Professionalizing Campaign Text Spam: How Technical Marketing Rhetoric Influences Rapid Change to the Professional Communication of Politics

In this brief paper, we report findings from an ideological rhetorical analysis of the technical marketing materials of politically focused peer-to-peer texting service companies Peerly, Hustle, RumbleUp, and MudShare. Although other studies have focused on the efficacy and effects of SMS texts in political communication, the technical marketing used by P2P texting service companies is an understudied phenomenon. Through ideological rhetoric, technical marketing constructs narrative framings that control how campaigns use P2P texting as a political communication tool. In the sample of technical marketing materials studied, all of the P2P texting service companies emphasized the efficacy and speed advantages of the technology. Additionally, Peerly and Hustle highlighted grassroots organizing and hyper-personal communication while RumbleUp and MudShare took a more business to business tone focused on investment return and financial expediency. All four P2P texting service companies evince techno-capitalistic ideology in their technical marketing materials, which functions to obscure the potential harms and possible solutions to the oversaturation of SMS political marketing.