Speaker 1: Welcome to pot Save America. I'm Dan Piferan. Today I'm
Speaker 1: joined by Danielle Butterfield, the executive director of Priorities USA,
Speaker 1: one of the largest and most important super PACs and
Speaker 1: democratic politics. Priority USA does a lot of essential digital
Speaker 1: work in the party, building infrastructure, investing in research and data,
Speaker 1: and running ads to reach the voters campaigns often struggle
Speaker 1: to reach. They're in the midst of a massive study
Speaker 1: about how less engaged voters are getting their information on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram,
Speaker 1: and even Ai chatbots, the platforms that will decide the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight election, whether we like it or not.
Speaker 1: Priorities has already started a thirty million dollar campaign to
Speaker 1: define the twenty twenty eight Republicans like Jennie Vance and
Speaker 1: Marco Rubio, and I invited Danielle on the podcast to
Speaker 1: unpack that research and talk about what they've learned. We
Speaker 1: dove into their findings, talked about how the media environment
Speaker 1: has changed since the twenty twenty four election, and broke
Speaker 1: down some of the ads they're already running. It was
Speaker 1: a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute,
Speaker 1: but before we do, please consider becoming a pain. Subscriber
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Speaker 1: Crooked dot com slash friends. All right, here's my conversation
Speaker 1: with Daniel Butterfield. Daniel Butterfield, welcome to Pod Save America.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: All right, so excited to talk to you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: doing this. Priorities has been working on a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of things are really interesting to me. I want to
Speaker 1: talk to you about the study you've done on less
Speaker 1: politically engage voters I want to talk to you about
Speaker 1: how you're thinking about ADS, and I really want to
Speaker 1: talk to you about why you are already spending money
Speaker 1: to try to win the twenty twenty eight election in
Speaker 1: the middle of the twenty twenty sixth election. We're going
Speaker 1: to do all of that. I'm going a level set
Speaker 1: on a couple things. First, For people who've been around
Speaker 1: politics as long as I have, they remember Priority to
Speaker 1: the USA as sort of the Democratic superPAC spending tens
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: spending money for Joe Biden. That's not what Priorities USA
Speaker 1: is now. So maybe talk a little bit about who
Speaker 1: you are and what you guys are doing so our
Speaker 1: audience understands.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I joined the Priority's USA team back in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: fresh off the Hillary Clinton campaign. Priorities, you know, up
Speaker 3: until that point, had been operating to you, like you said,
Speaker 3: as a presidential superpack. But in the aftermath of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: one of the most urgent, kind of quickest realizations that
Speaker 3: folks had about why we lost was just how little
Speaker 3: Democrats had invested on digital compared to television. And so
Speaker 3: the Prioriti's team got some funding to kind of stay
Speaker 3: open beyond the presidential and really investigate why that is.
Speaker 3: So that's when I joined the team. I became our
Speaker 3: digital director alongside a bunch of other really smart people,
Speaker 3: and we kind of made it our mission to really
Speaker 3: diagnose and understand why the Democratic Party is so severely
Speaker 3: underinvest in digital, but then also like to actually close
Speaker 3: the gap to right to raise a bunch of money
Speaker 3: to spend on digital. And so flash forward to where
Speaker 3: we are today. I like to say that we are
Speaker 3: anchored as a as a presidential organization, but we really
Speaker 3: have gotten to a point where we're using the midterm
Speaker 3: elections and special elections to really prepare and get better
Speaker 3: and innovate and try new things so that by the
Speaker 3: time the next presidential election rules around were like that
Speaker 3: much more ready for it.
Speaker 2: So that's how I would think about us today.
Speaker 1: I know the presidential election seemed like a million years
Speaker 1: away for a lot of people, but as I like
Speaker 1: to point out that, if we follow the previous schedule,
Speaker 1: one exactly one year from now, be Democrats and Republicans
Speaker 1: on stage in debates actually like this thing will we
Speaker 1: will be this thing will be often running the day
Speaker 1: after the midterms, so people should be prepared for that.
