Candidate security looms large, political ads at gas stations, fundraising on the right, reaching voters via influencers
Inside: Yale puts spotlight on candidate security, digital outdoor ads look attractive in 2024, how fundraisers on the right navigate the second Trump era, how campaigns can engage influencers
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1 - Yale’s campaign school adds ‘candidate security’ to its program
It’s a sad state of affairs, but personal safety and security is something candidates have to think about. And The Campaign School at Yale University, which has trained female candidates across the political spectrum and world since 1994, has added candidate security to its 2024 curriculum.
“This was something that we really didn’t deal with before,” said Patti Russo, executive director of the school. “Now we’ve got people stalking you, trolling you, videotaping your kids going to school.”
Russo, who’s currently reviewing applications for her 28th class in June, continued: “We are seeing more and more of our grads who are candidates who are being stalked by their opponents or just by local, difficult people. So we want to prepare them. These are things that when I was starting my career over 30 years ago, these were just not things that we ever had to deal with, but we do [now].
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2 - Why an explosion in gas station, bus stop and other digital out of home ads might be coming this cycle
While much attention has, rightly, focused on the maturation of the OTT/CTV ad market (spoiler: 2024 is going to see $$$ in that direction), another ad channel has been maturing too: digital out of home. C&E’s Sean J. Miller reports on what that might mean for 2024.
This cycle could present PACs and groups with the chance to take advantage of this ecosystem, which covers everything from screens at gas stations, bus stops and taxis to massive digital billboards next to major roads.
Katrina Moore, a sales director on the political/advocacy team at StackAdapt, said one of the reasons she’s excited for DOOH this cycle is the fact that the targeting has gotten better. What remains tricky, however, is navigating the publishers’ approval processes.
“Some will say, ‘I’ll accept anything that’s not a candidate ad [or] I’ll accept anything that’s a PSA ad, but not candidate,’” she said. “I think a lot of ad tech vendors do often have deals in place where they’ve already negotiated with the digital out-of-home vendors about who’s going to accept political, what kind of political will they accept so that you can just pop the deal in place and get going that way.”
She added: “It’s definitely a growing space and not everyone’s going to be comfortable taking digital home inventory, but I think it’s a great tactic — especially in use cases like you’re trying to hit a very specific demographic. [It’s also] great for, like, neighborhood targeting.”
“The only issue is that digital out of home is a little bit harder to track,” Moore said. “But they are becoming more sophisticated in their ways with tracking , say, X number of people [saw the ad] based on foot traffic [in the area].”
3 - Fundraising copywriting on the right in the second Trump era
Quinn Huckeba, an RNC alum and current copywriter at Politicoin, shares her take on how fundraisers on the right should think about copywriting in the second coming of Trump.
You may have heard the adage: was Napoleon a product of his times, or were the times a product of Napoleon? In 2024, political copywriters find themselves asking similar questions.
“Does my client support Trump? Should I invoke the name of Trump to boost my fundraising copy? Should I try to write in the style of Trump? Will unsubscribes skyrocket if I mention Trump? Will engagement skyrocket if I mention Trump?”
But in reality, donors don’t give to Trump because he’s a businessman, billionaire, or Republican. His unprecedented success was always his ability to say plainly what his voters were already thinking. There is no sugarcoating, no beating around the bush, and no legalese.
The truth is: all of these questions are extraneous. This is good news for good, conservative copywriters. It means we can stop asking the Trump question.
“What was the most shocking thing my donor base saw on the news today? What was the biggest challenge my audience faced this month? What kind of language makes me feel small? What kind of language invokes my ability to make a difference?”
The ins and outs of influencer outreach
Curtis Hougland is co-founder of People First, the first influencer agency specializing in politics and advocacy founded in 2018.
More campaigns are turning to influencers to build trust and persuade voters — particularly in diverse communities. This is happening, in part, because voters are relying less on the media or political endorsements for guidance on how to cast their votes.
Case in point, the Biden campaign has already announced a social media war room for influencers.
Still, there are going to be some hurdles to climb in this new realm of voter contact. These early-adopter campaigns must quickly learn that popularity is not persuasion, and how voters know a friend from a fake.
