kip/bot/blog

Briefing a team on interactive is a balance between reductive over-simplification and excessive detailing of requirements. Everyone knows this. It was part of what made planning an art, it’s why agencies struggle with things like channel-neutral briefs. One of the best examples of a project brief comes from the 1993 documentary The War Room. I’ve used it 100 times. Sometimes, it supports the need to go beyond the three word brief (which is important for complex, rich interactive experiences). Sometimes, it supports the idea that anything, no matter how complex, can be simplified.

Back to The War Room. The documentary is about the 1992 Clinton Presidential Campaign. The filmmakers joined up early in the campaign when Clinton was more than a longshot, so they kind of lucked out in that they wound up being on the winning and unconvential team. The War Room of the title is the campaign office in Little Rock where soon-to-be-legends George Stephanopoulus and James Carville were calling key strategic thoughts in the campaign. At the end of the film, Clinton can be heard giving his victory speech on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion. The camera crew is inside the now-empty War Room and lands on a whiteboard (!) at the front of the office:

This was the mantra, or the brief, of the campaign: Change vs more of the same, Health Care for Everyone, It’s the economy, stupid. (It had several versions and I went with the one that was more memorable for me. Interesting to note is that the press simplified this even further to include only “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The mantra defined what was going to win for them, their true north, the campaign’s compass, the priorities, the decision-making criteria in strategy. Of course, the campaign was going to take on other issues, but these were the themes to which they would return again and again, this was the source of their voice, their media presence, and their style. God help me for the marketer-speak, but these were the things which, if they owned, would put them over the top.

A great use of this mantra is for any team that complains that they can’t possibly formulate a strategy or brief that’s less than 2 pages. Surely, if a presidential campaign can be distilled to this, something as simple as a website, or a game, or an MP3 player can be tamed as well? The alternate use is to combat the notion that anything beyond three words is superfluous, confusing, too hard to work with.

This video is the kind of thing that originally got me excited about the web and new media tools: someone with a compelling story to tell has the tools to make it engaging and a channel for putting it out there and finding an audience. Leaving aside the politics, this piece adds up to something great even though the individual production values are so-so.

- from today’s NYT

From today’s fivethirtyeight.com, an interesting insight into Obama, a surprising toughness, and leadership in long campaigns:

Indeed, Barack Obama himself hopped on a nationwide all-staff conference call Friday to emphasize this point to the troops. Pledging to “come down hard” on anyone getting “too cocky,” Obama specifically and pre-emptively called out any semblance of lack of focus. High-fiving, for example, is strictly verboten. Acknowledging everyone must be exhausted, he pointed out that he was pretty worn out too. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, and I’m older than all of you.” The message: if I can finish this off, so can you. Do not doubt that this is a man firmly in control of his campaign.

as a person . . . and I think that’s a healthy thing . . . really.

Not long after the Republican convention, there was a Facebook group called “Intelligent Women Against Palin.” At the time I remember twittering something like “[kipbot] thinks intelligent ______ against anything republican kind of proves their point.” Leaving aside that it’s completely stupid to think that insulting people’s intelligence will do anything more than serve one’s own ego and galvanize the people on the other side, there was a bigger dynamic. Why are we soooooo unsympathetic to people who vote for candidates we can’t stand?

Watching With God on Our Side, a documentary about George W Bush’s relationship to evangelical America, I saw a Bush that I had been blind to: a devout Christian, likeable guy, with a simple worldview that could be seen as, and maybe, is hard-won wisdom.

A few clips showed Bush talking about his drinking, dissipated lifestyle and how he pulled things together through his faith. He joked, but was humble and quiet and confident, about how he went from not so good guy to someone with something to offer. During those clips, especially one where he joked about giving his mother all those white hairs, I liked and respected the guy. Thhe audience was clearly connecting with him as well.

Then they got to the famous moment where a Republican debate moderator asked who the most important political thinker in their lives was and Bush gave the simple, direct answer of Jesus. Many people, no doubt mysefl included, guffawed and wailed on the moron for the next week. “What a lightweight!” “No inner resources.” “Tool.”

After being softened by earlier clips, I had a hard time being pissed at his answer when I saw it. (And to be honest, I’m not sure I ever actually SAW him say it, I probably only encountered it in text.) I watched the clip three times and I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any defiance in his voice (”come on liberals and fellow Republicans on stage, I dare you to mock me.”) Had this been a character in a show, like say Leo McGarrey saying something like “I have a sickness and I can’t drink again”, or a black junkie turned community worker in The Wire, we would have shed a tear, but when R’s talk like this . . .

Anyway, I’m tired of hating the people who like the people we hate. Intellectually, it’s dishonest, politically, it’s useless, and now I’m starting to feel mean.

When John Kerry was slipping in the polls a month out from election day, liberals fretted that there wasn’t enough time to get back on track.

Now, with Obama ahead by at least twice as much as Kerry was down, it’s a political eternity in which something can go wrong.

“Great kid! don’t get cocky.”

The NY Times had a deviously clever piece about candidate physiques and their impact on Presidential elections today. Leading with the explanation that they were exploring the claim that Americans might not relate to Obama’s “slender physique”, they did a height and weight analysis of the major candidates, going back to 1896. It would seem that taller or heavier tends to win, though we probably need a baseball stats nut to model the combinations.

