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When Does a Twerk, Dress, and a Party Send A Message?
How the world sees women in leadership is more than a debate about messaging a casual moment for a state senator
If you want to learn about marketing messaging, political debates often give a crash course in messaging lessons that work for marketing as much as they do about the history and civic issues they address. The recent debate on the 28-year-old Rhode Island congresswoman Tiara Mack's TikTok video is an example. It not only shows how messaging overlap can occur online — and often does — but also how messaging overlap brings together various issues in a debate, making discussions more intense and involving more parties than intended.
Rhode Island congresswoman Tiara Mack demoed a twerk dance in a video. Twerk is a dance craze made by combining the words twist and jerk. It is a hypersexual movement of the buttocks. Mack did her dance in an upside-down handstand, with the video ending with her saying “Vote for Senator Mack”. The video garnered much attention and debate.
TikTok temporarily banned the video but Mack defended the video, noting that it was not a violation of TikTok’s rules regarding graphic material in a video. Emphasizing the underlying message, Mack mentioned that people “should pay attention to who talks…
