Episode 834: How to get a COVID head in advertising

Zain 0:02

This is The Strategist, episode 834. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, it is another Sunday. How are you doing?

Carter 0:11

I'm really good. I missed you guys on Thursday. I sat in my chair and just wept. I was so lonely. No Zain, no Corey.

Zain 0:20

used to be a pregame, your standard pregame.

Corey 0:24

You know, we've only been doing a Thursday podcast for like four months. Yeah,

Carter 0:29

but still, I mean, you know, it was nice. I ran through it in my head and made myself feel bad. So it worked out well for me.

Zain 0:37

Can we talk about the story of the week, which is on Friday, I

Zain 0:40

I got a 10 out of 10 from Room Raider for my Zoom background on national television. And I feel like this has been something I've been advocating for, for months now. Well, it got a little buried

Corey 0:52

buried by the other story of the week, which was Twitter deciding whether we were a centrist or a left-wing or a center-right podcast.

Zain 1:03

that's right. That was a much

Zain 1:04

Well, whatever we are, Corey, we have someone on the podcast with a 10 out of 10 Rune Raider score. So, I mean, I just wanted to – regardless

Zain 1:12

regardless of how hard left communist we are. yeah

Carter 1:18

yeah i mean if you have to ask though is it the same you know like oh my 10 out of 10 now like how many chances did that take for you to get there uh

Zain 1:26

uh it's persistent advocacy carter you don't just get

Zain 1:28

done in the first meeting with mad right you meet multiple times with mothers you know

Zain 1:35

know let me teach you how this works okay

Zain 1:37

okay you don't go in with the ask the first time you just continuous improvement cory no telling you guys any more

Carter 1:42

more stories because he's

Corey 1:43

he's a professional He knows

Corey 1:45

because he's a professional.

Zain 1:47

Also, guys, we sit here in mid-December, which, of course, tees up our Holiday Spectacular next week, as we've done for many years, our Holiday Spectacular episode. Now, this is the one episode where we ask you, the listeners, to submit segment ideas. You know, in the past, we've had several segment ideas that you've submitted. Most of them have been what we call pure dog shit. Some of them have actually been pretty good. As you remember, two years ago, we had Carter do a political quiz, a year-end political quiz against a low-end AI, and Carter, of course, lost. It was a high

Zain 2:27

It was a very low

Zain 2:29

AI. And I believe it was that same year that we had listeners suggest a segment where Corey Prank called the finance minister and offered to make a donation on behalf of the listeners on the podcast to help with Alberta's debt. And that was an awesome voicemail that Corey recorded.

Corey 2:45

let's not forget six years ago when a young upstart named Zane Velji recommended a segment title, which led to this gig that you've got today right now. This

Zain 2:54

This is true. Miracles

Corey 2:55

can happen at the holiday season.

Zain 2:57

That and an a**hole

Zain 2:59

have led me to this position.

Zain 3:12

So, Carter, over to you. You've also got some housekeeping before we keep going, so I'll throw it over to you. As

Carter 3:17

As always, I mean, what we need to do is we need to make sure that the biggest political plays are recognized in Alberta. And our good friend over at the Dave Berta podcast is asking what the biggest political play of 2020 is. And I'd like that biggest political play to be us winning the biggest political play of 2020 in Alberta. So everybody's going to be able to hit the tiny.cc slash Dave Burda link that has been created here. We're going to share that in our episode notes. You'll be able to go straight there. And of course, you will vote for question six. Question six alone. Don't worry about the other five. What is the biggest political play of 2020 in Alberta? And of course, we will be... What do you want

Corey 3:59

want them to answer?

Corey 4:02

No, no. The strategists winning biggest political play

Carter 4:04

play in Alberta. The strategists winning biggest political play. It's going to be pretty huge. which I suspect that we'll

Carter 4:10

we'll win it in the landslide.

Zain 4:12

So it's a bit meta. So a lot of our listeners are one-dimensional thinkers, kind of like one of our panelists here. So just to, Carter, I don't know why you made that face. I don't know

Carter 4:20

know why you talk about Corey like that. That's so cold.

Zain 4:25

So we are trying to solidify number six with an award from another podcast, which is very much on brand for what we do, and we need your help doing it. So submit your segment titles and segment suggestions for next week and also project the future with question number six. Corey, do you have any housekeeping before we move on? Well,

Corey 4:48

Well, I know it's really unusual for us to win awards when we're actually broadcasting new episodes of the podcast, but

Corey 4:54

but this would mean an awful lot. It would be a holiday miracle.

Zain 4:59

It would be. It would be. And with that, we're moving on to our first segment. Our first segment, Not Everyone Loves COVID Loves. Corey, we are starting in Alberta with a story about a campaign here that has gone national in many ways. And we start here with the Alberta government has tried to use humor with a new edgy campaign called COVID Loves. It has an eggnog slurping social distance violator named Mr. COVID Head as part of this $2 million campaign by the government of Alberta to try to influence behavior during the holiday season. I want to do two things in this segment. Number one, I want to talk about government communications campaigns. And Corey, we've got you here to kind of help us tease out what exactly happens. I also then want to get the political side of that. And then I want to talk more specifically about this campaign. So let's start more generally. And Corey, I want to start with you. This is a campaign that has been sponsored, paid for, sourced out by the government of Alberta. And it's one of several campaigns that the government, I imagine, runs on a yearly basis, tackling many different items. Take us through where these campaigns originate, how they kind of work on the inside, how they get sourced out, and what are you kind of looking for in terms of success? What does success look like when you set out one of these campaigns as a former head of communications for the province here?

Corey 6:21

Well, the first thing you got to keep in mind is that government communications is a vast operation. Government communications is a bit like an iceberg. You see all of this communication that touches on the political issues of the day above the waterline, but the majority of communications that happens in government is below the waterline. and the government of Alberta has a fairly sophisticated operation for dealing with those campaigns some of it is done in-house some of it is outsourced it depends on both capacity and the nature of the communications that's going on it's true of every government to a certain extent some have more in-house capacity than others um this this looks like it was outsourced to me just based on what I know of the government's communications apparatus but why I mentioned this is that these campaigns are constantly being generated and every now and then one of those ones that's below the waterline that's created outside of any kind of political

Corey 7:12

political conversation although i i seriously doubt that a campaign of this nature didn't go through you know some some political nods given the given the subject matter sometimes it becomes a conversation point alberta actually has probably more of a history of this than a lot of other provinces we we had a campaign about syphilis another public uh you know health campaign plenty of sif yeah

Corey 7:33

plenty of sif so this this campaign uh You know, parodied

Corey 7:37

parodied Plenty of Fish, which was a bigger dating site back in the day, and it talked about the risks of getting syphilis, and these ads were everywhere. Very similar creative ideas have gone on for things like – it got everything from gonorrhea to you name it. Alberta actually tends to have some pretty interesting, pretty edgy public service announcement communications here. Now, what's interesting about that is that is not government's strong foot, generally speaking. And I think that's part of why you have a conversation that's going on here. A lot of people want government communications to be very straight up, have no edge whatsoever. That's not always the best way to hit the audiences that you're trying to hit when you're a communicator. So there's a bit of a tension there that government communications is always trying to walk, particularly when you're trying to talk to the youths, you know, younger demographics. But listen,

Corey 8:28

listen, I can tell you that we used to run surveys fairly regularly of how did you want the

Corey 8:33

the government to sound? Like, what did you think the

Corey 8:35

appropriate voice of government was? And the answers were so insanely contradictory. You know, a certain portion of the population would say it's got to be familiar. You can't be overly formal or

Corey 8:45

or I'm just going to tune out. And then you have other groups of the population saying it's got to be formal. You can't be overly familiar or else I am going to tune out. It's a tough job. When you think about Wendy's,

Corey 8:55

Wendy's, you know, think about any organization with like a good social media presence. Like that's a brand with a personality, right? The thing about government is it's got to have the range to be talking about, you

Corey 9:08

know, a school shooting in the morning and silly names on like the registry of births later that afternoon, right? Every day there are so many different press releases, so many different tweets, everything that comes out, and to have one voice that encompasses that all, you inevitably have people who just don't like certain communications that comes out of it, regardless of what you do. They'll find it either too boring or too edgy every time, every time.

Zain 9:34

Carter, you know, you've held to a position that would complement Corey's, you know, not supervising government communications in the vast, almost internal agency that is communications within any provincial government, but on the political side of things. And tell me about some of your experiences having to deal with government comms on the public service level and how you've either, you know, ham-fisted the political agenda or kind of leaned back or listened. I'm kind of curious what, you know, we'll get into the specifics of what we think the political push on this particular campaign was. But tell me about some of your broader experience on how politics plays a role in some of this stuff.

