AOC & Twitch — The Historical Bridging of the Digital and Age Gap in Politics
“What is the biggest mistake people make in a crisis? Not knowing when they are in a crisis.”
— Olivia Pope, Scandal
— Sarah Weise, CEO of Bixa Research & Market Researcher w/focus on GenZ
AOC has been changing the game ever since she was elected two years ago. Being the first social media A-List celebrity politician to wield the power of Instagram and Twitter to reach the youth of the world, she’s going even further beyond. We are witnessing a trailblazer and no one is taking notes.
Did you tune in? Did you read about it?
Did you see the headline of a major newspaper and scoff at it?
That’s okay. You’re not alone, but you need to know what really happened, why it happened, and what it means for the playbook going forward.
That's why you’re here.
TLDR: This is your wake up call to get you and your organizations on Instagram and other community-building platforms. For those that think they know Instagram, 2016 social media is not 2020 social media. Gen Z has changed everything. The new playbook on best strategies to meet the youth where they are is here, well it's in the first aggregated Gen Z research that was published in 2019.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) held a “Get Out The Vote” event and played a video game online with eight other well-known streamers, alongside Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. (Ilhan may not have been in the headlines, but was MVP and she hard carried AOC). It started with a random tweet — the lever of Supply Side bridging of the gap, per se.
Last week, AOC’s debut stream became the 6th most-watched stream on Twitch. For those that don’t know, Twitch is way more popular than YouTube for streaming video games and interacting with “chat”, where those watching you can message you, pay to put their message on the screen, ask you questions, interact with each other as a crowd, and lots more that allow you to build a community. Don’t laugh, there is a reason Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million back in 2014. (Pssst here is the reason).
Most older generations, not only Baby Boomers, but even old-millennials, don’t seem to understand the importance of AOC bringing in 439,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch and 5,000,000 views within 24 hours. (not including the view counts from other famous streamers, highlights, short clips from a range of social platforms). But if you're main social network is Facebook, you probably don't have a true understanding of the upcoming phenomena.
(not including the view counts from other famous streamers, highlights, short clips from a range of social platforms)
I’ll break it down.
ICYMI: here are the highlights of AOC’s night on Twitch from Washington Post. (Yes, that’s another million viewers. Also, here's a highlight video from one of the people she played with, add 2.4 million to that count. Anyone keeping count anymore?).
It’s been absolutely bonkers to me that holding what essentially amounts to a virtual rally for a sizable fraction of a million people, with millions watching the recording, is just getting shrugged at by important players in the political arena. Especially considering the majority of that community’s demographic is usually not voting, not engaged in the political process, and furthermore disenfranchised by the American culture that has neglected the value of younger generations.
Ever since the event, there haven’t been any good articles that covered exactly what happened and how truly historical of a night it was. Let me put it into perspective how impressive the 400k number is because those journalists failed you and me. To their credit, a lot of their political readers don’t play games or watch Twitch to know the benchmarks. I’m no political journalist, but if no one is going to connect the meteor size dots for us, I’ll do it.
Crash course in Historical Moments on Twitch
• Your average “popular” twitch streamers can get anywhere between 10–50k viewers, give or take, on a normal day. Maybe 80-100k for the best or most popular ones.
• The highest number of viewers recorded is by the “PlayStation” channel with their recent PS5 reveal event. It had about 1 million viewers.
• League of Legend, one of the most popular games watched online, is in the midst of their world championship, and the highest views they have recorded on Twitch is at ~500k-600k.
• The highest recorded number by an individual on Twitch is by Ninja (alias of a popstar video gamer, the blue-haired person you saw on ESPN). He was playing Fortnite at a Las Vegas tournament event and pulled in over 600k viewers.
Let’s process that. All the above were billion-dollar companies with their million-dollar flagship events, or in Ninja’s case, the #1 streamer who had been streaming for years, with 13+ million followers, playing the #1 watched game, at a big tournament. And all of those streams are targeted for the audience worldwide.
(Thanks, u/Fubi-FF, for putting that together)
Then comes AOC, a Junior Congresswoman, simply trying to get out the vote for the US election, explain some legislative policy all while playing some casual matches of Among Us (its the new video game fad) … and casually puts up numbers comparable to the most experienced and popular video gamers in the history of Twitch. That justifies my use of bonkers, right?
This isn't the first time AOC has shown the world a glimpse of the potential power of social media in its current 2020 form. In July, CSPAN’s Twitter post of AOC’s confrontation with a House Rep. Ted Yoho was viewed 12 million times in 24 hours. Back in July, AOC’s twitter had 7.8 million followers, three-months later, she’s at 9.4 million. Her social media game marketing strategy should be coveted. Truth be told, she could be doing a lot more according to the latest research published last year. We’ll forgive her, she’s been kind of busy lately. Just know what she has been doing is the tip of the iceberg.
