by Joe Reddington
Let’s talk about click bait. It’s one of the scourges of the modern internet. Advertisers pay by the view so the incentives for websites are to get people to click on the page regardless of if the page is relevant or informative. That’s why you see headlines like “You wouldn’t believe what this middle-class mum does for money” rather than “Middle-class mum buys ice-cream van”. It’s a fundamentally dishonest form of advertising used to drive up some numbers while simultaneously making the world a less truthful place.
Which brings me to the subject lines of the emails that the Labour party sends to members:
What’s the problem? The problem is this is so obviously click-bait. If I get an email from an address that seems familiar with the subject line “Thank you” I’m going to assume I did something nice for someone and I click on it half expecting a nice warm glow instead of the deep disappointment that I’ve been tricked into opening a campaign email.
“Telling you first”
You are “telling me first”? I suspect not, I suspect that you are telling millions of people on your email list first, many of whom open your email expecting to be told something useful and urgent only to find that it’s standard political boilerplate.
Do we really want to put obvious and direct untruths into the subject line? I mention it only because teaching the voters to make a connection between the Labour Party and direct untruths might be, you know, suboptimal…
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