof can have the opposite effect on outsider tribes and outlier beliefs.
Heaven isn’t a selling point if you’re a satanist.
A UK governmental campaign tried to use social proof to make more citizens pay their taxes.
The line was deceptively simple:
“Most people pay their tax on time”.
And it led to a 15% overall increase in tax payments before deadline.
Seemingly a success.
But author of “The Choice Factory” Richard Shotton brings up a crucial point:
The campaign reduced payments for the top 5% debtors by 25% — and by 35% for the top 1% unluckiest bastards.
It’s a perfect example of how not to use social proof when trying to reach and move outlier opinions.
If you already feel like an outsider, majority peer pressure is just another push away.
If someone is already referring to mainstreamers — even friends and family — as “normies” or “sheeple”, broad social proof will only remind them of their otherness.
And when the prime minister sends out a call-to-arms and panders to the frustration of the many, the response is predictably contrarian.
In another essay, I recommended Richard Shotton’s book “The Choice Factory” as a great tool for marketers. It would seem the recommendation extends to politicians.
11% fall in trust and a historically bad election was the result of ignoring behavioral science and trying to crowbar the dividing rhetorics of war into a message of moving forward.
Professor Petersen called the speech “unproductive” — and was asked by a journalist if it could be read as “professor speak for stupid?”
He replied, quite wonderfully: “Something like it”.
Activism or Advertising?
When I was a kid, there was something called “The Console Wars”.
It was a marketing ploy to make children be brand ambassadors in the schoolyard and talk up their favorite gaming device: Nintendo, PlayStation, whatever.
It worked until the game developers realized that their war was effectively preventing consumers from owning and enjoying more products. The videogame industry was growing but gamers’ love for gaming was even bigger — certainly big enough to own multiple devices.
Since then gaming has financially outgrown Hollywood and the music industry combined.
Maybe because developers stopped fighting for short gain and moved towards the future.
Tribal discourse can activate overlapping sentiments and ideologies. War rhetorics can push people and all their important opinions.
They just never change them.
Last week I wrote about boxing and dancing as a metaphor for brands who understand when to fight for someone and when to move them.
I wish Mette Frederiksen was a better dancer. Still, of course, metaphorically speaking.
Danish branding expert Hanne Felthus suggests that the Social Democratic party should have used their old ethos of “solidarity” and named the vaccine something to that effect: “The Solidarity Vaccine”.
Maybe.
I’m still trying to figure out why my government can’t afford just halfway decent behavioral consultation.
Or at least a speechwriter.
Glasshouse brands should take note of professor Petersen’s concept of “radical transparency” — even if governments still have a long way to go.
Maybe your product or service is worth going to battle over. But the war can make refugees out of those not in your focus group. Are you protecting your clan or inviting in new members?
Politicians are so used to waging tribal war they forget how to travel across the middle or reach the edges.
Governments could stand to learn from marketing and remember when to stop fighting and use behavioral insights to unite and move forward.
The Console Wars turned out to be a limitation — and so is any notion of a “battle” against COVID.
It’s not a war. It’s an odyssey out of the Age of Pandemics.
We need to write smarter invitations to get everyone aboard — not shame and exclude those who missed the boat the first time around.
Appendix: The full speech, translated with comments
You can read the speech in its original Danish here.
Welcome to another press conference here at the Prime Minister's Department — this time about the current and unfortunately worrying development in Corona.
The Epidemic Commission — which among others consists of the health authorities — has suggested that Corona is once more categorized as a socially critical disease and that requirements for the Corona Passport are reintroduced.
That’s why the government will suggest doing so tomorrow.
Let me first explain a little about the reasons.
On one hand, we are at a very different place than during the first and second waves of Corona. That is first and foremost because so many of us have been vaccinated.
That’s why we can have an open society. We can deal with more infections. Like we can see the effect of vaccinations; there is a high degree of immunity among the population.
Let me emphasize that while we can see there are vaccinated people who get infected as well, they are not as ill and the ones who are hospitalized are there for a shorter time on average.
On the other hand, we face new challenges.
The Health Department expects the infection rate to keep climbing over the coming months. Like the flu and other diseases, it will mean a bigger pressure on hospitals and health services.
Overall, The Health Department considers the pressure on hospitals to be very different and more concerning than the previous waves of COVID 19.
In other words, we can not let the infection run wild in Denmark.
[Translation: We are better off than during the first two waves — yet somehow not. The scene is set with authority symbols, mixed results, and vague fear of the future.]
Our responsibility to each other and society as a whole — to make sure our health services don’t collapse — yes, it is still in effect.
This week more than 16.000 have been infected with Corona in Denmark.
While the number of hospitalized has risen by 22%.
Very currently, we have today reached 300 in hospitals.
Both regarding infected and hospitalized, we are now at a higher level than last year.
The Health Department had expected more infected and hospitalized during autumn.
But it has been faster than expected.
And The Health Department expects, as mentioned, the rise to continue.
We must all remember that the pressure on our health services is delayed. The hospitalizations and the deaths we see now are the results of the infection behind us.
[Translation: Data and numbers show concrete severity, the infection rate is rising faster than expected. A shift in time (“the deaths we see now are the results of the infection behind us”) as an implicit movement forward and a reminder that our current actions influence the future.]
During the first two waves, hospitals were allowed to postpone non-acute treatments. Obviously, this created bottlenecks of postponed treatments that we still haven’t settled.
And now we’ve just started the winter season which typically makes the health services busier. They run fast in the hospital corridors. And they are short on staff. In many places, it’s already hard to make scheduling ends meet. That’s a fact this press conference won’t change. Yet I want to make an appeal to you, working in health.
