breaking down the white house newsletter: insights from a conversion-minded marketer

This evening, I got an email from the White House. I get them frequently, in fact. I am a White-House-email-newsletter-subscriber.

The subject line read: The stories the media doesn’t tell

That caught my attention. So, I opened the email. I read the first blurb. Then I read it again. Then I clicked a link. And another link. And I found myself—like Alice on that fateful day—falling deep into a rabbit hole.

I am a marketer by trade with a background in conversation optimization, behavioral science, content and communication. As someone who’s job it is to persuade, I thought it might be helpful to break down this newsletter and explore the tactics at play from a marketing lens.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Tactic #1: An evening email send

I got this email at 7:10pm EST—a tactic in and of itself. According Get Response (a popular marketing blog), “If you want to appeal to the emotional side of the brain, evenings might be best [for an email send]. People will take the easy choice when their energy is depleted. Because our brain is constantly on emo-pilot. The emotional part of the brain, the non-rational part is always on autopilot. And it becomes more prevalent once the day progresses and our energy levels drop.”

I’ll get deeper into emotional vs. rational processes a bit later.

Tactic #2: Curiosity and confirmation bias in the subject line

Subject line: “The stories the media doesn’t tell”

Curiosity is an age-old marketing tactic. Particularly when it comes to subject lines and headlines, marketers often work to create curiosity to get you to click through to read an email or article. This is why this tactic is also often fondly dubbed “clickbait”.

Again, from the Get Response blog: “How [do you] create an itch and scratch it at the same time? A proven tactic in your emails and subject lines is to appeal to the curiosity of your readers. …

The trick to writing a subject line that sparks curiosity is to not tell the whole story. If everything is spelled out from the start, there is nothing left to be uncertain or curious about.”

The subject line “The stories the media doesn’t tell” creates a sense of curiosity because it doesn’t tell us what stories the media doesn’t tell. We have to click into the email to see what the media is missing.

This subject line also taps into the presumed confirmation bias of its subscribers: namely that the media is failing to do its job.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports one’s prior personal beliefs or values. It is an important type of cognitive bias that has a significant effect on the proper functioning of society by distorting evidence-based decision-making.

Even if the reader doesn’t open the email, they are able to confirm any existing bias towards the media simply by reading the subject line. This subject line allows you to sit back and think, “Yet another example of the media failing to do its job.”

Tactic #3: Storytelling

The first section within the body of this email is a story. And an emotional story at that. A frantic mother speeds down the street as her young baby chokes. She is pulled over by a police officer and the officer saves the baby’s life (and becomes its godparent).

Like curiosity, storytelling is one of the most powerful persuasive techniques in existence. Our brains love stories. They appeal to our emotions.

In a guide posted on the CXL blog, writer Shanelle Mullin explores emotional persuasion. Storytelling is cited as an emotional copywriting tactic. Mullin explains, “While stats and facts can be valuable, emotions are more persuasive in our irrational minds. Once you make someone feel something through trigger words or storytelling, you can connect with them. Once you connect with someone, you can more easily persuade them to take the action you want them to.”

“While stats and facts can be valuable, emotions are more persuasive in our irrational minds. Once you make someone feel something through trigger words or storytelling, you can connect with them. Once you connect with someone, you can more easily persuade them to take the action you want them to.”

Stories are also more memorable. “Jennifer Aaker, a marketing professor at Stanford, asked each of her students to give a one-minute pitch. One in 10 students used a story in their pitch. When asked to recall the pitches later, only 5% of students could cite a statistic, but 63% could remember the story — in detail,” writes Mullin.