Speaker 1: And so just also to level set here. You know,
Speaker 1: as you point out, like in twenty seventeen, you're worried
Speaker 1: about the digital gap in working on it. After the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four election, there was this sort of widespread
Speaker 1: consensus that Democrats had once again been out maneuvered digitally.
Speaker 1: There's all the talk about all the podcasts that Trump
Speaker 1: did and how they were, you know, using the internet
Speaker 1: to target these less engaged voters. You know, I think
Speaker 1: that there was a general sincerity among a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the party to try to close the gap,
Speaker 1: even if they didn't know exactly how to do it
Speaker 1: or how the gap got there. Eighteen months after that election,
Speaker 1: where do you see things? Has the party made real
Speaker 1: improvements here? How much work needs to be done?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, we obviously have made improvements, but we're
Speaker 3: not where we need to be, right. I think in
Speaker 3: the aftermath of twenty sixteen, it was quite easy to say, wow,
Speaker 3: cards are really not spending anything on digital. In the
Speaker 3: aftermath of twenty twenty four, Democrats outspent Republicans two to
Speaker 3: one on digital. So it's no longer a numbers game.
Speaker 3: It's actually like several layers below the surface, which makes
Speaker 3: it a lot more difficult to diagnose and solve. And
Speaker 3: that's why, you know, it's no surprise that this the
Speaker 3: last couple of years post twenty twenty four have been
Speaker 3: a really tough set of fundraising years for Democrats because
Speaker 3: the solutions to why we lost in twenty twenty four
Speaker 3: really require us to dive deep and solve some big,
Speaker 3: bigger cultural problems that we have ingrained in our party.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, I think, if I'm going to
Speaker 3: diagnose that problem in one sentence, my read is that
Speaker 3: while Democrats are spending a lot more money on digital
Speaker 3: than they were back in twenty sixteen, we're still running
Speaker 3: digital programs to mirror what goes on on television. And
Speaker 3: I think that's the crux of the problem that I'm
Speaker 3: seeing today.
Speaker 1: Could you say a little bit more about what that means?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: when a campaign was setting out to reach voters, they
Speaker 3: had a handful of options of how they were going
Speaker 3: to do that. They could buy, you know, broadcast cable
Speaker 3: television points, they could knock doors, build an organizing program
Speaker 3: send out mail pieces. Digital really wasn't on the table.
Speaker 3: When you're setting out to you know, run a TV program.
Speaker 3: You're picking out DMAs that are efficient based on where
Speaker 3: your your state or congressional district is. You're building really
Speaker 3: fancy models to determine which door I'm going to knock
Speaker 3: and which door I'm going to skip. You're, you know,
Speaker 3: building mail pieces that you know, same thing you're going
Speaker 3: to mail to one house and not to another. But
Speaker 3: I think that what we have really failed to realize
Speaker 3: is that digital opens up so many more possibilities to
Speaker 3: be able to reach voters in ways that bleed so
Speaker 3: much far beyond where you live, what your DMA is
Speaker 3: and what your voter file score is, And we're really
Speaker 3: failing to lean into the creativity that digital affords us
Speaker 3: when when we do that, and I think put put
Speaker 3: in a much simpler way, nine out of the ten
Speaker 3: top U t ads in twenty twenty four were just
Speaker 3: thirty second ads that ran on TV first. So we
Speaker 3: are quite literally practically taking thirty second ads that we
Speaker 3: run on TV and then putting them on YouTube and
Speaker 3: expecting people to watch them.
Speaker 2: And that is quite literally lighting money on fire.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've instruck by this, and you know, as
Speaker 1: you know, we've been sort of both together and severally
Speaker 1: screaming about this for a long time. Yeah, anyone who
Speaker 1: watches YouTube would understand that a TV commercial run on
Speaker 1: YouTube makes no sense. It would be like someone putting
Speaker 1: a print ad on your television when you were watching it,
Speaker 1: so you would just be supposed to read it. And
Speaker 1: they're obviously incredibly smart people working in digital spaces across
Speaker 1: the party in the Harris campaign and some of these
Speaker 1: super PACs in the Biden campaign in twenty twenty. What
Speaker 1: accounts for the fact that there we're sort of like
Speaker 1: jamming this anachronistic square peg into a much more modern roundhole.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think I cannot adequately answer this question
Speaker 3: without addressing the consultant driven nature.