Here is one implication:
Years from now, as AOC runs for senate or the presidency or where ever she decides to take her following, hundreds of thousands of viewers from the event and maybe millions over the next few weeks or months will remember and feel personally connected to AOC. She made them laugh and forget about the troubles of the world for a couple of hours playing a video game. They saw her for who she is, an average young American that enjoys playing video games with friends to take a break from the stressors of life. They saw her as one of them, not some esoteric politician on top of Capitol Hill.
“But who needs Twitch?”
Well, you might not, your organization might not, but an event like and what AOC has done with Insta, is one of the foretold dominos to fall to indicate that the younger generations are finally being connected. We just have to be the connecter and build with them the infrastructure to bridge the gap. Sure, TV interviews, watching committee hearings, rallies, being on the View and the Late Show, etc. can connect politicians to the voters and volunteers, but that is old school, and only common for the older generations. You remember seeing the headlines from 2014 about Millennials destroying the cable industry and just about every industry on the planet, right? Reality check, Millennials are now turning 40, with mortgages, and kids. Your traditional way to connect to voters and volunteers has been dwindling for a while. Adaptations are long overdue. While many politicians in the future will use Twitch streams or the equivalent to promote themselves and their platforms, most will remember AOC as the first willing to meet them where they are and most sincere to do so.
Let’s recall Sasha Issenberg’s book, Victory Lab, that was celebrated for examining how “extraordinarily sophisticated” political campaigns got in the decade of 2002–2012. While albeit may be worth applause to finally apply what is the equivalent to First Year marketing knowledge in undergrad to politics and curate personalized email blast lists to potential donors; that is mere child’s play in 2020. Twitter and Instagram came along and set the playbook on fire and watched political strategists put their head in the sand. Not understanding how to interact with the power of Social Media, they clung to their comfort zone of radio, TV, and basic email. They would rather ignore it than learn from it. I suppose we did see some political figures on a podcast for the first time this year. Nina Turner even started her own podcast. It’s catching on, slowly.
The silver lining of the pandemic is that it forced our entire society onto the internet, whether it was ready or not. COVID pushed the political industry’s back against the wall in what everyone is calling the most critical election of our lives and demanded adaptation to the digital age of information. The adaptation has been farthest from smooth and simple.
“We’re not even on Instagram or Twitter yet. You’re telling me there's more now?”
It's not the same, but it is a medium for entertainment and community for Gen Z and young Millennials. Wait, you’re not on Instagram or Twitter? It has been 14 years since Twitter was released and 10 years since Instagram came on the scene. I was in 8th grade then, granted I was among the first to navigate what no one thought would be the new frontier of the internet — where the majority of Americans communicate daily, where Gen Z is creating new businesses on a whim, where Fortune 500 businesses are investing in micro-influencers and yes, nano-influencers.
Alas, our leaders in Congress don’t know the difference between Google and Apple. But I know you do, right? Right?
I graduated college four years ago and heavily used Instagram. Today, Gen Z is using Instagram in a way that no one was using before, and I was in a very social greek life, to add to that it was during the 2016’s presidential election. Trust me, Social Media has evolved in ways that we could not imagine a decade ago when we were patting ourselves on the back for finally figuring out email blasts. The past 4 years have brought an even newer age of social media interaction. It’s as if we had dial-up social media in 2016 and upgraded in 2020 to the highest speed internet in Silicon Valley.
The older generations that preserve traditional norms within their industries refuse adaptation until they have enough staff in their twenties come along to bring about change themselves. The older generations do not want to acknowledge this shift in paradigm as anything important for many reasons.
I’ll keep it simple and briefly address some reasons. (Yes, this is the brief version).
Let’s be honest with ourselves. Most Baby Boomers and Gen X, let alone “political strategists” and politicians are elderly and un-engaged with youth culture. Don’t take it from me, ask the folks that sank 1.75 billion dollars in 6 months on Quibi how it went without consulting anyone outside the Baby Boomer generation. Quibi folded in that 6 months. That’s how it went. (Hint as to why: relying on star power celebrities is long over). This year, I became far too curious and frustrated with how disconnected older generations truly were. I surveyed around a hundred of them and they told me that the only people under 30 that they talk to are their children and family members — that’s the totality of their experience with any of the “younger” generations. It's safe to say they’re un-engaged from youth culture. Where did I find a hundred Baby Boomers and Gen Xers? Go to your local political party committee and truly look around. Ever since I’ve been involved in mine, I have been called a baby at least 15 times when folks find out my age. I’m 27. My highschool Overwatch team that I coach calls me a BBoomer (that’s not a typo, that’s a twitch emote). Believe me, I am not the poster child for the “youth”. But if I’m a boomer to them, what does that make real Boomers?
Maybe that’s why every campaign from City Council to Congress and every local and state political committee can’t seem to understand Instagram 101. (Disclaimer: The one extreme outlier is Qasim Rashid and his army of youth volunteers).
Personal story time: For 99.9% of campaigns I’ve followed this year on Instagram, one word can describe all of their digital outreach efforts: nonexistent. Some more insight as to why? It took 40-minutes of showcasing and answering basic questions to a political organization’s Board of Directors as to why they needed to invest in establishing and building an Instagram account.
