Trump is beating Biden in the battle for attention
It’s not even close. Not only is Trump dominating Biden in things like cable news mentions and search, his lead on social media is growing. Also in this week’s issue:
The Trump campaign is list building off FLOTUS’ birthday
How a front page gets designed
Every brand is basically running the same Covid-19 ad
Yours,
Trump is beating Biden in the battle for attention
Credit: Axios
President Trump is making the most out of his bully pulpit, dominating his presumptive Democratic opponent in terms of attention across cable news, social media, and digital.
According to data compiled by Axios, Trump was mentioned three times more on cable news than former Vice President Biden from March 15 to April 15, and stories about Trump get seven times more interaction on social media than stories about Biden.
Screenshots of the Biden campaign’s podcast and videos
The Biden campaign is doing its best to up its ~content~ game, launching the “Here’s the Deal” podcast in late March with guests like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Ron Klain, the Obama administration’s former Ebola response coordinator. They have also been hosting digital events, including online town halls about unemployment and gun violence, and a virtual rope line where Biden live-streamed with individual voters.
Content strategy will undoubtedly play a big role in the 2020 campaign, but all the videos and podcasts in the world don’t matter if you don’t get them in front of people. Online distribution channels — AKA followers and subscribers — are crucial, and it’s the area Biden lags the furthest behind.
Trump has 15 times more followers than Biden across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, according to Axios. Trump also dwarfs Biden on YouTube, with 360,000 subscribers to Biden’s 42,000. And Trump’s lead is growing.
Here’s the average daily growth for the candidates’ accounts, according to data from SocialBlade, a social media tracking site:
Trump Twitter: +108,577 followers/day
Biden Twitter: +17,934 followers/day
Trump Instagram: +28,584 followers/day
Biden Instagram: +8,178 followers/day
The Trump campaign is list building off FLOTUS’ birthday
Screenshots of Trump campaign ad graphics about the first lady’s birthday
First lady Melania Trump turns 50 on Sunday, and the Trump campaign has rolled out digital ads asking supporters to sign her “Official Birthday Card.” These ads take users to a page where they’re prompted to fill out a message for Trump and fill out their personal information for the campaign’s contact list.
About 3,700 FLOTUS b-day ads have run in the past 30 days, and judging by a sampling I looked through, they primarily target women.
Trump was the second most admired woman of 2019 behind her predecessor, former first lady Michelle Obama, according to Gallup. A December 2018 CNN poll found Trump had a 43% approval rating. It also found men had a 48% favorable opinion of her compared with 39% of women.
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How a front page gets designed
Credit: via Print
The front page of the New York Times starts out as a sketch on paper before being turned into digital pages.
Times design director Tom Bodkin shared several examples of front page templates he designed for the paper’s A1 in March and April with Print magazine. He said the above front page, from April 8 showing maps of Covid deaths, was the first time a graphic appeared above the dateline and into the logo.
“When I break from tradition, as I did on these pages, I’m careful that the departures are substantively driven, that they are made to convey an important message, and that the drama they create is proportionate to [the] gravity of the news being expressed,” Bodkin told Print.
You can see more front page drafts here.
Every brand is basically running the same Covid-19 ad
Somber piano music plays. A voiceover says something about how a brand has always been there for you. Then something about “people,” “family,” and “together.” The somber piano music speeds up, everyone claps, fin.
Many TV commercials during the pandemic appear to follow a formula, and Sean Haney, an Austin YouTube user who works in digital marketing, compiled clips from more than 60 brands that show just how similar they are.
Haney said it took less than a week to complete the video, and at one point he just searched “we’re here for you on YouTube” and found about 10 more examples for the compilation. “Some companies didn’t even bother coming up with a unique title,” he told Yello in an email.
Haney wrote that because companies had to get a message out quickly without the ability to film due to social distancing, and in some cases without much of a budget because of financial restraints, they fell back on b-roll, inoffensive royalty-free piano tracks, and cliché marketing trends.
“In my memory, I haven’t seen a crisis or ‘event’ have so many ads dedicated than this one,” he said. “I think this is a sign that the current pandemic has changed our economy so drastically - it’s like a bad hurricane that hit the entire world.”
The ads that most impressed Haney were from Burger King and Domino’s. Both brands have been advertising delivery in ways that are creative and avoid platitudes.
Banky’s still making “street” art, but now at home
Credit: @banksy/Instagram
The anonymous street artist posted a photo of a bathroom decked out in his rat illustrations with the caption “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
How graphic design shaped the environmental movement
ICYMI, Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and I wrote about the role graphic design has played in the environmental movement since then, as well as what designers can do to effectively communicate about climate change today. You can read my story here.