Speaker 2: Of decisions.
Speaker 3: Right like it is just if you want to look
Speaker 3: at profit margins for a second, I'm what I'm basically
Speaker 3: declaring that a campaign should do costs a lot more
Speaker 3: than what it costs to run a TV campaign, So
Speaker 3: that such that if I'm asking a campaign to cut
Speaker 3: twenty ads to put on the Internet instead of one
Speaker 3: ad to ship to everyone, that is obviously going to
Speaker 3: eat into profit margins, and you know, the folks that
Speaker 3: have been around for a really long time are going
Speaker 3: to resist that. So I think that the pressure has
Speaker 3: to come from a from a different place. That's part
Speaker 3: of what Priority sees as its role in this ecosystem
Speaker 3: is pushing the hard questions and you know, trying to
Speaker 3: get past profit margins as the as the core goal.
Speaker 3: It's it's, you know, ridiculous that we even have to
Speaker 3: have that conversation, but it's it's also part of why.
Speaker 3: Like when I joined the team in twenty seventeen and
Speaker 3: you know, was offered the job as digital director, part
Speaker 3: of my negotiation and was I want to build an
Speaker 3: in house team because I don't want to have to
Speaker 3: worry about, you know, working with a set of consultants
Speaker 3: that's ultimately going to be trying to you know, pay
Speaker 3: the bills. I want to hire people that are purely
Speaker 3: focused on trying new things, innovating, and that has to
Speaker 3: be their their number one focus. You know, I don't
Speaker 3: want to get on here and say like consultants are
Speaker 3: in it for the right reasons, right, so many democratic
Speaker 3: consultants want to win these elections, but they also have
Speaker 3: to pay bills, and when you are forced to make
Speaker 3: decisions between paying bills and you know, winning elections, that's
Speaker 3: naturally going to create attention that we just can't ignore.
Speaker 3: But anyway, all of that to say, you know, I
Speaker 3: think it is extremely easy to look at the reach
Speaker 3: numbers that YouTube affords where you're any given week eighty
Speaker 3: ninety percent of voters are reachable on YouTube, and to say, oh,
Speaker 3: that's just an extension of TV, just like TV is
Speaker 3: A is a one size fits all reach broadcast. We
Speaker 3: literally use the word broadcast to describe TV. If you're
Speaker 3: treating YouTube like a podcast channel, though, you're just missing
Speaker 3: the point, right. And I have a lot of good
Speaker 3: friends that you know, work on the Google sales team,
Speaker 3: love them to death, but.
Speaker 2: Their sales pitch is YouTube is TV.
Speaker 3: I just fundamentally disagree with that, right, Like, if you
Speaker 3: are treating it like a broadcast channel, you were fully missing.
Speaker 1: The point the YouTube is TV thing. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to get your study a minute, but you've got me
Speaker 1: down a rabbit hole. And I knew that would happen
Speaker 1: in this conversation because this is a issue a particularly
Speaker 1: nerdy interest for me. I mean, YouTube is TV. And
Speaker 1: this is the thing I've done the round since twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, meeting with various politicians, and I've tried to
Speaker 1: explain to them, and I use YouTube as TV for
Speaker 1: the purpose of understanding that for people to like actually socially,
Speaker 1: these politicians understand that young voters watch YouTube on their
Speaker 1: TV right they come home, they turn it on. And
Speaker 1: what's different is they're not looking at TV guide or
Speaker 1: the literal TV guide that shows up in your affinity
Speaker 1: or cable. Thing is that the algorithm is showing them
Speaker 1: things based on you know, a lot of data mining
Speaker 1: and the and the things that subscribe to. But where
Speaker 1: the point you're making is where the analogy fails is
Speaker 1: that it is not consumed in the same way and
Speaker 1: sort of like you can't just put a TV show
Speaker 1: on YouTube, which is why YouTube does not invest in
Speaker 1: scripted television, Like there's like a lingua franca of it.