Carter 10:11

Well, I mean, I think we can pick on this, your parks decision in Alberta. It's not something that, of course, I've overseen. It's something that is just being done right now. But I think it really is typical for how government wants to communicate. They have a series of facts that they wish to get out. They've created a website, site. They have asked for our interaction. So they have put together an engagement structure. The word engagement can never be spoken enough in government communications. It is, we must engage the population. That engagement is often a facade, but nonetheless, it is an important element. And then they try and create

Carter 10:50

create some sort of final communications, which is, this is what we're going to do um i

Carter 10:57

find that the parks want to be particularly challenging i mean just trying to complete the form requires you to to give a tremendous amount of information that i don't want to give to the government ironically because they have it all um but nonetheless the these these communications are traditionally boring they are traditionally challenged to deal with uh they present a lot of information on a web page that goes forever and you're the seemingly The seeming expectation is that you're going to read everything and that you're going to engage in a linear fashion of acquiring this information. And

Carter 11:31

And I just don't think that that's the way that audiences are set up to receive information. So that traditional methodology of communicating is pretty broken, but you'd still see it, I would suggest, four times out of five out of government communications.

Zain 11:48

Corey, give me an example of this tension between formal and familiar. You know, you've talked about this. You see the contradictions within the polling. How does that bear itself

Zain 12:00

itself out in the decision-making process? I'm sure you've had to kind of choose focal points and say, nope, you know, we want a more familiar tone or you know what, we want a more, you know, formal tone. And I'm sure this campaign probably had that same debate, you know, we can talk about it kind of, you know, tipping into that a bit more. You had people say, you know, this is not how government should communicate, right? Quite literally, the criticism you'd mentioned, especially in a time when so many people are dying, it's crazy that we've got this edgy, almost thirsty to be viral campaign that the government is producing. So give me some examples of some of those debates or conversations you've had, or that you've seen that kind of tried to, you know, negotiate between these two poles.

Corey 12:45

Yeah. So I can only tell you a few because the nature of the job is, you know, that advice and those conversations are confidential. So if a campaign didn't get through that filter, it didn't get through that filter.

Corey 12:57

I can broaden the point and tell you a

Corey 12:59

lot of campaigns don't get through the filter. I can think of quite a few that actually got fairly well developed and people got cold feet and said, no, we're just not going to do that. That's too edgy. That's too edgy for government. But backing

Corey 13:10

backing up a bit, when I talk about that poll, I was talking about a poll of audience expectations. Now, the audience's expectations are not the only input here, right? So even if we could very cleanly say this demographic wants us to communicate in this fashion, we also have to weigh that against our expertise as communicators. So there's communications best practice, and we know being clear and relevant matters. So we don't want to use a lot of $20 words. We don't want to sound too officious. We know that has a serious effect on remembering these things. And then, of course, there's the expectations of our bosses and the minister's office or the premier's office, depending on the actual campaign.

Corey 13:49

Or even, frankly, it might just be one of our clients that's a deputy minister somewhere who's looking at the ad. if it doesn't quite reach that level where somebody wants to be engaged.

Corey 13:58

That can all change things pretty dramatically. And I will

Corey 14:01

will tell you the campaigns that Stephen Carter is talking about, where it seems like a lot of text, you got to give a lot of information. There's nobody in CP, in communications and public engagement, that's the name of the department in Alberta, that doesn't know that that's not best practice. There's nobody that doesn't know that. But you get the, you know, despite that being called communications and public engagement, Public engagement is something that is broadly shared with a lot of different departments, and you're going to have a lot of people in departments say, no, I want to ask that question. No, I want to ask that question. Let's just layer in one more question. And you're going to similarly get helpful input on those lines from minister's offices and perhaps even the premier's office. Although in my experience, the premier's office is a lot more sophisticated on those things and much more willing to heed the advice of professional communicators.

Corey 14:44

and that all changes the the outcome and

Corey 14:47

and you're going to get different outputs as a result of that some ministers will be edgy or some ministers will be you've got to explain it all to death and you'll say minister that's not necessarily best communications practice and they'll say do it anyways and you'll say how about we ab test the short version of the long version they'll say no just do the long version and you end up with the long version but um you

Corey 15:06

you know i just really want to stress even when we know what we're supposed to do we don't always get to do it because it is ultimately a consultative advisory role, just as any public service role is. Carter,

Zain 15:17

Carter, I want to talk to you about this exact campaign in a second. But Corey, one more follow up for you. You know, knowing your experience, walk our listeners through perhaps how this campaign got through. Do you feel like it's a decision that was made at the public service level, ultimately, where a recommendation was made? Like just even maybe not even on this campaign, like how does this process work? Like, at some point, does the the public service as comms experts say we've decided on edgy we decided on familiar here's what we think here's our justification why who do they kind of sell and pitch that to i'm kind of curious or does an agency pitch the public the cp office just give me a sense of what that looks like because i'm curious myself well

Corey 15:56

well generally how it happens but not always there's a lot of ways these things can be created sometimes the communications department can say we see a need need so let's let's go pitch this to in alberta and it's not true in every province but in alberta the actual ad spend dollars live with the departments and cpe you

Corey 16:14

know organizes it on their behalf but you know there's maybe there is now but when i was there there was not a central advertising budget uh except for like big big campaigns uh but what normally happens is a client comes to us so let's just say in this example and i don't know this to be the case but i'll just just illustrate it out. The Minister of Health, or more likely the Ministry of Health, somebody in the department says, we

Corey 16:36

we see a need for a public service announcement on this. We'd like to build a campaign. Can you help us do that? Then CPE, the communications department, would reach out.

Corey 16:46

We'll probably do some initial scoping, work with them on creating a creative brief. What are you trying to do? What does your audience think now? What do you know? What do you not know? All of those things, filling gaps where you didn't have information. If it's particularly sensitive, it would be run up the flagpole to the premier's office just hey fyi you comfortable with this we're going to proceed on this matter and

Corey 17:06

and then uh depending on whether it was in-house or the capacity didn't exist slash it was too big you'd go to a vendor there's an uh you know an agency of record and it used to be there's a small stable of agencies i do believe because this was under works when i left uh they wanted to go down to just you know a couple of tighter partner relations but they would reach out to them and say give a quote what do you think you can do on this um So at that point, you're not likely to see creative. You're probably more likely to see basic

Corey 17:34

basic strategic approach considerations. And so it might be, we think you need to get edgy to get this demographic. And here's

Corey 17:41

here's some past work we've done, by the way, where, you know, say I'm Frank Calder, and I did plenty of SIF, right?

Corey 17:47

It's a name known to Albertans here.

Corey 17:50

maybe that's what goes into the portfolio and you say oh okay i get a general sense of what you're going to get uh

Corey 17:55

uh at that point that they would start working on creative and that's when i think generally speaking everybody wants to get you know their

Corey 18:01

their hands involved and there's no way a campaign like this went

Corey 18:05

went forward without a lot of it

Corey 18:08

it either had uh political people my bet is that the political people needed to be dragged into this a bit i don't actually

Corey 18:14

believe that the political people were like yeah let's go out and do something edgy but i suspect that the The communications professionals carry the day by explaining the benefits and why this would make sense. Spoiler alert, I'm actually a pretty big fan of the creative here. But then

Corey 18:31

there's a lot of back and forth. People revise it. They say, okay, I'm okay with this, but don't go further than that. There will be edits along the way. And ultimately, there's an end product that gets launched, and here we are.

Zain 18:43

Carter, let's talk about specifics. Corey has kind of tipped his hand as to where he's at. Do you agree with him? Do you like this campaign? And for those who aren't seeing it, it's covidloves.ca. There's two PSA video spots. There's a website which has some really, like, funny copy in terms of, you know, COVID kind of being personalized and humanized as this individual and what COVID likes. But, Carter, from your perspective on considerations of efficacy, communications, virality, message resonance with the audience, are

Zain 19:15

are you a fan?

Carter 19:17

fan uh really really big fan and i'm a big fan for a couple reasons he spoke about virality um this has gone massively viral people are talking about this the point of the exercise is to get people to understand and people will see this and it is super easy to understand you talked about the the text that was chosen it's easy it's it's it's clear um the way that it's laid out i love love um the whole covid loves piece is just really solid for me it is something that we can relate to even with kind of the the giant comic head uh which normally would kind of pull away from it um it's like the uncle that no one wants to sit around there's been a lot of pushing back on east timor um you know who from edmonton east timor i mean there's

Carter 20:04

there's nothing to pick on there the point one of the exercises, this is a worldwide international thing.

