Political professionals have a long list of things to wish for in the new year. Perhaps they’ll start by asking for the ability to clone themselves to keep up with the volume of work in an election year in which Everything Is On The Line — Again.
More realistically, most campaigners surely hope to find practical, efficient ways to reach voters in a remarkably fragmented media environment.
Rise of the Machines
AI! AI! AI! In 2023, artificial intelligence began to infiltrate just about everything a campaign does, particularly on the media-creation side. Chatbots trained to write fundraising emails? Yep. AI voice generation for robocalls? Yep. AI content-creation for extra-exciting lies and disinformation? Gotcha covered.
A year ago, commentators talked about the possibility that ChatGPT would put a lot of people out of work. As some of us predicted, though, political professionals are actually using it to stretch the limited time they have before Election Day. Campaigns always have more work to do than days to do it, and if a chatbot can help you write a half-dozen fundraising emails before your next Zoom call instead of just one, huzzah. Or lean in, as they say.
But AI is creeping in via less-obvious paths as well. As a panelist pointed out on stage at C&E’s recent CampaignTech Innovation Summit, Adobe tools like Photoshop and Premiere now have the same kinds of AI-assistance that photo-editing apps on our phones do.
So if a regulator wants to require a disclosure notice in any ad that employs AI, what counts? Will we have to log the theoretical percentage of the creative time that AI saved, even if the end product looks exactly the same as it would have without robot assistance?
Pretty soon, AI will become as common, unremarkable and sometimes frustrating as auto-correct is today, and our political system will simply have to adapt to it. I’m sure the process will go smoothly and well.
Can Relational Organizing Save Us?
We looked at the Biden team’s investment in relational organizing in more detail in my last column, but other campaigns on all sides will be giving it a whirl in 2024. As relational organizing slides closer to ubiquity, will it live up to its promise?
I’ve often heard that a good field campaign can add two or three points to a candidate’s vote percentage, enough to win many a close race. My suspicion is that reaching voters via someone they know rather than having them talk to strangers could improve performance by another point or two, but we shall see. A few thousand votes here, a few thousand votes there, and you may be talking about a different person in the White House.
Bring In the Influencers
Did you hear about the big influencer holiday party at the White House? It’s just the latest sign of the importance Biden’s political operation places on people with sizable or relevant online followings.
Others will do the same. More organizations are building out their influencer outreach programs, and vendors are creating platforms to connect clients with influencers in specific niches or places. The trick as always will be to scale beyond the relative handful of campaigns focusing on it now. If everyone’s trying to corral the influencers, are there enough of them to go around?
The Advertising Revolution Will Be Streamed
One thing I am quite confident about is that 2024 will see consultants pouring money into connected TV/streaming ads. I wouldn’t be surprised if as much as a quarter or a third of all digital ad spending goes to Hulu, FreeVee, Roku Channel and their friends next year.
CTV combines the strength of programmatic pre-roll video (voter-file targeting) with the screen size and potential household reach of TV. This makes it compatible with both TV and digital consulting shops without having to buy an adapter plug. Create your ads to the right specifications, and any firm can be ready to go.
The devil, as always, will be in the details. Is there enough inventory to sate the demand that billions of dollars of spending will create? Is there enough in the right places and in front of the right voters in those places? Is CTV’s higher prominence worth the higher cost, often three or more times as much as pre-roll video? CTV may be all the rage, but it’s still part of a balanced advertising diet, along with pre-roll, banners, social media ads, cable TV and old-school broadcast media.
But Can We Pay For It?
The presidential and other big-name campaigns will surely be rolling in money, but what about the rest of us? Small-dollar online fundraising has been the backbone of congressional and prominent statewide campaigns for at least a decade now, but donations plummeted this year compared with the last off-year, 2021. This time, will campaigns have the budget for relational, CTV, influencer outreach, TV, radio and all the rest?
I suspect the answer will be “yes,” because of that whole “everything is on the line” factor mentioned above. Despite the damage that over-aggressive fundraising may have done to donor trust, the fear of the other side will still compel politically involved people to give as often and as much as they can.
What happens after 2024, though, is anyone’s guess. I suspect many of our donors will be truly exhausted by then, whether our politics have returned to “normal” or not. But if the Other Side seems as odious to tomorrow’s partisans as it does to today’s, the grassroots money will keep flowing.
Keeping Up with the Socials
Finally, the most vexatious part of the digital equation, social media. In 2023, Twitter/X was a madhouse, Facebook and Instagram were a serious pain, TikTok only wants our money if we don’t mention a candidate, and the other platforms are so varied as to overwhelm a casual practitioner.
Still, social media is where millions upon millions of Americans spend the bulk of their online time. But how to reach them? Through advertising, for a start.
Facebook/Insta ads are far less cost-effective and harder to target than they were a few years ago, but good content and good data can still help campaigns connect with voters on the platforms. Navigating content restrictions and disclosure rules on these and other social networks will drive digital consultants to drink, but that’s a risk most of us will have to take.
Don’t forget those influencers, though. Or active campaign volunteers, organized relationally or not. Both will help campaigns connect with voters on social media through voices they trust. With voters hunkered down in a blizzard of political ads, a friendly face may be the only thing likely to warm their political hearts.
Of course, no predictions will fully survive contact with reality, including these. Despite our wish lists, Santa may have a few surprises for consultants this year. Let’s hope they are pleasant ones.
My thanks to Annie Singer, Claire Douglass, Kevin Butler, Kari Chisholm, Antonia Scatton, Susan Quinn, Mo Oliver, JC Medici, Myles Bugbee, Mike Nellis, Ashwath Narayanan, Chris Masak, Sue Zoldak, Harvey Cohen, Stuart Max Perelmutter, Josh Klemons, Michael Silvia and David A., all of whom weighed in when I asked for suggestions for this piece on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Colin Delany is founder and editor of the award-winning website Epolitics.com, author of “How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections,” a veteran of more than twenty-seven years in digital politics and a perpetual skeptic. See something interesting? Send him a pitch at cpd@epolitics.com.