Speaker 1: And if the ads, if you're running TV ads on YouTube,
Speaker 1: even if it's being watched on a literal television, that's
Speaker 1: not what people are expecting, so they are more likely
Speaker 1: to dismiss it, is that, right, Yeah, just.
Speaker 3: I think it's an attention span problem, right, and it's
Speaker 3: a function of you know, if someone is sitting to
Speaker 3: and you're correct that a majority of people when they're
Speaker 3: using YouTube are literally using watching it on a smart TV.
Speaker 3: And that is different than YouTube TV, which is like
Speaker 3: a subscription service that people pay for. No, it's literally
Speaker 3: YouTube dot com being streamed on a television device. But like,
Speaker 3: how many of those people are also holding their smartphone
Speaker 3: and playing games, Like I've it into that category, like
Speaker 3: it is extremely tough to get me to pay attention
Speaker 3: to one screen. And I know I'm not alone in
Speaker 3: that situation. So you both have an attention span challenge,
Speaker 3: and then you also have a challenge slash opportunity that
Speaker 3: people are using YouTube in.
Speaker 2: Very different ways. It's a battleground, right.
Speaker 3: It's people listening to podcasts, it is people playing games.
Speaker 3: Is people watching clips that their friends send them, like
Speaker 3: it is people listening to music. It's just it's so
Speaker 3: many different things that if we're going to try to
Speaker 3: squeeze it into to one category, we're really we're really
Speaker 3: feeling And this does open up a really good, you know,
Speaker 3: segue to a lot of the work that that Prairie
Speaker 3: is doing too to really understand, like you know, I'm
Speaker 3: pretty tired of media consumption research looking like let's slap
Speaker 3: a question to the end of a poll and ask
Speaker 3: how many people are watching YouTube. I need to know much, many,
Speaker 3: many more details than that to really understand how to
Speaker 3: cautacraft a media strategy. So that is the work that
Speaker 3: Priorities has been investing in since twenty twenty four. Wrap
Speaker 3: actually way before twenty twenty. We were doing this in
Speaker 3: the middle of twenty twenty two, And that's the work
Speaker 3: that we're excited to chat about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you've, like I said, you've been studying how
Speaker 1: people actually get information in this crazy, insane world we
Speaker 1: live in, and not's just how people like you and
Speaker 1: I can information because we kind of get information the
Speaker 1: same way people have always got information, Like we're going
Speaker 1: to sources to get it. We're following politics closely. But
Speaker 1: you know, as we've talked about sort of endlessly on
Speaker 1: this podcast and elsewhere since twenty twenty four, is the
Speaker 1: swing voter is not necessarily a well informed centrist white
Speaker 1: man from Wisconsin. It is someone who doesn't pay that
Speaker 1: much attention to politics and is sort of kind of
Speaker 1: you know, surfing the news at best and we're very weeded.
Speaker 1: We're not very good at reaching the people or understanding
Speaker 1: those people. So you've been looking at them. So before
Speaker 1: we get into like what you actually found, can you
Speaker 1: get walk us through the process by which you try
Speaker 1: to understand the media habits of these less politically engaged individuals.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, But just to underscore what you just said in
Speaker 3: our post twenty twenty four research, we actually found that,
Speaker 3: beyond age demographic, geographic indicators, that your consumption of YouTube
Speaker 3: was more predictive of your vote choice and your vote
Speaker 3: swing from twenty to twenty four than anything else.
Speaker 1: So people think that you were more likely to vote
Speaker 1: for Trump the more you could you watch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So basically the crosstab was that men, men who are
Speaker 3: watching more than three hours of YouTube have some of
Speaker 3: the highest swing of any other you know, cross tab
Speaker 3: that we were looking at, and that it also applies
Speaker 3: to people who are listening to podcasts, It also applies
Speaker 3: to women. It's it's just it's pretty consistent that your
Speaker 3: Internet consumption patterns are very predictive of how much you swung.