Carter 20:12

it is. And so I don't see this as a negative campaign at all. I can't get over people who are really upset about it. I mean, humor, if this is humorous, and I think it is humorous, humor works. Humor is memorable. Humor is viral. Humor is what we share. We don't share statistics. Yeah, I mean, sure, we can go on today and we can see the the data numbers that we're all sharing on twitter but that's just us on twitter it's just us little twitter our little twitter world will share that but this thing went mega

Carter 20:43

mega viral and that was the point cory

Zain 20:46

cory give me your take i

Zain 20:48

i think i got a bit of it but give me substantiate it a bit more and maybe take me to the next step what is a liability in a campaign like this if there is any right it clearly has chosen a direction it's clearly really chosen a tone and a set of creative tell me why you like it just like carter did but but also tell me what you know if you were sitting in that room being like hey here's some of the risks with a campaign like this what's some of the things you'd bring up when

Corey 21:12

campaigns go through the editing process they usually get less edgy i'd be really curious to see what the first draft of this was because you think you think it would have been well i

Zain 21:21

i don't know but i think uh

Corey 21:22

uh i think that's a real possibility there's

Corey 21:24

there's a bunch of things that carter said and that you know there's The questions you asked, which I may or may not answer. I haven't decided yet. But the –

Zain 21:33

nature of this show is I don't write anything down, so I have no idea what

Corey 21:37

asked you. Zane's shrug was priceless there to our audience. It

Corey 21:41

I give no fucks. I couldn't care less if you answered my question. Yeah,

Zain 21:44

this is not for me.

Zain 21:47

why I did this.

Corey 21:50

So there's a couple things. I really, really like the creative. The small details are so great and so gross, like the way he dips in in the one where he's at a party with two handfuls in eggnog, right? And

Corey 22:03

he pulls it up and he's got these two mugs and he looks at them for a moment there and his hands kind of have it running down. And as much as that's kind of like a sight gag, it's also a really good reminder of the actual risk there. Like, you really going to share a drink with people when there's a pandemic going on? Like, that's effing

Corey 22:18

effing gross. Like, stay away from that. that like so some of the things that they do actually do a pretty good job of reminding you like hey somebody with this disease is going to give it to you in a bunch of weird ways the one where he's dancing uh you know you can almost see the sweat flying off him as he's in the middle of those scenes there it's just it's it does a great job of making you actually not want to be near

Corey 22:40

anybody in my opinion like you see it and you're like oh god the

Corey 22:44

the dude the the character in general who you gave a name to it doesn't actually have a name that's just because it was so memeable the internet immediately gave it a name but totally totally yeah has a has a bit of a beetlejuice vibe like it's

Corey 22:56

like quite a character and

Corey 22:58

and uh really i can imagine people rushing to see this if they're not from alberta and haven't seen it here but and

Corey 23:04

and you should it's very interesting um but where i suspect um people

Corey 23:10

people got upset about it mostly mostly like let's just talk about the the unsubstantiated upset first and let's talk about where their substantive challenges might be

Corey 23:20

like if you don't like a person the way they hold their fork will irritate you and there's a lot of people who do not like this government and a lot of people who do not like this government's response to covid in particular and they're in kind of do no right mode with some people so even when there's a piece of creative that actually comes out that's that's not bad the first reaction might be screw these guys what a bunch of assholes right and i don't think that's fair and i think think a you

Corey 23:43

you know i'm not i'm not saying that's everybody but i think there are some people who are there and those people should take a more mature reading of the situation where

Corey 23:50

where there are legitimate uh you

Corey 23:53

you know suggestions that perhaps it's deficient and this is where i think some criticism is is that the content does a good job of talking about the problem but not necessarily the solutions you know it's very light on the solutions and i feel like in the editing process

Corey 24:07

i suspect they made some decisions to stay away from anything that was a bit third rail political critical, at

Corey 24:12

least in any kind of real fashion. So even some of the language they choose is not real precise. It's like, follow the guidelines, doesn't say what guidelines. And I think that's a legitimate criticism. Although I do think it still elevates, you know, I saw people saying, well, it's talking about the problem, but everybody knows COVID is a problem. So is it actually any good? I think it actually does a pretty good job of talking about the problems inherent in social gatherings through that creative that I talked about there. But to sort of answer your question, and Zane as to what are some of the challenges there. It's like, if you put this out, it will be under a magnifying glass. You know, the edgier you are, the bigger you are, the bolder you are, the more you're going to invite criticism, even if it's awesome, just more eyeballs are going to mean more feedback. And sometimes government doesn't want more feedback.

Zain 24:56

Carter, do you feel like this campaign was designed to go viral? I feel like that you've effectively acknowledged that. But from your perspective, any risks or liabilities with something right here. And I'm not getting it a second guess. What I also feel like putting my cards on the table is a very well done campaign, both from a creative perspective and knowing how hard it is to get something like this to stand on its feet, the work that was required here and the sense of imagination. So I don't want you to second guess the creative professionals who put this together. But from like the strategy here, is there a risk that you feel like either on on efficacy or it might working or backlash or anything else that you feel like um could be warranted or could be necessary to put out on the table well

Carter 25:40

well the timing the campaign's wrong i

Carter 25:42

i mean sure it makes sense in the in the overall scheme of the uh of the holidays coming up in this new set of uh of criteria the the new set of lockdown rules here in alberta we're not allowed to call them lockdown uh but it makes sense there but this feels to me like it should have been a campaign that was ready to go in october um it could even have made a lot of sense at halloween um but this is a campaign that that maybe got dragged out too late uh would be one of my big critiques of it i mean um the point that people know what you know what the uh the covid problem is um yeah i guess so but it's because it's late this is just the first official communications that is designed to try and reach us as a general public, not from behind a podium. And the timing would be the strategic question that I have.

Carter 26:35

Why is it coming so late in the game? And I do think, you know, is this something that was designed for October that someone just sat on because they didn't want to bring it forward yet? And

Carter 26:47

the new set of criteria was coming out, they said, let's dust this off and see if it has any play

Carter 26:52

play here. And just before the holidays, they

Carter 26:54

they rewrote it. I

Carter 26:55

I could see that being a viable process

Carter 26:59

process that they went through, but I just think that the biggest weakness of this campaign is it's just too late. Otherwise, the campaign is functioning as it should be.

Zain 27:09

Corey, I want to do two more questions before we close this segment out, and I want to do one pretty rapid fire for both you and Carter. We've seen this campaign. We've seen the website. We've seen the initial two videos. Let's do a bit of free advice time, right? What would you do next? What would your next phase of this be? What would you kind of suggest the next – either the next messaging beat or the next piece of creative or elevation? Now seeing how it's gone, what would you kind of throw out there? And I'm sorry for putting you on the spot, but I'm just really curious if you've got any suggestions or ideas. And Carter, over to you after that.

Corey 27:41

So fair enough, Zane. I think I really – I'll give you an answer that I think is both pragmatic and – well, let's just say it's pragmatic but also probably good advice. um videos are really tough to edit once they're done so let's let's say and i love the videos i think the videos are by far the strongest part a friend of mine who i really have very high regard for in this in this space said yeah you love the creative you don't love the campaign and i i think i don't hate the campaign but i get what he's saying the creative is really strong the creative is really bold but there's not kind of this wraparound right uh certainly when you land on the website while it's very funny i

Corey 28:19

don't think it's pithy i think it's actually too short there's not enough detail on the website and this is an opportunity like web is easy to change you're not going to change your videos there's probably other videos in the pipe but you're not going to change your videos realistically at this point um you might make new videos but you can play with web so i suspect the best advice i can give them is to fix up the landing page and to fix some of the wraparound content the social media tweets things that you can rapidly modify and um in particular i think you can bring more information into the web as to what you should be doing making it a little more substantive once you land um because that does seem to be

Corey 28:58

to the point of this friend of mine who i would give credit to but i don't want to out him if he doesn't want people to say he was critical of the campaign is um maybe

Corey 29:06

maybe it's not a complete campaign Yet, maybe it's the start of a great campaign. And there needs to be a little bit more on, you know, downstream. So so retargeting advertising, perhaps is already part of it. But if not, they should consider that they should absolutely consider bulking up the web content and making it more explicit as to what you are supposed to do, and being much more clear on that. Carter,

Zain 29:27

Carter, what would your thinking be around next steps, either tactics, message, or even broader strategy?

Carter 29:33

Fully develop the voice would be what I would suggest. And the voice has been articulated a little bit, but I think that we could develop the voice a lot more. And the example I'll give to this is Banff Squirrel. That used to be the voice for Banff tourism, Banff Lake Louise tourism. And it took a while. You remember the squirrel ran in front of a camera and was caught in this picture. And they developed that voice as one of their primary voices for tourism in Banff Lake Louise. It took time. But the voice that we're seeing in the website is just but one opportunity. Developing the Facebook profile, developing a Twitter profile that enabled them to share, Snapchat, Instagram.

