Sketching Republicans

Cartoons are lifting our social media coverage of the American election

There’s only so much you can say with words. For everything else, there’s KAL. Here he is, flying around in his pyjamas:

But normally he’s got a pencil and a notepad. Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher has been the resident cartoonist at The Economist for 38 years. His satirical sketches sit alongside our correspondents’ analyses, often summing up an entire story in a single image. Since last summer, The Economist has had a 10-person editorial social-media team, so it was only right that we recruit KAL into our coverage of this year’s American election (more on these plans here).

When I first spoke to KAL about what he was planning, he said he would be at the party conventions in person and taking his sketchpad with him. Even better, he planned on producing video sketches. As a social-media editor, I was delighted! We worked out a plan for how and where to post them, and then posted them on our test Facebook and Twitter accounts to see what they looked like.

Over the course of the Republican convention, KAL produced eight animated sketches. They’re all on our Facebook page but here’s one of Eric Trump:

These animated sketches reached several million people on Facebook. And 27% of the viewers — 237,000 people — watched to the end of the clips. This metric is important for us because it tells us to what extent our viewers are actually engaging with our videos. It’s better than just looking at the number of three-second views.

Seven of the eight videos were quick caricature sketches, but the final one was a full animated cartoon with a story and a robot arm detaching Donald Trump’s hair. It was drawn by KAL and animated by Peter Winfield.

This video performed really well, but when I took a look at the data on the post I could see that most of the viewers who dropped off did so in the first few seconds. That’s to be expected, of course — Facebook users are notorious scrollers. But I am sure that we could use KAL and Peter’s skills to make the first few seconds more eye-grabbing. How do you think they could do it? Take a look at the one-minute video and let me know your thoughts.

With the Democrats in Philly this week, they’ll no doubt give KAL plenty of inspiration for more satire. Let’s see how we can share his sketches on social media this time around, in a new battle between the Republicans and the Dems.

Adam Smith is deputy community editor at The Economist.