The chart is too big to display, but here’s a sample:

It’s a fun little exercise, but the ‘tale of the tape’ seems a little silly for the NYT to devote this kind of space, even virtual, to it. I think the thing of real interest, is the silhouettes they chose to represent the candidates. In addition to some nice design work (Truman’s glasses, William Jennings Bryan’s watch fob, Carter’s smile), they did a nice job of capturing of the general vibe of the candidates. Many have argued that Democrats lose not so much because people disagree with them but because they are hard to relate to, egghead, or as the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank put it, ‘inauthentic’. So check out the profiles.

Ike versus beloved egghead Adlai Stevenson: (whose campaigns my mother worked for weekend after weekend):

Nixon versus Humphrey and McGovern:

Dukakis and Mondale are the very mark of unimposing, unleaderly, un-anything:

War hero John Kerry doesn’t stand up to the admittedly faux-Reagan swagger of W:

Not all of them are perfectly accurate. TR’s pose comes off a bit foppish (though he DID lose that election):

Yet another deft bit of info-work by the NYT.

This election has been weird for me with the polls. The biggest riddle for me has been: why, in a race that the media describe as a dead heat, has John McCain been throwing hail Mary passes, acting in such a desperate fashion? The most frequent answer is that the media wants drama so that people follow the news more closely, which I can buy, but I’m still kind of baffled and annoyed about the highly democratic (all polls are worth reporting) approach to polling data.

Weird moment of NY Times coverage in today’s/yesterday’s online version (interesting: I just realized that the phrase “today’s paper” is really twisted on-line. Long time coming, that thought). On the front page is an article about the campaigns in battleground states with the graphic:

The image is one of the worst case scenarios for Democrats and pretty far removed from current thinking: no toss-up states, no recognition of polling showing some of the reds leaning blue. So, what’s the editorial thinking driving that? Is the Times trying to panic its liberal readers into reading that article? What role does polling data play in the news? I’m confused.

Very grim, 2004, version of the election in that graphic. In fact, if we assume that most readers and viewers are becoming quite familiar with shades of red and blue for barely, weakly, and strongly dem or repub and that they expect some neutral color to indicate toss-up, this graphic gives no indication that there are any battleground states.

Then there’s the Times’s ongoing electoral map graphic which appears in the right column of the Politics section:

It’s even more jarring when the two items appear together:

Poll reportage has been tricky for several elections: exit polls on the east coast have been thought to influence west coast voting, exit polls created the mis-announcement of the Florida winner in 2000, landslide vote predictions make people nervous about voter turnout. I’m having a hard time figuring out what role poll reportage is supposed to play in the election.

Fun interview by Dan Rather of fivethirtyeight’s Nate Silver:

Some interesting things to note:

There’s a weird thing going on in this discussion about stats and polling where some very simple math is being turned into high science. If you spend a little time looking at Baseball Prospectus, it’s all algebra. There may be some underlying techniques in the crunching of the numbers, like regression, but the formulas are pretty simple. fivethirtyeight is largely a question of weighting polls, based on some historical data. It’s just not that complicated. Silver’s dissection of the GWU/Battleground poll is barely even a dissection — he just looked at the methodology and saw that they over-indexed older voters! I’m starting to find it frightening how innumerate people are . . . or is it how illogical they are given that it’s middle school math level?

As part of my poll-obsessing, I finally checked out fivethirtyeight, recommended to me by Alex. Short version is that Nate Silver, the author of the site, is also a leader of Baseball Prospectus. He is credited with creating the very powerful PECOTA system, which rethinks baseball statistics — mostly through pure intelligence, but there is some math that exceeds the AD&D level — and in the process creates a much better explanatory and predictive tool. (It also played no small part in helping to create fantasy baseball’s popularity and even help baseball make a comeback when people thought the fast-paced, pre-felonious NBA was going to surpass America’s pastime.)

fivethirtyeight is, and I don’t think this is oversimplifying, doing for political polling what it did for baseball stats: finding truths by refining, critiquing, and improving simplistic polling data. Today’s post on the site was one of those aha moments:

I have gotten an increasing number of questions about the GWU/Battleground Poll, which presently gives John McCain a 2-point national lead, even as essentially every other current national poll shows Barack Obama with a lead of at least 5 points.

Just because a poll is an outlier doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s doing something wrong. Pollsters may have legitimate reasons for having a different perspective on the election, and they may also occasionally produce odd results due to chance alone.

In this case, however, the poll seems to be making a relatively fundamental mistake: it is not weighting by age.

For months, I’ve been wondering why the hell some polls have been reporting a neck and neck race, while others show Obama steadily gaining ground. (Even stranger, why on earth is the always admirable John McCain pulling such silly stunts, throwing hail Marys, if it’s a dead heat?) Finally, someone explains it, and oh how bizarrely simple it turns out to be.

For those who are curious, here’s the weighting of the battleground poll in question:

18-34 17%
35-44 12%
45-64 40%
65+ 31%

Compared to the US Census/2004 election data:

18-34 26%
35-44 17%
45-64 38%
65+ 19%

Pretty clear. This poll massively overrepresents older voters who, at a local polling level, have been averse to Obama for a variety of reasons, and massively underrepresent the younger voters who Obama has targeted in campaign activities and who are likely to respond to the post Baby-boomer voice he’s cultivated.

So simple, no math. Can’t tell if I’m impressed at the baseball-stats freaks or disgusted at the innumeracy of the media, or even literate newspaper reading people.