Carter 30:19

Instagram. There could be all kinds of examples. i mean i really like the idea of a of a snapchat campaign where this guy's showing up in other people's feeds like it's a filter right that you could apply to someone else's stuff um so like there there's a lot of different opportunities like you see someone's photograph on instagram if i can drop this guy in it and repost it like have some fun right tiktok i like that

Carter 30:44

yeah like there's a there's a number of

Zain 30:45

of him start his own tiktok again i like that too there's

Carter 30:47

there's a right and And it's going to live a lot differently than those heavily produced videos that are not going to have much shelf life. But I think this voice needs to be with us right through. And I'd love to see what he looks like after vaccination, right?

Carter 31:03

right? It's like there's an arc here of a voice and a character that you could actually develop.

Zain 31:10

It's an interesting story. Add to the story. Add more characters. Do more with the characters. Guys, I have to move on, but I have to end with this. Corey, we have to talk about evaluation. and measuring success on something like this. You brought up the other campaign that has found a moment of virality, I believe, even close to a decade ago in Alberta, which was the Plenty of Cif campaign, right? And that one, as we learned from the results of the campaign, had tremendous sort of efficacy, and it seemed to quote unquote work during the eight weeks of the campaign. But as soon as the ad spend ran dry, we kind of had a period where syphilis rates went back up, that the calls to get more information went down so how are you kind of judging success for something like this knowing that yes it's got a budget yes that budget seems healthy but when the ad span runs out is the campaign dead like what are you kind of looking at in terms of sustainability here well

Corey 32:01

well for a campaign of this size i suspect that the the measurement will be well i hope the measurement will be relatively sophisticated they'll be looking at uh doing public opinion research seeing what recall on these advertisements are amongst key demographics maybe even they'll do some after the fact focus groups try to understand whether it did change opinions dig into it a bit ideally you do the focus groups first because that can help inform your what we call quantitative research when you do a bit of polling afterwards so if somebody in the focus group says something interesting you pull on it but you know stepping back the

Corey 32:31

the broader measurement has to be on actually changing behaviors i think that one of the ways that campaigns like this often go awry is they start measuring the wrong thing. And what are, you

Corey 32:43

you know, key performance indicators, things that tell them they're probably on track towards changing behaviors become the final measurements. So you start saying things like, look how many retweets it's got. That's not actually telling you if you're changing amongst your target demographic opinions in the way that you want to have it done. So that's, that's the important thing for a campaign like this. And the other thing is, it takes an awful lot of rigor to set some metrics and objectives ahead of time. And And they should have certainly have polled on this, and I suspect they have because of the nature of the issue, COVID, in advance to see what the yardstick was then and see how much they've moved that yardstick over the course of the campaign. There'll always be a lot of confounding variables. There'll be many things going on, but you ultimately have

Corey 33:23

have a number of ways that you can effectively disaggregate. And actually, like all three of us have done this work before in

Corey 33:30

in the past, but you

Corey 33:32

can ask somebody their opinions. You can ask if they've seen this creative before.

Corey 33:37

If they say no, you can sort of measure in real time whether it's changing. If you say yes, you can see whether those opinions were different than

Corey 33:43

than the control group that never saw it. It's more difficult the bigger the campaign, of course, but tons of ways to measure this. The important thing is you measure what matters, though, and not what I would call vanity metrics along the way, like likes and retweets and, you know, even reach. All right. How many eyeballs have seen this? That tells you they saw the ad. That doesn't tell you if the ad worked.

Zain 34:04

Carter, anything to add to what Corey's

Carter 34:06

No, but I want to know what you think.

Carter 34:08

I mean, you do this too. What do you think?

Zain 34:11

Oh, I agree. It has to be around behavior change. My biggest concern is some of the instruments to measure behavior change are not perfect, right? So when you look at ad recall and those sort of things, it's really hard to kind of be like, okay, is this a good enough proxy for having someone say, or having us as experts and analysts assume that behavior change has happened? You know, my big push, and I'm a broken record on this, is you make these campaigns sustainable by finding a small group of people who want to keep pushing them out beyond the ad spend, right? So, you know, we've talked about it last week on the vaccinations, which is the same philosophy here, right? Whether it's this particular campaign or this particular issue of how big the problem is, finding groups of folks that want to fan that out and ensure that they've got the toolkit to be able to do that. what's the equivalent for this campaign to carter's vaccination selfie and portfolio that you get right like what is the group of people that might be able to kind of fan this out so that's just top of my head thinking carter anything to add to either what i said or cory said did

Carter 35:10

did you like the campaign did

Carter 35:12

did you know cory and i have said both on side saying we liked it did you oh no i

Zain 35:16

i did i did i added my thoughts and i totally did it's gonna win a bunch of awards i think it's gonna it's it's already kind of penetrated beyond the alberta and canada walls right there's parodies That stuff is happening. The stuff you want is happening, right? Like people are adding characters in. There's like a Mrs. COVID head someone's developed now. Right, this is perfect. This is exactly what you want in terms of the story. It will win awards. It will win whatever the Anvil awards are and all those things that ad agencies deserve and hardworking people deserve. Will it do what we need in a province that is, to Carter's point, way behind and way late on some of our behavioral metrics, which is at the heart of what really matters at the end of the day to be determined, right?

Corey 35:57

Okay. Yeah, go ahead, Corey. Finish off. It's total nightmare fuel. And I think it's pretty good. And it actually is not jurisdiction dependent. So maybe the government of Alberta can even, you know, sell it at a small, small fee to other jurisdictions. National

Zain 36:11

National Film Board, let's make a full either 90 minute mockumentary about this person or this Mr. COVID head or an entire web series. I'm going to move it on to our next segment, the resistance to the resistance. Guys, we're going from Alberta, we're going to the federal side of things where this week, Ottawa is to hike the carbon tax to $170 a ton by 2030 in a surprise announcement made by the Trudeau government. government. Simultaneously, they're promising an additional $15 billion in new spending on climate initiatives over the next 10 years, money earmarked for improvement to the country's electrical vehicle infrastructure, rebates and tax write-offs to zero-emission vehicles, home retrofits—we've seen this story before, somewhat here in Alberta a bit—as well as other proposed policies, including even helping the oil and gas economy. Guys, let's start with the very top line. And Carter, I want to start with you. What do you make of this announcement that was was put on the table by Trudeau. Some may call it a surprise announcement. How dare he do anything that is not COVID-related during the pandemic? A, what did you make of the timing? And B, what did you make of the message? The lead for Trudeau, at least the lead he wanted, was it's time to put money back in Canadians' pockets when they need it the most. Was that a good enough sell for something that many are going to argue is ultimately a tax that's aggressively, you know, positioning to a lot of wealthier individuals? I

Carter 37:32

think it was a good sell. I

Carter 37:34

I think that he sold it to the people who want to hear it. I

Carter 37:37

I think the difficulty from being in Alberta is that most

Carter 37:39

most Albertans just don't want to hear it.

Carter 37:41

We don't want to hear this particular message. And as a result, the media coverage, the coverage that happens is along the lines of how dare he increase or introduce this tax. People don't want this tax. And I think that I

Carter 37:55

just don't think that that's borne out by the evidence. I think that there's lots of people who want this tax. They want to see an environmental action that's going to have impact. And there was two, I think there were two giant headlines that popped out of all of this messaging. One is $170 a ton, and the other is we will exceed our commitments by 2030. And I think that the primary audience that

Carter 38:23

Kenny is speaking to is the 170-ton audience, and the primary audience that Trudeau is speaking to is we're going to exceed our climate targets by 2030. And I think that that's a much bigger group. I'm sure that Justin Trudeau checked with his Alberta caucus before he brought this in, finding no one there. He just fucking did it. So, you know, that's, I think that this is exactly what he should be doing to show leadership. And I don't mind it in the time of COVID.

Zain 38:52

Corey, it seems pretty clear that this is a march to the left or a continued march to the left. It seems pretty clear that it's a continued march for, you know, carving out some form of legacy. I'm curious to get your thoughts, both on the policy doubling down on carbon taxation, as well as the timing and message of this announcement by the Trudeau government.

