NFL Draft and Peloton Classes Offer a Road Map for Virtual Conventions

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- It’s the summer of a presidential election year: That means America’s major political parties will throw big pep rallies where 50,000 or more people gather to network, don cheesy stars-and-stripes apparel, and get pumped up for Election Day.

Or they would if there weren’t the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing to reckon with.

In the “before times,” Democrats were planning to hold their national convention in Milwaukee in mid-July. They postponed the event until mid-August, and presumptive party nominee Joe Biden has raised the possibility that it will be at least partly virtual. Last month, the Democratic National Committee passed rule changes to allow for remote voting by delegates.

Democratic National Convention Committee spokeswoman Katie Peters said in a statement that organizers “will continue to monitor the impact Covid-19 is having on our country and to follow the guidance of public-health experts” as they formulate plans.

Republicans have marched on undaunted with their schedule for a fully in-person national convention in August. The host city was supposed to be Charlotte, N.C. President Trump threatened to pull the convention out of the state after Democratic Governor Roy Cooper said the event would have to be scaled back and abide by social distancing guidelines. On June 3, the Republican National Committee confirmed it was seeking another site for Trump to accept the party’s nomination for president, with procedural business remaining in Charlotte. The RNC didn’t respond to requests for comment. (The convention’s marquee events will likely move to Jacksonville, Fla., according to reports.) 

For Democrats then, a packed arena and speeches in front of roaring crowds are unlikely in 2020. Even for Republicans, there’s no guarantee of a good turnout with the spread of the coronavirus and a potential switch of venue. Organizers of both conventions will have to change their playbooks.

Television pros have some suggestions. Dan Abrams, a former MSNBC anchor and founder of Mediaite LLC, says a successful virtual approach to amping up voter energy will “feel like a Peloton class,” referring to the stationary-bike brand that’s been a popular quarantine purchase. In those classes, the instructor pedals in a dark room with mood lighting while exercisers following at home can watch their progress on a leaderboard, videoconference with others, or send each other virtual high-fives.

Convention organizers could, hypothetically, replace the Peloton instructor with the candidate, the dark room with the Grand Canyon or a Black Lives Matter protest, the music with clapping sounds, and the leaderboard with scrolling reaction tweets. Done well, it would feel participatory and alive. (Done wrong, though, it could be “pretty bad,” Abrams concedes.)

Tim Brooks, an entertainment historian and former executive at the Lifetime network, speculates that the prime-time speeches might take a cue from the videoconferenced 2020 NFL draft, during which league Chairman Roger Goodell called out the names of selected athletes in his basement. Behind him was a large TV screen displaying a grid that looked like the title sequence of The Brady Bunch, with about a dozen people dialed in and clapping to the camera. More than 55 million viewers watched the three-day event, according to the NFL.

Technology opens up more options than were available even for the 2016 conventions. Producers are able to splice live feeds of people from different locations into one smooth picture that can be streamed to a television, tablet, or smartphone. Vizrt, a Norwegian media company, developed a method to make a person in one country appear on camera with a person in another as if they are sitting in the same room. Convention organizers could use this kind of technology and scale it up, making it look like delegates all over the U.S. are voting together.

“My sense is there’s going to be a certain amount of symbolic activity that can also be preproduced and taped that’s around individual delegates voting and announcing,” says Michael Hirschorn, an Emmy-winning TV producer. “The pseudo-sense of hundreds of members in delegation voting in unison, I think, can have quite a pop.” Poignant and stirring video clips with the candidates could be produced before the event as they have been done in the past.

This time around, the Democratic Party will have to plan an unconventional debut for Biden’s running mate. In 2008, Republican candidate John McCain had plucked his vice presidential pick, Alaska’s then-Governor Sarah Palin, from near obscurity. She gave a rousing speech during the Republican National Convention about breaking glass ceilings, earning a minutes-long standing ovation. Biden’s running mate won’t get that reception from a big, in-person crowd, however rousing her speech might be. (Biden has said he will choose a woman.)

Prime-time convention speeches don’t get as much traction on TV as they used to. In 2016 about 32 million people watched Trump accept the Republican nomination; he got 7 million fewer viewers than McCain eight years earlier, according to ratings consultant Nielsen. With conventions now livestreamed on YouTube and key moments consumed via clips on social media, producers are incentivized to keep things fast-paced and engaging. But that’s where media was headed even before social distancing.

“On some level this is just pushing things toward a logical conclusion,” says Hirschorn. “And I think that there are going to be new and interesting aesthetics that emerge out of this moment.” —With Greg Giroux, a reporter for Bloomberg Government

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