Speaker 3: From a persuasion standpoint, sour our team, you know, took
Speaker 3: that information and said Okay, like we got to be
Speaker 3: media consultants for the twenty first century because if no
Speaker 3: one else is going to do it, like, let's let
Speaker 3: us step up and play that role. And so we
Speaker 3: basically have this project that our team has been working
Speaker 3: on that really takes a look at We have an
Speaker 3: always on survey operation.
Speaker 2: Where it's actually really cool.
Speaker 3: We actually, in a normal kind of survey environment, we
Speaker 3: pay people to send us a screenshot of their screen
Speaker 3: time apps. I'm sure you guys have like logged in
Speaker 3: to see like how much time you spend on Twitter
Speaker 3: every single day, But we're actually paying people to send
Speaker 3: us a screenshot of that and then validating it against
Speaker 3: what they self report to where they spend time, and
Speaker 3: then using that as an understanding of what new apps
Speaker 3: are popping that should be on our radar. How much
Speaker 3: are is YouTube consumption changing over the summer. How how
Speaker 3: much are people you know changing their subscriptions between Hulu
Speaker 3: and Peacock depending on you know, what reality TV show
Speaker 3: is on, which is very common and the thing that
Speaker 3: I think our team was highly surprised to see how
Speaker 3: much people change up their subscriptions, which is very you know.
Speaker 2: Good information.
Speaker 3: So basically Part one is is an always on survey
Speaker 3: operation to just get a baseline of like where are
Speaker 3: people spending time. We then do kind of quarterly sometimes
Speaker 3: monthly deep dives on specific topics that our team wants
Speaker 3: to dig into. So last summer we did a deep
Speaker 3: dive on audio consumption to really understand specifically, how are
Speaker 3: people consuming music, podcast, et cetera, what platform, What are
Speaker 3: some patterns that that we can you know, take into
Speaker 3: account from a media planning perspective.
Speaker 2: And then we also.
Speaker 3: Acquire you know, third party data that often is very
Speaker 3: kind of observational and behavioral in nature, so that we
Speaker 3: can actually observe what people are doing. And the search
Speaker 3: data that Peter Hanby wrote about over the weekend is
Speaker 3: that third category where we paid to acquire people's search data,
Speaker 3: and then we did a really long term kind of
Speaker 3: study to kind of better understand what patterns we could
Speaker 3: pick up there.
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Speaker 1: Do you speak just a little more detail about the
Speaker 1: search data, like what what you were looking for? How
Speaker 1: many people it was? But you know, and then we
Speaker 1: can g into what you found.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, So anyone that's ever like talked to me in
Speaker 3: my life knows that I am like particularly obsessed with
Speaker 3: search behavior as like a proxy for understanding kind of
Speaker 3: where voters you're at. I think it's like the single
Speaker 3: most interesting thing that you can do to observe where
Speaker 3: someone's head is at. It is literally like knocking on
Speaker 3: someone's door and then being able to say to you, hey,
Speaker 3: I'm really interested in immigration. You can then have a
Speaker 3: conversation with them about immigration. They're like quite literally telling
Speaker 3: you what they're interested in. And So for a long time,
Speaker 3: I've just been really interested in how can we, you know,
Speaker 3: do more to understand people's search behavior, how can we
Speaker 3: use it, how can we learn from it, et cetera.
Speaker 3: So we worked with a third party data provider to
Speaker 3: acquire and pay for a set of people who basically
Speaker 3: opted in to share their behavioral data with with this
Speaker 3: data provider. So basically, like you could go to your
Speaker 3: YouTube account right now and say download my history, you
Speaker 3: could do the same thing on Twitter.
Speaker 2: I actually highly recommend it. It's like very entertaining.