Corey 39:12

Well, you call it a march to the left. I mean, is it, though? I said

Zain 39:15

said this on purpose because I knew the tweet there that you put out there. Go ahead. Well,

Corey 39:20

listen, I find it very curious that somehow over time, the market mechanism to solve climate change became the left-wing solution. And right-wing governments like Doug Ford's and it looks like Aaron O'Toole even musing about different things have become the let's figure this with regulations. that that to me is baffling and that's a weird flip um here's the thing about carbon taxes we didn't really talk about it i suspect most of our audience knows this but let's just put it out there paying

Corey 39:46

paying the tax and then getting it back in a rebate is

Corey 39:49

is works helps people make climate friendly decisions because uh you pay the tax you get the money back but there's still a price mechanism there you you get more money in your jeans if you make decisions that reduce your carbon output, right? So all of a sudden, you know, let's say you've got $800 in carbon tax to pay. I give you $800. You

Corey 40:10

You still save $400 if you cut your carbon output in half, right? You can actually end up with more money than you had previously in this situation. So it's a really strong incentive to action. And I get that. And there's an elegance to it. But it's also a little bit Byzantine.

Corey 40:26

I just frankly is because we're giving you money and we're taking it away. And from a policy point of view from a politics point of view i should say right it's it doesn't necessarily intuit for a lot of audiences like what why does this work what how am i just even still if i'm even how does it work at all it

Corey 40:47

it works for the reasons i just said but it can be quite confusing to people the other thing is the current delivery mechanism for this benefit which is is significant and going to be huge by the time it hits $170 a ton is

Corey 41:02

is the federal tax system. Now, we're doing some good stuff. We're moving towards automatic filing. But the reality right now is 14% of Canadians do not file in an orderly fashion. They don't. 14% have not filed in the last year. There's a percent beyond that who have not filed for multiple years. And it over-represents certain certain demographics. I was talking to a friend of mine and she said, yeah, every woman files their taxes, probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it's men who don't file the taxes because women are more likely to receive some of the child benefits and all of that.

Corey 41:35

And men are just idiots in general, I think is kind of the other part of that. But it does mean there are certain groups that will just never see this because they're not properly filing. They owe child support, so they don't want to file. They got

Corey 41:50

got behind on their taxes one year, so they don't want to file. And, you know, not a very sympathetic group.

Corey 41:56

I'm talking about the world of politics here. If they're never going to see that money, to them, it's just a massive tax hit. So there are some challenges with the introduction of a policy like this.

Zain 42:04

Would you propose an alternative? Would you propose

Corey 42:06

propose a politically sellable alternative? Well, I don't have the access to the government of Canada's polling. I know as an Albertan that that this

Corey 42:14

this will not be popular in alberta 170 carbon tax will not be popular in alberta that doesn't mean it's the wrong thing you

Corey 42:21

know personally i'd pay 340 carbon tax but i know i'm very much in the minority on that front uh

Corey 42:26

uh i i think that um when you are talking about the existential challenge it presents to alberta's largest industry there's

Corey 42:34

there's a reason why albertans get anxious about that they're getting anxious about their own economic future and and i get that and i think that the government of canada gets that which is why there were there's some incentives for oil and gas in there as well but that's a big number and if the if the goal of this policy is to reduce carbon that's reducing reliance on fossil fuels which means sun setting the industry that alberta has relied on for a very long time and hey maybe it's time to move on but that does not necessarily sell well uh and for obvious reasons here so um

Corey 43:06

um there are options i guess there are other ways that you can look at this the obvious one is what the right-wing parties in canada are looking at you

Corey 43:14

you know regulation uh the idea that you just say okay we're going to have this increasing

Corey 43:19

increasing fuel efficiency requirement or increasing energy efficiency of buildings not going to be necessarily as efficient from a pure economic point of view not necessarily going to be as efficient from a carbon reduction point of view but

Corey 43:32

maybe there are other ways the one that i pitched on twitter that i think you're trying to tease out of me is maybe

Corey 43:37

maybe we just introduce a wealth tax we tax the hell out of uh you know uh the one percent and And we say, we're going to use this money as pure incentive. You buy an electric car, you're going to get $3,000 back. You're going to upgrade your home, you're going to get $2,000 back. And we go

Corey 43:54

go pure carrot and we get rid of the stick. That's an option. It won't be as efficient. You're going to miss a lot of the capture you get with a carbon tax. But it might actually be politically

Corey 44:03

politically sellable in a way that a carbon tax at $170 is not. and i guess

Corey 44:08

guess the risk is if

Corey 44:10

if the carbon tax becomes 170 carbon tax it might be too poison i don't know like i'm assuming and i'm hoping that the government of canada has some good polling on that but that's

Corey 44:19

that's that's a different game than a 30 carbon which

Zain 44:23

which is which is what it is right now you know carter cory said it's a big number it's also a big gamble for trudeau politically with that being said is this a big gift for aaron o'toole i

Carter 44:34

i don't think it is a big gift for aaron O'Toole. I think that it's a big gift for Aaron O'Toole in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I don't think it's the same in the lower mainland of British Columbia, where, let's be honest, they've already been paying a significant carbon tax. And they're looking at this being bigger, but they're also looking at moving outside of the traditional oil and gas market much quicker. You know, the hybrid market's much bigger out there. The electric vehicle market's bigger. And I think that, realistically, this is moving faster than we think it is. Realistically, by the time this thing hits $170 per ton,

Carter 45:08

ton, we're going to be seeing the way that we consume carbon is going to be dramatically different. So I would expect to see that by the time 2030

Carter 45:17

2030 rolls around, well

Carter 45:19

well over half of the cars sold in Canada and even in Alberta will be electric in

Carter 45:25

in some fashion, either a hybrid or a straight up electric vehicle. And in fact, I could be very wrong on that. and be, if I am wrong, I suspect I will be low. But I'm also old enough to remember

Carter 45:38

when Canada's right-wing parties were just basically saying that they were all for a carbon tax as long as it was revenue neutral. And that's what this is, right? So, you know, and that wasn't that long ago. That was just before Rachel Notley brought in her own carbon tax that didn't have a revenue neutrality to it. The revenue neutral element of this, the wealth redistribution model, model um it's a very interesting thing to buy people off with their own money and in some fashion it's not their own money right that which is coming from them you know paying on on their carbon uh consumption is their money but they're also getting all the industry uh all the industry money and that's where the real money is going to come in uh transportation uh production of oil and gas uh those are going to be significant drivers in this and that will um people

Carter 46:28

people will be getting back more than they perceive that they spend. So I think that that will be a significant step forward for the government. People, when

Carter 46:37

when they start getting quarterly checks, they're going to remember that they got a quarterly check, especially, I think Trevor Toom said it would be about $3,000 for the average household. $3,000 is real money.

Carter 46:48

So I'm intrigued to see how people respond to that if they start taking advantage of it, or if they start to see it as a real bonus.

Zain 46:56

Corey, what's the O'Toole strategy here? Are you embracing this as a principled conservative? Can you? Are you trying to fight it as nothing more than a tax grab? Knowing that you have to win the same swing regions that the liberals are going to compete for in an election as soon as this spring, what is your strategy and what is your play on something like this? Especially considering O'Toole, you know, as part of his true blue conservatism, whatever that means, hasn't necessarily rejected, you know, carbon pricing or any sort of regulations on carbon as being part of his plan. What are you doing if you're him?

Corey 47:29

Okay, well, let's unpack this a tiny bit here. I'll start by saying I think that O'Toole has been given an enormous opening by the liberals on this front to actually rectify a pretty big problem that the conservatives have right now. And that is an absolute lack of a climate plan.

Corey 47:44

that's that's just uh disqualifying for a growing segment of the canadian population and

Corey 47:50

and and it will grow further still we see that from demographics and we see that from the opinions that are held by younger canadians who are aging into politics and political engagement

Corey 48:00

there's an interesting question though and

Corey 48:02

and the question is this is the benefit

Corey 48:04

benefit of the rebates perceived as larger than the hit of of the tax and i'm not actually sure that i i believe it is at this point. I think that's an open question to me, but it's an important question because if people perceive the rebates as being bigger than the price, that means the higher this tax goes, the bigger your rebate gets. Actually, the more politically advantageous it is for Trudeau. Now, there may be a breaking point on that, but it effectively says, well, your checks are going to get bigger and bigger the larger we make this carbon tax, so why not go through the ceiling? You do it in an incremental sense so you don't feel like all of a sudden you go to the gas station and it's $2.50 a litre. I know that's not anywhere near what we're talking about here. We're talking about about 40 cents a litre. But the idea is you could take an incrementalism up and as long as those rebates keep going, my God, by the end, you've basically got a UBI. Life is so good. Why not do it, right?

Corey 48:56

Maybe that's taking the argument to the point of absurdity. But I think it's an important question. Do people perceive the rebates as being larger than the price impact?