Stories have also been found to be more persuasive when facts are weaker. “According to research from social psychologists at Northwestern University, stories can increase the persuasiveness of weak facts, but actually decrease the persuasiveness of strong facts. …

Krause and Rucker found that when facts were weak, a story with the facts embedded within it led to greater persuasion than facts alone. But when facts were strong, the opposite effect occurred: facts alone led to more persuasion than a story with the facts embedded within it. This result suggests that stories don’t just direct people away from weak information; they reduce people’s general processing of information.” (Source)

A note: The Movement for Black Lives, activists, and abolitionists are tackling something enormous, long-lasting, and complex—systemic racism. The movement is asking everyone to abandon the belief that racism exists in a good / bad moral binary (e.g. if you are racist, you are a bad person. If you are a good person, you cannot be racist) and acknowledge that we are all operating within a system that is inherently racist—and dismantle said system from which many of us benefit greatly. This is a much more difficult message to process and our reptilian brains prefer to default to emotion, to tangible stories that we can hold onto, that make us feel better. The storytelling in this email is relying on our laziness.

Cognitive biases worth exploring:

Semmelweis reflex—The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.
System justification theory (SJT)—A theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people.
Just-world hypothesis—The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).

Tactic #4: Weak facts and fear mongering

This story is followed immediately by this paragraph:

As we already know, stories make weak facts more persuasive. It makes sense, then, that vague statements positioned as fact follow a story meant to incite our emotions. The “vast majority” of our country’s law enforcement heroes (intentional framing) … save “countless” lives. There are no tangible numbers, no hard statistics to back up these declarations.

The final clause in this paragraph is particularly sinister in my opinion, as it seeks to stoke existing fears that without law enforcement, drugs, theft, and violence that currently plague communities (implied: of color) will overflow into white (e.g. innocent, pure, wholesome, safe) communities. This, again, plays on confirmation bias and simultaneously fosters emotions of anxiety and fear.

In the post cited above, Shanelle writes the following about anxiety: “When you are anxious… You’re more selfish and less ethical. When you’re afraid, you adopt a survivalist mindset. You take less time to reflect on the consequences of your actions.”

Tactic #5: Emotionally charged language and negative framing

Let’s look at the next two paragraphs:

Yet in recent weeks, the men and women in blue have faced attacks from rioters and hostility from leftwing pundits and politicians. Radical Democrats in both Congress and city halls across our country have echoed calls to defund or even abolish police forces.

In bold are terms I would describe as emotionally charged: “attacks” “rioters” “hostility” “pundits” “Radical” “calls to defund or even abolish”. These words help to vilify anyone calling for change in our subconscious minds by framing them as the enemy and applying negative, violent traits to them.

According to Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman the framing principle holds that the way information is presented influences how we respond to that information. Here’s an alternative statement where I simply change the bolded words.

In recent weeks, police officers have faced calls for change from protesters and scrutiny from elected officials. Democrats in both Congress and city halls across our country have echoed calls to defund or abolish police forces.

Note the difference.

Tactic #6: This isn’t really a tactic. It is outright propaganda.

The previous paragraph is followed by a quote from President Trump.

The quote that follows is in keeping with the President’s standard rhetoric. Here, he references the “hundreds of police” that have been injured and the “several” that have been murdered. He neglects to mention the following:

598 people have been killed by police so far in 2020 (Source)
Over 14,000 protesters have been arrested (Source)
An unknown number of protesters have been injured due to police violence, tear gas, rubber bullets, and more. (See this Twitter thread with over 540+ videos and counting capturing this violence)

This is outright propaganda, which is defined as a form of communication intended to sway the audience through presenting only one side of the argument:

“Propagandists have a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve these, they deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda.” (Source)

Tactic #7: Storytelling, revisited

Now, the answer to the question raised in this email’s subject line: What are the stories the “corporate mass media” is neglecting to tell us?

There are three stories summarized here; at an individual level, they are less emotional than the first story and seem to be more about representation—look at how many great things police officers do and see how beloved these officers are.

The first story is about a boy who suffered multiple overdoses and was revived multiple times by police officers. This account seems to communicate that, without law enforcement, there would be no community care (this boy would’ve stayed addicted to drugs and died). This is not the case in any abolitionist document I have seen. All advocate for funds currently funding policing to be funneled back into social care programs, including substance abuse programs and mental health programs. They simply advocate that armed law enforcement officers are not necessarily the best providers of that support.

