Sesame Street and Evoking Emotion

Feist’s recent guest appearance on Sesame Street has something very important to tell us about political media – and it has nothing to do with cookie access laws or numerical sponsorship regulation.  Her clip is a fantastic illustration of how powerful intangible factors like facial expressions and body language are in evoking emotions.

Watching this video puts a smile on my face and it does the same thing to everyone else I know who’s watched it.  Yes, some of it is the muppets and the novelty of watching an indie star dance around a kids set, but watch her face and body movements, Feist is genuinely, infectiously happy:

Fiest bounces, bops, sways and grins through the entire song, either she’s a fantastic actress or she’s having the time of her life.  As we watch her, we can’t help but smile along.

Deep psychology is at work here.  We’re hardwired to respond to the emotions of the people surrounding us, especially facial expressions.  More importantly, we do this subconsciously, which makes us excellent at spotting a fake.  Acting is basically the art of faking these responses and as any good actor will tell you, it’s much easier to elicit the emotional response in themselves than to try and mimic the forms of the emotion. 

Intangibles like this play a huge role in the effectiveness of a political ad and throwing on a grip-and-grin smile doesn’t come close to cutting it.  A good political ad has to evoke the proper emotion in the candidate during filming to be effective on screen.  Virtually everyone who runs for office is an amateur at this and there’s a real art to directing them – it takes time, creativity and patience. 

Usually, the best thing is to find something the candidate genuinely feels strongly about, then the intangibles like Feist’s smile come naturally.  The entire process is different for everyone and this is one of the big reasons cookie cutter ads are so ineffective.  Personal attention matters.