They finally saw the value and demand but were at a loss as to what to do, what to post, how to start building a follower base, how to engage, etc. Thank goodness they recently found a young person to be on their board. (Furthermore, they should be thankful that youngster has a sister that is a leading expert in User Experience (UX) who takes him along to UXPA International Conferences as a babysitter). Still, you could tell they were disinterested and didn't want to learn the details and engage themselves. They couldn’t wrap their heads around why you should not treat Instagram the same way you do Facebook. It's like breaking a golden rule of social media. (PS: We can’t talk Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, and the others until we begin to crawl).
As is tradition, older generations don’t take anything from the youth seriously aka Pokémon go to the polls. (I can’t cringe any harder, I promise). The brightest political experts gave that talking point advice to a presidential candidate. What are the odds that they grasp a glimpse of insight as to what was happening here for AOC to hold a historical Twitch event? I’m going on a limb here and saying none. I like real-life examples, let’s keep them rolling. Turn on your local news, you’ll see daily warnings to older generations about basic phishing scams that have been around since dial-up. (No, the email with your Boss’s name from the email wadfe-vs45#@stopusingaol.com is not really your boss. Stop opening it. I’ll be here again to remind you of that next week when you forget before you send HackerGuy420 ten $100 gift cards. Yes, I’m talking to you, Dilbert).
The Digital Gap is indescribable. Let me just drop some quick tidbits for your next Zoom trivia night.
· Your average High Schooler has 1,000 followers on Instagram, and often have more than one Insta.
· Gen Z represents 2 out of every 5 Americans and influences $655 billion a year in purchasing power.
· 51% of the world population is under the age of 25.
· 40% of American Consumers are gen Z
· 98% of teens in the world own a smartphone.
Do I see the light bulb flickering yet? Are you starting to see the crisis?
AOC’s event is something unprecedented — a major politician doing something like this instead of carefully manufactured soundbite scripts or carefully screened interviews. Pundits and “experts” might not even know what to make of this. If this becomes a new model, it may be perceived as bad for the news media to be cut out of the middleman position between the people and their representatives. If you can hang with AOC online while she explains public policy and current affairs between rounds of a game, why would you go to NBC to see what she thinks instead? Remember, most of don’t have cable. The fact that no one over 35 knows what twitch is or why Amazon bought them for $970 million should be a flag for you. Maybe you didn’t know that the video gaming industry is now a $159 billion a year (and drastically growing) business, making it bigger than the NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL combined.
The truth is, AOC’s unconventional tactic is the first effective Supply-Side action we have seen in an attempt to bridge the Age Gap. The time is now that we recognize, as gatekeepers, that we have a duty to bridge the gap, not the other way around. The demand is there, we simply have to meet it. AOC became a household name for people that play video games overnight. That is no hyperbole. She just flipped the script and rewrote half of Victory Lab in a single night. The many that are politically disenfranchised by our culture found someone to subscribe to in AOC. Her Twitch channel has 707,000 followers. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill youth pandering event either; AOC has long been a gamer before she entered the political arena with her passion for League of Legends.
I haven’t taken you on the deep plunge to see the value of Instagram when it is done right. I will tell you that only using your Instagram and Twitter to say Happy Birthday to your local and state elected officials is not how you engage on social media. *ahem* I’m looking at you, county and state political party organizations. Your average political organization and nonprofit is not even aware they should start building an airplane, while AOC is landing on the moon.
Why is the political and nonprofit industry always the last to adapt marketing research?
Why did it take a global pandemic for them to realize you don’t only have to hold fundraisers in person, or that you don’t need to force your volunteers to drive to a random location to phone bank with an 8x11 script in front of them, or that you can actually engage and inspire your followers instead of holding a rally?
The potential of Gen Z is being actualized by Gen Z, imagine if they had our support in building this bridge.
“We are Gen Z — born into tragedy and movements and protests,” said Maxwell Frost, 23, national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the anti-gun violence movement formed by survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
Frost said the young organizers’ goal is to foster a civically engaged generation that not only votes in massive numbers, but plays a pivotal role in holding the White House and congressional leaders accountable. They feel emboldened by the work of young liberal leaders, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in pushing a more liberal agenda.- WaPo (10/29/20)
The opportunities to engage the largest demographics are all around us, we just have to recognize we’re in a crisis of disconnection. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Now, you know there is one. Gen Z will not wait for you.
As in any business, you either adapt or get left behind. For many nonprofits, social services, and the entire political industry have been actively choosing to get left behind.
It’s like when the Model T came out and some people were actively ignoring it saying, “my horse is better!” Or when the debit/credit card came out and so many that refused to adapt kept hoards of cash laying around for purchases. (Wait, I don’t remember what change look like).
The digital age will not wait for you and its been here. You can choose to be the one that rings the alarm for your organization, or hit the emergency meeting button in Among Us. You don't have to endure the crisis. If you need help ringing the alarm, let me know, I’ll bring the gong.
