Trust Beats Message Discipline: Why Political Persuasion Needs a Rewrite
For decades, campaigns have treated persuasion as a simple equation. Poll the right voters, and you can distill down the perfect message. Package that up in the right creative, get it in front of said voters, and presto chango, you’ve won.
But the audiences we’re trying to reach have changed faster than the playbook. In 2025, the campaigns that still prize message discipline over emotional truth are losing the trust battle before their ads even launch.
Across the political spectrum, we’re seeing that the electorate is over talking points. They crave authenticity — stories that sound like something they’d tell a friend, not something written for a talking points memo. And the data bears this out.
This summer, we tested a conventional political attack ad against a simple, direct-to-camera story from a real voter. The lower production version wasn’t just more persuasive and mobilizing. It was more engaging, trustworthy, and memorable.
This echos what many of us are beginning to see in our campaign postmortems and creative analyses. Content that feels emotionally authentic consistently outperforms polished, on-message creative, often by double digit margins.
The reason is simple. Trust has overtaken message discipline as the new driver of persuasion. In an age of disinformation (and AI slop) people aren’t asking, “Do I agree?” first. They’re asking, “Do I believe you?” A campaign that sounds rehearsed fails that test immediately.
This shift requires an overhaul of how we approach creative strategy for our campaigns. For years, political advertising has been built around a cycle of polling, talking points, and tightly scripted spots. But real people don’t speak in bullet points. The villains in our lives aren’t shaded in black and white and accompanied by sinister background music.
Now, I’m not advocating tossing discipline out the door. But if we are to win, creative discipline in campaigns must look different. Instead of controlling every word, campaigns need to invest in curating and amplifying genuine stories with the same strategic rigor we once applied to slogans and logos. It’s harder work, but it’s the only path to credibility in a media environment where audiences are experts at detecting (and rejecting) spin.
The most persuasive creative isn’t the spot that looks perfect. It’s the one that feels true. That’s why the next generation of campaigns will need to build relationships with real people, let them tell their stories (imperfections and all), and show those stories in ways that actually connect. It’s real creative — the kind that wins.
If campaigns want to meet this moment, they need to let go of the illusion of control. Message discipline still matters, but trust matters more. Voters don’t care about polish. They care about truth.
Gwen McGarry is a Senior Vice President of Creative at M+R, where she advises campaigns and advocacy organizations on strategy, creative, and data-driven persuasion that connects with real people.
