Dollar Shave Club<\/a> \/ YouTube<\/p>\nAnd now politicians are honing their direct to consumer game.<\/p>\n
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, has The Real Food Show on YouTube, where he cooks with guests while talking about food and health.<\/p>\n
His colleague, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, has gone further.<\/p>\n
The Great American Road Trip follows Duffy and his family around America in something resembling reality television.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s Cabinet is turning into a collection of YouTubers.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this as another example of America\u2019s decline. But doing so misses the fact that these politicians are bringing a disruptor\u2019s business model to politics that fits with their two fingers to the establishment ethos.<\/p>\n
Dollar Shave Club was a massive success. But this success came at a cost \u2013 to Gillette.<\/p>\n
Gillette had spent decades building an industrial machine involving manufacturing, advertising agencies, retailers and supermarkets. Dollar Shave Club called out the absurdity of this business model, and how it offered little value to the consumer.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you like spending $20 a month on razors?\u201d it quipped. \u201c$19 go to Roger Federer.\u201d<\/p>\n
So who is Gillette in the modern-day political equivalent?<\/p>\n
Sadly, it\u2019s the media.<\/p>\n
Ministers used to hold press conferences and issue press releases to reach their audience. They needed RT\u00c9, the BBC, or CNN to distribute their message. This was the political equivalent of selling your product through Tesco \u2013 which cedes a lot of power to Tesco.<\/p>\n
Editors and producers chose which politicians appeared, how long they got, what questions they were asked and which parts of their answers appeared in the finished programme or article.<\/p>\n
The politician might have supplied the raw material, but the media company owned the packaging and the distribution. Worse, from the politician\u2019s perspective, troublesome journalists had a nasty habit of asking difficult questions.<\/p>\n
The internet turns this dynamic on its head.<\/p>\n
Kennedy can make a programme about cooking, call it health policy, publish it himself and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people without facing any questions. One recording can become a YouTube programme, podcast, Instagram Reel, TikTok, YouTube Short and dozens of social posts. Your in-house production team becomes more important than your media relations team.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t happening because traditional media suddenly stopped being useful. It is happening because its monopoly over political distribution is eroding.<\/p>\n
The Reuters Institute\u2019s 2026 Digital News Report contains a remarkable milestone. Across 48 markets, social media and video networks are now the most widely used way of accessing online news, used by 54% of respondents, compared with 51% using news organisations\u2019 websites and apps.<\/p>\n
The rise of social channels for news is happening across all age groups. YouTube alone is used for news by 34%. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are the only three countries where TV news trumps \u2013 or is on a par with watching online news.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s driving this growth? Personalities it seems. 27% of respondents to the Reuters report get some form of news from news focused creators or influencers. Respondents said creators are more entertaining, easier to understand and more relatable than traditional news outlets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
American politicians aren\u2019t the only ones who are following the audiences into social media. In Poland, former president Andrzej Duda has his own programme on Kana\u0142 Zero, a YouTube-based news operation with more than two million subscribers.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s Narendra Modi, Argentina\u2019s Javier Milei and El Salvador\u2019s Nayib Bukele have all built enormous direct social-media operations around their own brands. Modi, for example, has over 106 million Instagram followers.<\/p>\n
These aren\u2019t simply politicians who are \u201cgood at social media\u201d.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re new media entrepreneurs, who are building political and cultural capital, rather than financial capital. But there\u2019s a new and slightly different edge to the latest political social attempts like Kennedy\u2019s kitchen, Duffy\u2019s family road trip or Gavin Newsome\u2019s political podcast.<\/p>\n
Their primary focus is to show a softer side of a politician or show their deep thinking, their family man credentials, and where necessary, suck up to the US President. They\u2019re naked attempts to build the comms infrastructure for a candidate seeking higher office.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s undoubtedly more on the way.<\/p>\n
Positioning yourself for a presidential run? You used to write a book, now you need a podcast or YouTube show. Less Dreams of My Father, more like Reels of My Father.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The great trick of direct-to-consumer wasn\u2019t simply cutting out retailers and wasteful marketing. Challenger brands like Dollar Shave Club replaced expensive middlemen with genuinely appealing founders, jokes, social stunts, memes and videos people actually wanted to share.<\/p>\n
They felt fresh, and they offered real value to consumers.<\/p>\n
Some of the needier candidates looking to build their political profile using\u00a0direct-to-consumer tactics have forgotten this. They\u2019re using tired TV formats, there\u2019s no humour in evidence and no value offered to potential voters.<\/p>\n
These guys may understand culture wars, but they sure don\u2019t get culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Steve Dempsey is a media and technology expert and commentator.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Dempsey THE MODERN DIRECT-to-consumer boom began in the late 2000s, when a few things fell into place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,16529,18,19,17,220644,284460,14162,1114,187],"class_list":["post-672952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-digital-marketing","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-media-industry","tag-political-communication","tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr","tag-social-media","tag-trump"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117215130975276845","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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