Corey 49:04

If they do not, and I actually would

Corey 49:06

would fall onto gut feeling

Corey 49:08

feeling that they do not. if they do not what

Corey 49:12

what you have done is you've essentially reset a game that the conservatives lost in

Corey 49:19

the the 30 the 50 carbon tax that

Corey 49:22

that was something canadians looked at said yeah okay right

Corey 49:25

right but aaron o'toole now can say okay whoa 50 was one thing but this is getting nuts and now we are just hurting ordinary canadians trying to live ordinary lives it actually plays very nicely into his pro-union approaches his southwest ontario approaches he says there is a better way to do this and that's when um he introduces his strategy and his strategy can actually be the equivalent of 50 a ton which would have been considered uh

Corey 49:53

to conservatives a short year ago but he's then able to do that uh and and just sort of fill into where trudeau had been just a week ago, and patch a hole in the conservative playbook.

Zain 50:10

Carter, I'm going to ask the same question, perhaps in a different way. Where is Trudeau vulnerable on this? Whether it's to O'Toole, whether it's to the NDP, whether it's to wherever the current zeitgeist leads us, what are the biggest vulnerabilities from what you see as going from the number we're at right now, to go into 170, to having the $15 billion fund Where in this entire policy or the politics of it do you feel like the biggest pain point perhaps exists for the prime minister?

Carter 50:38

People don't have any tolerance for a slow rollout.

Carter 50:41

They're going to say this is $170 a ton tomorrow, right? They have no capacity to project, well, it's $30 now and it's going to go to $50 and then to $70 and then to $90 and then to $110. That won't happen in their minds. What will happen is they will say this is $170 a ton. this is huge and then the first checks are going to come and they're not going to be very big so

Carter 51:02

so when the checks come and they're small and you're paying 170 a ton people

Carter 51:07

people will uh misassociate um these the input and the output and which is what we always do we always a great point

Corey 51:15

steven that's a really great point so

Carter 51:16

so if you if you know i would have done it like i'm not sure you needed to announce the whole plan you

Carter 51:21

you know maybe just announce a couple steps of this plan plan and then wind up with the whole plan at the back end.

Zain 51:28

So you would have announced, let's say, let's just make an arbitrary number, 80 bucks, 90 bucks, or 100 bucks, even. That's what you would have done. You would have kind of let the money flow into people's pockets already. And then you would have said, fuck it, we're here. To Corey's point, let's just go through the ceiling now that we're already here. Is that what I'm sensing? Or am I putting words in your mouth?

Carter 51:48

No, I think that here, how about if we did it this way? How about if we said that we will exceed our Paris climate commitments by 2030, and the way we're going to do it is we're going to put in an $80 per ton carbon price, which is going to go back to all Canadians. And if we don't get there at $80, if that's not enough disincentive, then we'll reevaluate.

Zain 52:10

Already knowing you're going to reevaluate. Already

Zain 52:11

Already knowing it has

Carter 52:12

has to go to $170. Finish

Zain 52:13

Finish us off on this. The question was around Trudeau's biggest pain points or perceived vulnerability on this. Either on that or to responding what Carter said here. Well,

Corey 52:23

Well, I'll build on what he said and disagree with a portion of what he said. There is no great way to roll this out, right?

Corey 52:29

right? If you put the rebates out first and then they get their checks, that's great. But then they're going to feel that pain relative to their lifestyle with the checks. So you've got to sort of consider that. If you don't announce where you're going, you are robbing the market of a really important signal. that market signal that canada is going to 170 a ton that in itself will change behavior in a way that just going to 70 and then 80 and then 90 like people are going to make investments assets will be stranded as a result of some of these decisions the

Corey 52:58

the market needs as much certainty on this as possible because it's actually much worse to the economy i suspect i

Corey 53:03

i i'll just plant a flag in the ground and say i think it would be a problem if every year or two the government is just increasing seen the carbon tax and nobody can figure out how, when, or why.

Corey 53:13

That's not ideal. People need to make decisions on some long-term assets here.

Corey 53:19

But yeah, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't on this one. The rollout will be messy. The end state is actually pretty easy to imagine, but the rollout will be very messy.

Zain 53:30

We'll leave that segment there and move it on to our next segment, the battle for 51. I want to talk about Georgia and what's happening there. And I want to to talk about some of the politics that are in play. There's two basic threads. Well, there's three because of, you know, if we're covering the US bucket in one because of the insanity that's happening in DC right now. Let's hold that off till the end of this segment. Let's start with two things. I want to start with the politics in Georgia right now. And Stephen, I want to go to you because I know you've got the Stephen Carter tried, tested and true political handbook for the holidays. And this is what I find to be interesting from a political strategy perspective. So to fill Fill our listeners in, you know, Stephen, in your 2010 campaign for Mayor Nenshi here, that come from behind victory, you had that guidebook for what people need to do during the holidays when they gather, how they talk about a campaign, not dissimilar to how one may talk about a vaccine or the COVID problem, right? Making the most engaged, super engaged about a particular issue. Knowing that the holidays are going to look very different in Georgia right now, I'm asking you to give almost be like a drone style analysis of where the terrain is and what you would recommend to the two Georgia candidates in terms of their strategy for the holidays? What are you looking to do? What are you not looking to do knowing the new limitations that you have? And I'm asking you to do this top of your head. So I appreciate that. But lay it on me. What do you think? Well,

Carter 54:47

Well, I think that the holidays are a big time because we are influenced by those people around us, right? And to the point where over the last few holidays, people have been issued talking points for how to deal with their difficult uncle or, you know, the Trump loving uncle that comes to Thanksgiving dinner, how do you deal with him? How do you manage his opinions versus your facts, right? And the way we ran in the Nenshi campaign, we had people talking about the Nenshi. We put one of our big issues in front of people just before Thanksgiving so that everybody would be talking about our

Carter 55:23

our question or our issue on our terms. I think that that's where we need to go uh with the the this particular campaign in georgia you've got to figure out what your big issue is and if your big issue is the supreme court if your big issue is the checks that haven't gone out to uh the general population um if

Carter 55:44

if your big issue is the economy if your big issue is covid whatever it is whatever your polling is telling you that is the thing that you are announcing uh somewhere around the 20th of december which is the kind of counterintuitive to what we would normally do in government where we would put the thing that we wish to go to die we would do in the 20th of like i'm expecting steve allen's report uh sometime in the last week before christmas or between christmas and new year's uh because it's due i think in the first week or two of january and it will be buried it will be buried over the christmas season no one will pay attention at

Carter 56:19

at an election people do pay attention and that paying of attention is a different

Carter 56:25

different structure. So I would think that we'd bang on it pretty hard.

Zain 56:30

Corey, from your perspective, you know, the holidays have been this time to gather. People are not going to gather, presumably, this year. What could, you know, what could the political strategy be for these candidates who probably relied on these gathering occasions to really crystallize and perhaps have a change in trajectory on their campaign? So any advice to them top line georgia

Corey 56:52

georgia has both the fortune and misfortune of having discussed this election for a very very long time at this point so i'm not entirely convinced that december 25th was going to be this pivot moment that it otherwise might be who knows um it's such charged time like the thing about and i'm a big believer in the stephen carter theory of people get together and opinions get formed um but that said it

Corey 57:16

it is such charged times do we really think that those conversations aren't happening in a dozen different ways right now. I think that at least dents that effect somewhat. So I'm less concerned about that. It's an interesting campaign in general, because it is both so national and so local, like it's made local, national and national local, in that all eyes are on Georgia, and all political decisions being made by the Democrats right now, and the Republicans to some extent are being adjusted to meet the local flavor of Georgia, you because why talk about anything else at this moment and meanwhile um you

Corey 57:52

you know all of a sudden we know georgia's

Corey 57:55

georgia's secretary of state and governor and the candidates of course and there are all of these personalities that have made it to the national stage as a result of this so i i you know i'm not sure like in some ways i guess what i'm saying zane is this

Corey 58:09

this has taken on the flavor of a national campaign and a lot of the tactics that a national campaign would use i i think are what we're seeing here both from a fundraising and an output point of view like the amount of money in georgia right now is insane

Corey 58:21

insane it is absolutely insane and

Corey 58:29

wouldn't have been optimal if we were in a non-covid time but they're just going to run this like it's for president of the united states times too you

Zain 58:35

you know this is very interesting and a great segue to my second point that i want to bring up because on thursday a group of uh progressive Democrat coalition movements, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, Data for Progress, put out this really interesting memo in Georgia, which said that the Democrats in Georgia should run on a national $1,200 check campaign for the Georgia Senate, ultimately concluding that Biden can strengthen his call for $1,200 stimulus checks if Republicans block them now. This is for the Senate. So what's on the line is $1,200 for you, quite literally. The memo then suggested that Ossoff and Warnock should announce their support for these stimulus checks that Biden would be pushing. And this would actually be the pathway towards victory. They kind of had polling that said 63% of likely Georgia runoff voters said they'd be more likely to support a candidate who supports these relief checks. Almost putting your point into practice, Corey, right? This is a national race. Let's put the national import of $1,200 stimulus checks into the hands of Georgians to decide for their fellow countrymen of 300 plus million. Carter, to your point, good strategy, bad strategy. What do you think? This is clearly a group that comes from the more left wing of the Democratic Party. We've talked about kind of that patching and that bridge that needs to be built. But what's your take on this? Like, what's your gut feel on? Is this a good idea? Is this something that they should perhaps embrace and inherit as part of their last leg heading into this January runoff? This

Carter 1:00:03

This could be the thing, but I don't know the numbers. And the numbers that you're giving me from this group, it sounds to me like a group that went looking for the number that they found. And

Carter 1:00:11

And that makes me very nervous because this is a very common technique. You know, you want something, go and tell the government, you know, the people that are running a campaign that the thing that you want is the thing that everybody wants. Why not a wealth tax? I mean, it's 70th plus percentile. Why this particular $1,200 check issue? To me, it looks to me like a group that was advocating for a specific thing found that the specific thing could be successful in this election. What it doesn't tell you is where is the ranking of that particular issue, right?

