Trumped: How Marketers Missed Out On Americans In The Middle

One industry navigates a nation divided. 

- Patrick Coffee

The polls were wrong. The strategy was wrong. The data was wrong.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 9, 2016, 18 months of carefully weighted, religiously updated forecasts evaporated into the ether as Donald J. Trump scored a series of upset victories to secure his status as the 45th president of the United States.

But the election post-mortem hasn’t just been a crisis of confidence for the number-crunching community.

It shook people up on the client side and the agency side, according to 30-year ad industry veteran and consultant Avi Dan. He said, “The belief that we have reached a very sophisticated stage in data gathering and analysis has been shattered.” Crispin Porter + Bogusky chairman and co-founder Chuck Porter added, “If most analysts were so wrong about Trump and Brexit, are they really right about your airline or your car brand or your cereal?”

One New York agency executive described her team’s post-November mindset as “shell-shocked.” But where some see crisis, president Paul Jankowski of the Nashville, Tenn.-based New Heartland Group sees opportunity in a bitterly divided nation.

REACHING THE GREAT MIDDLE

Jankowski sometimes asks marketing executives to share their anonymous takes on those who’ve been lumped into “Middle America” or, to use a more loaded term, “Trump’s America.”

“You hear lines like: hillbillies, Bible beaters, right-wing extremists, modernized rednecks who are stuck in the past, wearing their ignorance and intolerance proudly,” he says of those brutally candid conversations. “It paints a picture of dismissiveness—a group that’s underserved. It’s not all country music, and it’s not all red states.”