I know that some of you are frustrated — not only with of pay and work conditions but also about the development you experience in many places. That there has been less time for what is most important — time with patients, care, and quality of treatment. I know your concerns and I share them.
How do we recruit more talented youth for care jobs in our community, so our future will hold people to take care of us when we grow old? Neither that issue nor the challenges of equal pay can be resolved as quickly as it’s sometimes demanded. But we are on it. And that’s why we ask for your patience. And I and we ask you to not only make an effort because you are already doing it fully — but an extra effort, again. Because Denmark needs you once more.
[Translation: Long overdue negotiations with nurses and health workers had brought strikes during the summer and the subject was/is still sore.
There’s an implied analogy that could have worked: If one small and under-appreciated group (like nurses) can go above and beyond, another can follow (like your specific kind of weird skepticism) — if only it hadn’t seemed in such poor taste after refusing demands from healthcare all summer.]
The infection must go down. Health services must be able to keep up. For this to happen, more people in Denmark must get vaccinated. More than 75% of the Danish population have already been vaccinated - almost 88% of those who can get the vaccine have accepted the offer, and approx. 400,000 Danes have now received the third shot. We have an impressively high level of support for the vaccines in Denmark compared with abroad. But it is not enough and we need to get more aboard. We need to get the last ones aboard now.
[Translation: Forceful rhetoric in the wrong place: “must go down”, “need to get vaccinated.” Broad social proof with 88% vaccine acceptance is a call to the wrong tribe. “We need to get the last ones aboard now” = journey metaphor ruined by the use of force.]
Because even though the vaccines work, the vaccines do not completely protect against infection. And right now infection is spreading, among other things, from those who have not been vaccinated to those who have been vaccinated — the elderly and people at risk.
Let me give you an example: Among 12 to 15-year-olds who have been vaccinated, there are currently 48 infected per. 100,000. But among the 12 to 15-year-olds who are not vaccinated, there are 763 infected per. 100,000. That's more than 15 times as many. The numbers speak for themselves. And that’s why the authorities have worked long and hard to get more people vaccinated and made it very easy here in Denmark. Vaccines are available. Appointments to be vaccinated are open, and it can not be said clearly enough: You who have not been vaccinated: Do it!
And you who have been vaccinated, who have now been offered a third shot, but who may not have booked an appointment yet: Do it!
[Translation: Good use of perspective, “15 times as many infected” = significant and easy to understand. Even if it gets lost in the rest of the numbers.
Poor reliance on authority and giving orders: “You who have not been vaccinated: Do it!” Oh, it’s that simple? Why didn’t we think of it sooner?!?]
As I mentioned, the Epidemic Commission has recommended that corona be re-categorized as a socially critical disease and that the corona passport be reintroduced in a large number of contexts, where people either sit close together or where a lot of people are gathered. The Minister of Health will elaborate on this in a moment.
I think it's easy to live with the Corona passport. I think it gives a sense of security for the individual — if, for example, you go to the cinema or to a concert — you know that the other guests are also vaccinated or tested negative.
And for business. At least in most places, it is easy to manage as well. And for all of us who have been vaccinated; yes, it's easy. There is no hassle. We've tried it before and it works.
For all of you who have not been vaccinated, it will of course be more difficult — and that's actually how I think it should be.
[Translation: The most polarizing bit yet.
Symbolic calls to the wrong tribe and pandering to the majority was a predictably poor decision.]
The political job right now is first and foremost to get the infection down. But in addition, it is our task to ensure that the very, very large majority of Danes who have been vaccinated, that you can get through this winter with as few obstacles and restrictions as possible. And that is why, of course, we in the government are also considering whether the corona passport should be used even more widely in our society.
[Translation: More tribal speak, fighting for the majority and the implied difficulties imposed on the unvaccinated.]
Next week we go to the polls in Denmark. We vote for both municipalities and regions. And, of course, it is absolutely crucial that everyone can cast their vote, and that it can be done anywhere in a safe and sound manner. Therefore, the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Housing are in close dialogue with both health authorities and municipalities to ensure that the election process can be completed everywhere. So the necessary hygiene is in place at all polling stations — hand sanitizer, cleaning, and allowing voters who do not wish to go inside to vote outside the polling station.
People are also welcome to bring a mask and their own writing tool if they are more comfortable doing so.
And finally, of course, there is the opportunity to vote by mail, and you can do so until Friday - that being November 12.
[Translation: Wrong kind of politics in the wrong context. Unpleasant reminders of the physical manifestations of the restrictions (masks, sanitizer) — only to tell us that even with the COVID Passport everything may not be that easy after all.]
Before I give the floor, I would again like to emphasize that we are not in the same situation as we were last autumn. We have an open society. Everything we propose now — introducing the corona passport and increasing the efforts to get more people vaccinated — is about us wanting a Denmark that stays open. And of course, a healthcare system that will not succumb to the pressure. Therefore it is incredibly positive that the number of first-time vaccinated is now increasing. Within the last week, approx. 12,000 have been vaccinated for the first time against approx. 9,000 the week before.
But I would still like to finally make a strong appeal to you who have not been vaccinated - get that vaccine! Do it for your own sake! Do it for the sake of your children! For the sake of your spouse! For the sake of your parents! For the sake of your grandparents! And get that vaccine to help the most vulnerable in our society.
[Translation: Good use of numbers to give the skeptics social proof from within.
Good appeal at the end — playing on the shared we-ness of family, micro-tribes, and the vulnerable. Localized social proof often works better than grand claims about national numbers.
A shame it was too little too late.
At this point in the PM’s tribalistic power fantasy “Everything we propose” only reads as “All we fight”.
And that’s how you lose 11% trust among the unvaccinated and make everyone else vote for a different party.]