Carter 1:00:44

right? So if the ranking of that issue of the $1,200 checks is first and it's got a 60th percentile approval, then maybe it's a good strategy. But if it's 70th, and yes, it can be 70th and still have a 70th percentile, you know, like a 60th percentile approval.

Carter 1:01:04

You know, we've talked about the give a fuck factor before. If people give a fuck about that, then it's something that maybe could be

Carter 1:01:12

be viable. I just don't know. And it makes me skeptical, just the way that they've released the information and the way that they've tried to make the public push on it. It makes me very skeptical that it's actually the thing that they say it is.

Zain 1:01:26

Corey, let's talk about both the strategy and perhaps embracing it. Do you agree with Carter that this is a group that's got an agenda, they clearly do, that's trying to put their thing into that political agenda? And then maybe let's more broadly talk about how you kind of nationalize a campaign that hangs in the balance for the Senate here. Yeah,

Corey 1:01:42

Yeah, well, I do agree with Steve and I'd need to look at the polling. Maybe they provide some of the details that I'm just going to rattle out here. But here's the thing. It's not a campaign for the hearts and minds of Georgia. It's the hearts and minds of the Georgia electorate that are still up for grabs or persuadable in some way,

Corey 1:01:57

way, shape or form. So it's not just that it has to be first in Georgia. It has to be first with a really small sliver of Georgia. And that requires a lot of polling. That requires you to have tons of numbers because you've got to have numbers you can trust with a relatively small subset of the population. Like, think about it this way.

Corey 1:02:13

Let's say that you want to have a 3% margin of error, so you have a 1,000-person poll, right?

Corey 1:02:18

Well, all of a sudden, if you're talking about 5

Corey 1:02:21

5% of that group, you're going to be looking at the opinions of 50 people if you only did a 1,000-person poll. So you've got to jack those numbers way, way up. The

Corey 1:02:29

The thing about polling like that is in some ways it's not designed to change anyone's mind because I guarantee you the Georgia Democrats and the Democratic National Committee are sophisticated enough to know that you can't kind of just triangulate based on a poll like that. But it puts pressure on the leadership from the base who will start saying, why aren't you doing this and start panicking? We could win the election if you just did this. And it's that internal pressure that actually gets delivered by this poll, not changes of opinion directly. Correctly. Nobody in Joe Biden's office is going to look at that and say, well, $1,200 checks done, stamp, we're going to do that. So it's a bit of an internal campaign as well, I guess is what I would say. It's not even targeted towards Republicans or the general population. It's to make, you know, the internal pressure to do something like this so strong that it occurs.

Zain 1:03:17

Carter, let's talk about that for a bit before we move on to the next topic here, which is how do these internal campaigns gain ground, right? Like you've probably, both of you have been part of political movements where internal campaigns are trying to, you know that you're in a close fight, someone throws an idea on the table. I remember, Carter, you and I discussing this when I was helping out on the last Merrill campaign here, being like, just do this. This could work, right? Like you're thinking about, you know, in this close fight, how to ultimately win. Everything seems to be on the agenda. If you're running these campaigns, you might kind of feel like you're Bambi on ice, not exactly sure what to do when. How do these movements kind of gain ground when you have such tight races, so to speak?

Carter 1:03:59

Well, I think that the challenge is everybody's got an idea and everybody's got a pet project. The trick is to put professionals in the room who don't have a pet project. They're looking at the data, they're looking at the impact, and they're also measuring out, can we actually do this if we are successful? The $1,200 checks thing is actually a relatively small piece

Carter 1:04:20

piece to do compared to like a basic income or something like that, which would be a much harder get. I think that this is an interesting strategy brought by this group of advocates. But I think that it's no different than anybody else who would bring a group, you know, an advocacy idea to a campaign. Campaigns aren't about advocacy.

Carter 1:04:44

Campaigns are about winning. And

Carter 1:04:46

And so I just think that if

Carter 1:04:49

if this was really viable, they

Carter 1:04:51

they would have picked up their phone and they would have called. I would pick up the phone and call you when you were running the Nenshi campaign. The person who would be doing this is picking up the phone and calling the person running the Biden campaign, and that didn't work. So now they're trying to do it through the public.

Carter 1:05:07

So that tells me that the data ain't there.

Carter 1:05:09

So that's the difference, I think, is that when you and I were shooting the shit about what we could be doing, I wasn't bringing an agenda. I was bringing a focal point to what an idea could look like.

Corey 1:05:22

Well, there's a broader point about how political parties use polling. And smart political parties always remember they're not trying to get a popular opinion with all of the voters. They are looking at those movable voters. And so the universe that they should be thinking about and targeting is always a subset of the broader universe. And you've got your base who will always be with you. You've got the opposition who will never be with you. And what does the group in the middle look like? And I think too often political parties get

Corey 1:05:51

get a poll, they look at top line numbers, and I think politicians more than political parties, this is true for and they say, Oh, this has got 60% support, let's do it.

Corey 1:05:59

Well, what if that 60% support is made up 40% people who will never vote for you, and 20% people who will always vote for you, and the people who are movable hate it, well, then the smart move is actually to oppose it, because your people will stay with you, the other people are never going to be with you. And you're making a play for the people in the middle. So we're

Corey 1:06:17

we're going to have to have a longer conversation about the follies that political parties run into when they poll at a later date. But I think it's fair to say that given that this has become a nationalized campaign and there are so many of the best minds in U.S. politics there, they're

Corey 1:06:31

they're not going to fall for those mistakes. And this poll is not sufficient. Maybe this is something the Democrats actually get behind. But if they do, it won't be on the strength of one poll. That's for sure. Carter,

Zain 1:06:41

Carter, I want to close that on here with a bit of a, not a curveball, but something related but not, which is what's happening in D.C. right now, right? We had today nearly three dozen people were arrested during a night of unrest in downtown Washington. That began yesterday with rallies supporting President Trump descending into chaos and white nationalism roaming the streets outright looking for fights, attacking black churches. is uh you know the violence we said that that didn't happen on election night seems to be here in some way um what do you kind of make of what you're seeing here and what do you kind of make of the impacts that something like this may have or let me be a little bit more crass or those may you know that that someone may want to take advantage of for what it might mean in georgia as well like is there is there value in looking at the politics of the senate and saying what's What's happening here is an extension of a guy who will will remain beyond whenever his presidency is over. And we need to nip this in the bud. And there's something politically charged here as well. Like, what are you making of what's happening in D.C. and where it kind of plays into our broader politics?

Carter 1:07:44

You know what? I don't know how it plays into the broader politics. And this is my problem saying, I mean, is the fact that Trump is is saying he's not going to leave, that the the election

Carter 1:07:55

election was stolen from him, that this is a fraud. nod. Is that just baked in at this stage, right? Do Republicans go along with it and some of them believe it and some of them just kind of nod and go along and they cast their votes? Do the people who stand up and say we're going to destroy the GOP actually

Carter 1:08:13

actually have people listening to them? I don't know. I'm fascinated by it. I mean, the violence that happened, you know, five people people being stabbed overnight. Does that impact what is going to happen down in Georgia?

Carter 1:08:28

And the honest to God answer, I think anybody who's looking at this, anybody who's studying this is we don't know the answer. We don't know how it's going to come out because it's so unusual to see this type of violence in action. I

Carter 1:08:42

maybe we can make some parallels to like the late 1960s, early 1970s. But those parallels break down very, very quickly because the people who who were involved, the people in power, generally speaking, followed the democratic norm. You know, Spiro Agnew did resign, not necessarily willingly, but he resigned. You know, Nixon resigned. This is not, you

Carter 1:09:07

this is not them. This is not anybody who's behaving with any sense of what a democratic norm is. So we don't know how it ends.