The second is about Spencer Bohan, a young non-verbal autistic boy who—when he went missing—was quickly found and rescued by police. Please note, Spencer Bohan is white. And despite this single account, we know that disabled people are particularly vulnerable to police violence. Time reports, “There is no reliable national database tracking how many people with disabilities, or who are experiencing episodes of mental illness, are shot by police each year, but studies show that the numbers are substantial — likely between one-third and one-half of total police killings.”

If 598 people have been killed by police this year, that means between 200 and 300 of those killings were likely people with disabilities.

The third “story” is simply an account from a pastor of a church in Tennessee, whose church gave $1,000 to every member of the town’s police department. He is quoted as saying, “The voice of small-town America is seldom heard . . . I think small towns all over America feel like we do.”

This story is likely meant to resonate specifically with readers who identify as Christians and as “small town Americans”, to create a sense of solidarity, and to invite them into a space that claims to represent them and their views. It is a specific call out to an audience that the President views as safely in his corner.

A note: I can’t help but wonder if that church in Tennessee has ever donated $1,000 to its BIPOC citizens who have been brutalized and robbed by white colonizers for over 400 years.

Tactic #8: Statistics without context (aka more propaganda)

Next, the email hits readers with some more stats, detailing the violence law enforcement officers have suffered. There’s also a threat woven into this paragraph that speaks to my earlier point about preventing the overflow of violence from communities of color into white communities: “Today, there are direct, often fatal consequences for residents of American cities whose leaders turn their backs on policing.”

Translation? Your life is at stake if you choose to defund the police (implied: because violence that is currently being held at bay by law enforcement will overflow into your pristine neighborhood).

This statement is then followed up with statistics about violence in New York City and violence in Chicago. The structure of this paragraph implies that violence in both cities is a direct result of “leaders turning their backs on policing”, however New York only recently (June 30th) ruled to cut $1B from its $6B police budget and Chicago has yet to do so (to my knowledge). The implication that violence this week is the result of changes to police budgets and policy is very very weak.

In psychology, illusory correlation is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists.

Tactic #9: Reassurance

The email closes with the following:

This conclusion is delivered after we have been primed to view law enforcement as heroes (repeated three times in the email copy). It seeks to reassure readers that, while there is no problem, this administration has already solved it with an executive order.

Note: You can and should read the executive order here.

And finally, a quote from Vice President Pence that, once again, uses framing to position the administration as heroes themselves: staunch defenders of the heroes in blue.

The email concludes with a photo depicting Vice President Mike Pence, President Trump (front and center), and Kemira Boyd, the Black mother whose child was saved by a police officer during a traffic stop. While depicted, the photo caption does not n… — The email concludes with a photo depicting Vice President Mike Pence, President Trump (front and center), and Kemira Boyd, the Black mother whose child was saved by a police officer during a traffic stop. While depicted, the photo caption does not name either the vice president or Kemira Boyd.

There are likely many more tactics and biases at play in this email. If you have thoughts or want to call out any tactics I may have missed, please do so in the comments. My goal with this analysis is to illuminate the tactics used in this administration’s political communications and generate more awareness and critical thought.

Additional thoughts from commenters on the original article posted to Medium:

From Mike St Laurent, Experimentation Expert at Widerfunnel:

Excellent post! I think the photo itself showcases a few more. Namely it is no coincidence that President Trump and Vice President Pence are both wearing Blue ties with Navy suits. Not only that blue is the colour associated with the police, but also that it represents loyalty and stability.
It is also not a coincidence that President Trump is sitting next to Kemira Boyd in an effort to show proof of defence for Trump as a “non-racist” figure.

From Kim Quach, Behaviral Science consultant:

This is so well done, Natasha! Adding to what you have here…
Another tactic that they seem to be using is to try and highlight a gap in thinking, used right in the subject line of “The stories the media doesn’t tell”. It’s alluding to this idea that the reader may not have all the information and is creating this feeling of cognitive dissonance. The reader clicks on the email to find out more, wanting to resolve the uncomfortable feeling.
In the storytelling portions of the email, they have used the identifiable victim effect to make their points more persuasive. The victims are clearly identified (Kemira Boyd, Kenneth Bearden, Spencer Bohan) and the saviors tend to be generalized (police officers, the Roanoke county police).