It’s obvious Donald Trump dominates the media conversation.
The useful inquiry for us is how did he do that and what can we learn from it?
The man who masterminded Trump’s strategy is Steve Bannon.
IN 2019, Bannon told ‘Frontline’ what he would do:
“The opposition party is the media.
And the media, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. All we have to do is flood the zone.
Every day we hit them with three things, they’ll bite on one, and meanwhile we’ll get all our stuff done: bang, bang, bang, those guys will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
So what does he mean by ‘muzzle velocity’?
It’s a term that applies to firearms and it’s defined like this:
“Muzzle velocity is the speed at which a projectile leaves the barrel of a gun.
It’s a key factor in determining the effectiveness of a weapon.
The greater the muzzle velocity of the projectile, the greater the power of the weapon”
So how does that apply to Trump’s campaign to dominate the media?
Ezra Klein of the New York Times explains it like this:
“Bannon’s ‘muzzle velocity’ insight here is real.
Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy, it is particularly the substance of opposition. People learn what the government is doing through the media, be it mainstream or social media.
If you overwhelm the media, if you give it too many places it needs to look all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next, no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to think coherently.
Donald Trump’s behaviour is following Bannon’s strategy like a script.
The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point.”
Michael Wolff, who’s written four books on Trump, says one of the campaign insiders explained it to him like this:
“Our only matrix is attention: good, bad, it doesn’t make any difference.
By dominating the media he dominates the agenda.”
So in our terms, muzzle velocity means the campaign should be designed to dominate the media with energy, however we do that.
Obviously we don’t have to use misinformation and outrage like Trump, we’re not that crass.
But remember he was the underdog in three elections and he won two of them simply by dominating the media, owning the conversation.
We have better, smarter, more civilised ways of doing that.
We have whole departments of planners, media, and creatives whose job it is to own the conversation for their clients.
Planners should be inventing new and exciting strategies, media should be finding new and exciting ways to propagate our message, creative should be doing new and exciting work that gets noticed and talked about.
But it has to all be about muzzle velocity: impact and energy.
As Bill Bernbach said:
“In this very real world, good doesn’t drive out evil. Evil doesn’t drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.”
If we aren’t doing that, if we’re frightened of doing that, then we end up doing the same lazy old thing as everyone else, the same tired route of not making waves.
And, like most advertising, our campaigns will just slide out of the end of the barrel and drop onto the floor with a quiet ‘plop’.
Zero muzzle velocity.