Zain 1:09:15

Corey, same question to you. What are you thinking of what's happening in the streets here and not here in D.C., but in D.C., I should say, more broadly, and perhaps the political implications of that?

Corey 1:09:25

Yeah, I mean, I keep asking myself, when are the grownups going to step in from the GOP? And look, the fact of the matter is, after the

Corey 1:09:33

the results have been made clear, the recounts have been completed, the states have certified, Trump has lost every time at court, almost

Corey 1:09:40

almost every time. I think he's like one for 80 or something at this point, only barely an exaggeration. He's lost at the Supreme Court. I guess what I'm saying is I can only come to the conclusion there are no grownups. And that is a very dangerous situation. The fact that the Republicans have not at least started to bleed away from Donald Trump,

Corey 1:09:57

I mean, there's no real bleeding away of support there. You're seeing, if anything, an ossification of this notion that the election was stolen. Look how many members of the House effectively called the U.S. election a fraud. odd. It's just the situation

Corey 1:10:13

situation is, I mean, Stephen's exactly right. I can't really add to it. I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows what's going to happen. I take comfort from the fact that most Americans believe the matter is settled, but most Republicans do not.

Corey 1:10:26

what really happens in a country, like, let's just, let's just fast forward a bit. Let's say Joe Biden is president. We've talked about the risk of this going back a while now.

Corey 1:10:36

Does the Senate confirm firm, his appointees? Are

Corey 1:10:39

there major protests outside of, you know, these electoral colleges meeting in all of the states tomorrow? I mean, there are so many different situations that could just make America an awful lot worse in the next bit. But if the opposition truly believes that Joe Biden is illegitimate because of all of the bullshit that Trump has put out there that has gone uncontested by people who are supposedly sensible

Corey 1:11:04

sensible adult people who care about their country.

Zain 1:11:09

Who the hell knows, man? Who the hell knows?

Zain 1:11:12

So much to discuss as we head into our next episode on Thursday. But we'll leave that segment there. And we'll move on to our final segment, our over, under, and our lightning round. Stephen Carter, are you excited? Are you ready? Are you jazzed? This

Carter 1:11:24

This is my favorite part of every week.

Carter 1:11:27

And this is why I am starting

Zain 1:11:27

starting with you this time. And Carter, I'm going to start with this question. Over, under, on seven, that's what you you need to remember in your head, Joe Biden has had a lot to balance over the past couple of weeks. Of course, introducing his nominees, denouncing the violence on the streets, repudiating Trump's messages on vaccines, ensuring he has political weight applied to Georgia. Over under on seven, Joe Biden's balancing act. What do you think of it? Is he doing a job that deserves above a seven? Or are you giving him an under a seven right now with all the dynamics he's having to keep juggling in the air? I

Carter 1:12:00

I think he gets an E for excellent. You know, he's he's done everything that he needs to do. If there's been one area that's been falling down, perhaps it's the Georgia Senate elections. But I think overall, his his announcements and his his push, his governance, the way he looks like a normal president. I think that all of that just helps. We will see. But I'm thinking that he's helping Georgia turn blue and his announcements have been super strong. I'm definitely I'm definitely on board with your scale and I'm giving him an E.

Zain 1:12:32

Thank you so much, Carter. This is why I go to you first. Corey, same question for you. Over under on seven, the job Joe Biden is doing, handling and juggling all of the various responsibilities and things he's got in the air right now.

Corey 1:12:45

Yeah, I give him one and a half thumbs up. He's doing a fine job. I don't know that I can point to anything specific. I want him to be doing better. But the situation has not improved with the Republicans. That's a huge concern for me. And for a fellow who was supposed to have a bit of charm with the Senate, we haven't seen that yet. And ultimately, I worry that as as strong as these moves look, if he does not get the Senate, you

Corey 1:13:11

you know, if Georgia does not vote for two Democrats, then I really at a loss. Yeah, despite

Zain 1:13:16

despite the whole compromise Joe sort of mantra and your legacy behind him. Right. I hear you. Corey, I'm going to stick with you on this. On a one to 10 scale, the political strategy and messaging of Trudeau, taking a picture of the planes that landed today with the vaccines, having the Minister Anand go there as well, kind of almost like similar to that video that we saw here in Alberta, where Jason Kenney was sending off masks to other jurisdictions. This, of course, is having the minister receive the doses of vaccine, the imagery, the messaging, the distribution of that. What do you give that on a one to 10 on the political strategy or campaign strategy scale?

Corey 1:13:54

It's eight or a nine. It's a great visual. It's something that people will be talking about. Yeah, did you see it? It's here. It is such a clear indication that this is now rolling out. And by the way, nobody

Corey 1:14:05

nobody loses worse than the CPC on this matter. The Conservatives who talked about we're going to be last in line for the vaccine. Well, now Canadians have literally seen footage of the vaccine getting here, roughly

Corey 1:14:15

roughly the same time it was rolling out in FedEx trucks in the United States, right? Like, nobody can say that we're...

Zain 1:14:23

Yeah, third fastest to approve and getting it earlier, if not at the same time as the U.S., which was part of my next question. But before I jump there, Carter, I'm going to throw the same question to you. One to ten on the political strategy or the campaign strategy and messaging scale for the Trudeau government. Picture of the plane, minister is there saying it's here. What do you think of it? What do you make of it? Back

Carter 1:14:42

Back to basics for the Trudeau government. This is what they've been best at, you know, getting the photo op to work, showing visually what is important. This showed us visually what was important. And when they're good at this, they are amongst the best. I'm going to have to give them a 4.0.

Zain 1:15:02

Oh, well, thank you so much, Carter. Really appreciate that. Going with a GPA scale there.

Zain 1:15:07

very, very solid. Carter, I'm going to stick with you on this. The political damage, because this is what Corey was just leaning into, the political damage for Aaron O'Toole and his party over under on six for overplaying their hand that Canada was in the back of the line that we were going to receive this thing last. What's the political damage over under on six that they perhaps face with something like this? I

Carter 1:15:29

I mean, the good news is our collective ability to remember what happens from time to time will be lost. These guys will move forward and we'll forget that they were predicting that we wouldn't be able to get vaccinated.

Carter 1:15:45

You know, this much the same way that they were holding Trudeau's feet to the fire with the We Charity thing. You know, remember the big scandal of the summer that was going to change their electoral fortunes that did nothing. That leaves us with the exact we're in the exact same situation that we were six months ago. The Trudeau liberals are riding high. And I suspect that unless something changes, probably caused by the liberals, because certainly right now, O'Toole's conservatives don't look to be having any impact whatsoever. whatsoever.

Zain 1:16:14

Corey, the political damage for O'Toole overplaying his hand on the whole COVID vaccine storyline over under on six?

Corey 1:16:21

Well, I would say it's under if he stops now.

Corey 1:16:24

To Stephen's point, we'll all move on. But if they double down, if they say, oh, this is just the first few vaccines, and they continue to kick this ball and continue to argue that Canada is going to suffer from not producing them here.

Corey 1:16:37

guess it's a strategy, but it's more of a bet than smart tactics right you are effectively saying i think that something's going to fall apart here and canada won't get all of the vaccines that that you know the timeline has on the timeline that's been proposed that

Corey 1:16:51

that could very quickly move it up like if if they keep if

Corey 1:16:55

if they keep on this line of attack the they may regret it deeply deeply so i hope that they have the i

Corey 1:17:01

i hope they have the sophistication to cut their losses um you

Corey 1:17:05

you know for them for their sake i hope they do And

Zain 1:17:08

And we'll end with the most important question. Corey, I'm going to start with you on this. One month from today, so I'm looking at January 13th. By January 13th, will we see a Mrs. COVID head character as part of the COVID Loves campaign?

Corey 1:17:24

Yes or no, Corey?

Corey 1:17:25

No, not an official one. But unofficially, you'll be able to get the action figures at any Toys R Us.

Zain 1:17:32

Carter, same question to you. Will we see a Mrs. COVID head one month from today?

Carter 1:17:36

Corey's just wrong. There'll be a Mrs. COVID head. There'll be grandparents. It'll all work out. It's going to be fantastic.

Zain 1:17:42

And we'll leave it there. Just a reminder before we wrap, two things we need from you. Our Holiday Spectacular is our next show. So submit your segment suggestions, your segment titles to us. As you know, we've done some crazy shit in the past and things could get crazier in 2020. And then, of course, ensure that the most meta project that the strategists have taken on is also fulfilled at tiny.cc slash Dave Berta. Fill out question six. Fuck all the other questions. Who cares? Number six, us having the survey win is the political play of the year. If you don't get it, doesn't matter. Just do it. And with that, we'll wrap episode 834 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velji. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

Transcript