Why Influencers Now?
Voter distrust in media, politicians, and government is at an all time high. Instead, voters increasingly rely on their communities and peers to inform decisions about candidates and issues.
“Asked who they trust for election information, Americans were much more likely to say ‘friends and family’ than they were ‘poll results’ or the ‘news media,’” according to recent polling by YouGov for The Economist.
The embrace of influencers was paved by the rise of digital relational organizing – the buzzword of the 2020 election – which accelerated recognition that the messenger matters as much as the message in campaign media. Local or so-called micro influencers are authentic members of the community, and it should surprise no one outside the beltway that they better understand what residents in their neighborhoods want than consultants.
This study for the DGA speaks to higher recall from Virginians than campaigns in “digital door knocking” through micro influencers.
Influencers Are a Trap for Campaigns
Any campaign having attempted to recruit influencers will understand how much work goes into the practice: identifying, credentialing, recruiting, negotiating, managing, approving, and distributing posts, videos, ads, memes, and other content at scale.
With that in mind, here’s some guidance as the cycle takes the training wheels off the hottest tactic in brand marketing:
Popularity is Not Persuasion: Taylor Swift is not the answer to an influencer strategy. Celebrities don’t influence elections. Celebrity influencers don’t actually share the same experiences or connections as members of the community. They are aspirational versus real. Exceptional versus real. As a result, the result is awareness, not persuasion. The one exception being tactics such as Hometown Heroes.
Identity Matters: Voters trust their peers, neighbors, and communities. Fortunately, campaigns can now source influencers matching highly specific voter segments for the first time – influencers who share districts/cities/counties/states, ethnicities, professions, employers, genders, ages, parties, religions, patient conditions, and even affinities with diverse voter segments.
Influence Is a Media Mix: An influencer strategy looks a lot like a paid digital media mix model, in which different influencers drive different outcomes for a campaign if blended together correctly:
Macroinfluencers (100,000+ followers) generate awareness, but most of their followers are out of district or state, and their content is the least persuasive
Midinfluencers (20,000 to 100,000) drive strong consideration among voters especially if they match specific voter segments
Microinfluencers (2,000-20,000 followers) generate the highest recall and persuasion, especially when run as white listed social ads, because they are the most authentic, personal and real
You Get What You Pay For: Volunteer influencer campaigns (user generated content) rarely work. If campaigns want quality content on-time, on-message, and access to proper rights and usages, they have to pay influencers equitably. Pollsters, staffers, consultants, and many canvassers are paid, and so too should a passionate voter who raises their hand to create a campaign video on Instagram or a post on Nextdoor. The Dunns are the face of political ads in 2024, and they deserve to be partners.
Voters Want Real: Political TV ads look more and more like TikTok videos these days. In a recent study by Meta evaluating all ads on all its platforms, lo-fi, peer-to-peer content not only generated higher recall but higher conversion than studio produced ads.
Voters simply respond to people who share their values and experiences – their in-groups. The word influencer is often a euphemism for real people sharing real experiences with their communities, and campaigns cannot afford to ignore TikTok, the epicenter of community activism in 2024.
The number one factor in the success of an influencer post is whether the creator shared something personal in relation to the candidate or issue. Length doesn’t actually matter if the content tells a personal and emotional story. This reality is why influencer content achieves higher performance than campaign ads with the same message.
Campaigns are slowly learning how to organize personal stories from real people. It’s really no different than door knocking, and if done authentically, it’ll have a large impact on elections up and down the ballot.
Editor’s picks
Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide (AP)
Meet the women who help power Maryland’s political campaigns (Baltimore Banner)
New RNC memo gives details of merger with Trump campaign (CNN)
Why the third-party role in 2024 is so unpredictable (NBC)
The Girls on the Bus - season one (Max)
In campaigns ‘not my job’ is never an option
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This week Democratic Governors Association Chief Digital Officer Laura Carlson shares a classic piece of campaign swag from her student days.
This is my vintage 2007 Fired Up Ready to Go Obama t-shirt. It was a limited-run print for primary staff and volunteers and I love it so much! I was a student organizer at Indiana University that cycle, when we flipped Indiana blue for the first time since 1964 🍾