The next time you hear someone blame inflation on stimulus checks that Americans got four years ago or workers finally getting much-needed pay bumps, we must kindly remind them that corporate profits are at a 70-year-high! At a time when prices are way up and the average American feels unhappy about their personal economic plight, our initiative to amplify awareness of “greedflation” — the concept that rising costs of goods are the result of corporate profiteering and monopolization of markets — began as a way to address misinformation about the economy and the deception of the American public. With just a handful of companies dominating each industry, corporations are raising prices because they can and doing so will benefit shareholders, not because they need to. Our greedflation video aims to expose the unsightly truth behind the glittering, well-packaged corporate lies.
Our objective with this video project was to provide an antidote to the wrong-headed messaging in mainstream media. Most major news outlets would have you believe that rising prices were the result of a bad economy or government stimulus checks. And corporate media companies were not even approaching the topic of greedflation when we initially posted this video. Because of that, consumers and working Americans were left in the dark. With this project, we sought to educate viewers about misplaced “blame” for inflation and put the onus on the government — not consumers — to curb corporate power, and on corporations to rein in their monopolistic abuses.
One of the unique challenges of digital education is attempting to counter the power of mainstream media and the deception resulting from misinformation campaigns. In this case, we were emboldened by the fact that the paradox presented by “greedflation” was not being covered by mainstream media outlets at all. The reality of “greedflation” was, at the time, being largely obfuscated by the corporate media. Why? Because corporate power looms large in our society, and politics.
Misinformation about the economy has infected every corner of the internet, and it can be daunting to challenge those narratives. Short, graphically compelling, fact-driven explainers have proved to be an effective way of penetrating the often obtuse, or even hostile, social media algorithms. With social media as our primary conduit to our 10 million followers and beyond, we are beholden to its algorithmic inconsistencies and biases. Breaking through with our messaging is not easy when our competitors are corporate media giants who rarely, if ever, rely on organic posting.
As we developed our script for the video we occasionally ran into challenges with our research due to an apparent lack of corporate transparency. We often had to work around the veil of secrecy shrouding many of these corporations from interrogation and dig deeper in order to present a solidly fact-based and digestible narrative explainer for our viewers.
Our team takes a unique approach to creating our educational social content. From ideation to publishing, this video was touched by many talented individuals. In this particular instance, it began with our co-founder and presenter, Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Reich has a long history of holding corporations responsible. He first called out the corporate robber barons for “greedflation” back in a 2022 article for The Guardian. After gauging the response to the article and Reich’s Substacks on the topic, our team decided the message needed to be heard by more people.
With every single video, we aim to reach the individual. We have a devoted core audience, but we don’t just want to preach to the choir. We want to reach the undecided voter in Wisconsin, the teen whose TikTok algorithms have begun to betray him, the cash-strapped mom who wonders why she can’t afford more at the grocery store and the gas pump.
Partnering with Swayable, we performed persuasion “lift” studies on our greedflation video. Through testing using randomized control trials, we found that this video was capable of moving public opinion by more than 19 points. (For reference, moving people by 5 points on such a test is considered a success.) We asked survey participants whether they blamed for-profit corporations or the government for the increased cost of goods. After watching our video, right-leaning viewers in Pennsylvania, for example, moved 17.4 points towards agreeing that for-profit companies were responsible. “Biden defectors” (who had voted for him in 2020 but weren’t planning to again) in the critical swing state of Wisconsin moved an astounding 19.2 points towards “for-profit corporations.”
With nearly 2.8 million (completely organic) views and more than 300,000 engagements, our video stands out as resonant both with our core audience and with non-followers. Even further, after we started using the term “greedflation” on social media, we noticed a huge leap in usage of the term in the media. Suddenly, people were willing to talk about this critical (and complex) topic in a much more honest way.
