on-message

[on-mes-ij, awn‐]

adjective

1. focused on the central theme or official message of a political, business, or other organization.

   The candidate's promises are on-message and echo the party platform. Your company’s ads should be entertaining and on-message.

on message

adjective

1. (on-message when prenominal) adhering to or reflecting the official line of a political party, government, or other organization

Word History and Origins

Origin of on-message¹

First recorded in 1995–2000; on ( def. ) + message ( def. )

Example Sentences

Writing in the Atlantic in 2024, Ali Breland marveled at how Kirk could assert that Haitian immigrants are threatening to enslave the American population on his podcast and then, days later, deliver a strictly on-message diatribe about the cost of living to undergraduates at a campus event.

Read more on Slate

About a dozen Donald Trump campaign aides spoke to Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about how their candidate strayed from a hitherto on-message campaign to embark on a series of offensive, threatening and self-defeating verbal adventures that have left his team utterly demoralized heading into Election Day.

Read more on Salon

His answers were smooth, and relentlessly on-message, constantly reminding the audience that for all of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s promises, Democrats have held the White House for the past three and a half years.

Read more on BBC

After so much exposure to the Western world, the athletes will probably undergo a gruelling “debrief” after returning home to ensure they stay on-message, said Lee, who is also the co-host of the BBC World Service’s Lazarus Heist podcast.

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For four slickly produced and relentlessly on-message evenings, the Republican party positioned itself as a welcoming place for all Americans and the former president as a uniting force who would return the nation to greatness.

Read more on BBC