Byron Donalds talks media decentralization and advocates for ‘long-form’ videos from politicians

Gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds gave a glimpse into his vision of the future of media and his own communication strategy to the Florida Association of Broadcasters this week.

Donalds talked about the “trust issue” in politics being something that extends to the entire culture, a problem compounded by what he called the “five minute news cycle” driven by people “thumbing through their social media feeds” in search of new content.

“What makes it really difficult is you can see something explode on social media, and then before you get an opportunity to address it, you have a segment of your population who truly believes it,” he said.

To counter that, he said politicians must “overcommunicate in all mediums” to create a “constant flow of information.”

The “old media” is increasingly rejected, he argued, with podcasting and other forms augmenting the amount of sources available and requiring a diversification of strategy via “overcommunicating in all spectrum of media” to reach audiences.

“So if somebody who’s an avid social media user talks to their buddy who listens to, like, talk radio on the drive time, they have a conversation. And, you know, the guy, the social media guy will say, well, I heard Byron said this, and his buddy goes, no, no, no. He was on the local radio affiliate. Here’s what he said. And this is going to be a far more decentralized media environment going into the future than anything we’ve experienced in the past. And I think that leaders have to be able to master and utilize all forms in order for there to essentially be some semblance of trust in messaging.”

Donalds also discussed diminishing returns in short clips, which are often used by politicians to distill their messages, likening them in an ad everyone has seen many times.

“When everybody’s giving you short bursts, 15-second, 30-second clips, where you can tell that it’s been spliced, it all starts to become noise. It becomes white noise after a while. It’s like running the same commercial, you know, let’s call it, 3000 rating points on broadcast, which everybody’s excited about for your budgets. I get it. But that saturation comes to an end. Because marginal utility has set in, and each additional ad just doesn’t have the same effectiveness.”

To that end, Donalds has taken to posting entire events, with an eye toward creating “long-form” digestible content for people willing to invest time “in this environment of decentralized media and decentralized communications”

“The 30 minute interview will catch the attention of people because they’re all they are accustomed to seeing is 30 seconds. The 30 minute interview can be digested in the car. Especially with cell phones today. A 30 minute interview can be digested while you’re cooking dinner. A 30 minute interview could be digested while you’re doing laundry. A 30 minute interview could be digested while you’re cleaning your bathroom. And I think that there is a universe where people want long form communication.”