Building the perfect beast
Alex Paterson offers campaign insights from the digital edge
By Jason Winders, MES'10
Alex Paterson never wanted to control the beast; he simply wanted to keep it fed. And as a member of the Liberal Party’s digital campaign team during the 2015 Federal Election, he saw firsthand what that would take.
“You have all these people out there, all these people who want to support you and your campaign online. You need to give them tools to defend you, to work with you, to do just that,” said Paterson, BA’08 (Media and Public Interest). “Your supporters are looking to you to provide them with stuff. Give it to them.” In Canadian politics, pundits of all political stripes saw the Liberal Party campaign, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as a triumph of new thinking in new media. It was no longer a matter of taking a traditional political campaign and cramming it into a new space, but using new tools to create new ways of campaigning and, perhaps more importantly, new ways of understanding a candidate.
“As opposed to packaging or focus-group testing a candidate, what we did was use digital tools particularly well to bring people to see who he really was, to get people used to who he was as a leader. We embraced who Justin is,” Paterson said. “People are pretty shrewd online; people know they are being sold to in politics. But that doesn’t make the job of selling a nefarious one.
“Instead of packaging a candidate to go and meet the people where they are, on social media and digital campaigning, you can bring people to where your leader is.” Inside the Liberal team, Paterson describes a nimble digital shop, focused on a well-defined plan, but also reactive to the ever-changing landscape of a political campaign by using a room full of not just traditional communications people, but graphic designers, video production managers, and animators.
“You cannot run a campaign without a solid digital plan. It does not guarantee success if you have one, but it guarantees failure if you don’t have one.”