Speaker 3: You like, download your history, upload it to Claude, tell
Speaker 3: it to give you some analysis, it is like better
Speaker 3: than therapy in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But or release they maybe claud will tell you to
Speaker 1: go to therapy after reading it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, potentially I'll call it complimentary to therapy.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so we did that with a provider that
Speaker 3: was able to send us search behavior across you know
Speaker 3: the major kind of traditional search engines, Google being the
Speaker 3: most predominant one, but also you know, Gemini, Chat, EBT,
Speaker 3: and then some of the major social media engines YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
Speaker 3: et cetera, and so our team it was about six
Speaker 3: million searches.
Speaker 2: We did it across two different time periods.
Speaker 3: The first was like the last couple of months of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four, and then the second time period was
Speaker 3: like a chunk of twenty twenty five. We wanted to
Speaker 3: be able to kind of look at it into chunks.
Speaker 3: Our team spent a couple of weeks like really really
Speaker 3: analyzing the data. It was like a huge you know,
Speaker 3: undertaking to take a look at the trends. We definitely
Speaker 3: would not have been able to do this project if
Speaker 3: our team wasn't you know, fully enabling AI to do
Speaker 3: a lot of the heavy lifting in the work. We
Speaker 3: are a very let's lean into AI organization at priorities,
Speaker 3: and we walked away with, you know, unsurprisingly a huge
Speaker 3: number of insights that our team is currently using to
Speaker 3: both run programs that we're running here in twenty six
Speaker 3: but also looking ahead to twenty twenty eight. So yeah,
Speaker 3: happy to share more about kind of what we learned
Speaker 3: before we.
Speaker 1: Get to the actual finance. With the search. The context
Speaker 1: of search in this day and age is very interesting
Speaker 1: because for most of the last twenty years, search meant
Speaker 1: one thing, and one thing only the.
Speaker 2: People at the people at being would would not.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's a small handful of being people out there
Speaker 1: who use it, and you know, we had Netscape. It's
Speaker 1: we had some things earlier and they are It was
Speaker 1: actually a.
Speaker 3: Highly highly effective fundraising platform on the presidential campaigns that
Speaker 3: I worked on.
Speaker 1: Guests, Well, there you go. I am learning something brand
Speaker 1: new today. But it meant it meant via Google or
Speaker 1: bing searching the web. That's something very very different now,
Speaker 1: as particularly as the social media and I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: to AI later on this conversation, but as the social
Speaker 1: media platforms become more places where people sort of live,
Speaker 1: particularly TikTok and Instagram, Like how are you thinking about?
Speaker 1: Like how does that? How many like our people? I
Speaker 1: assume people are are searching for the same thing that
Speaker 1: people used to search Google for a few years ago,
Speaker 1: are now searching on Instagram or TikTok or elsewhere? Or
Speaker 1: are their differences in those search like what did you find?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think like Google is still king, Like let's
Speaker 2: let's just be really clear.
Speaker 3: Google is still huge market share, predominant market share, and
Speaker 3: Google makes a majority of their money off of search,
Speaker 3: not YouTube, Like, let's just name that they were going
Speaker 3: to do everything they can to not lose that spot
Speaker 3: in the market. But even as people are spending more
Speaker 3: and more time online, I like to think about it,
Speaker 3: and this comes into play a lot when you're putting
Speaker 3: together a media plan. As people spend more time online,
Speaker 3: they're just doing more, right, Like you are both using
Speaker 3: Instagram and TikTok and search every day instead of picking
Speaker 3: between them.
Speaker 2: And so I think what we.
Speaker 3: Are starting to see is that the behaviors between these
Speaker 3: different search engines are different, which is really helpful learning, right,
Speaker 3: Like people are going to Google to really fact check
Speaker 3: and get basic information, but then they're going to chat
Speaker 3: GBT to really like put together robust plans and really
Speaker 3: go back and forth, whereas you know Instagram, TikTok, it
Speaker 3: can become a little bit more entertaining in nature. So
Speaker 3: I like to think about it less of a binary
Speaker 3: choice that people are making between these different platforms. Obviously
Speaker 3: there are t in that direction, but it's more about
Speaker 3: how are people using these different platforms for different different reasons.
Speaker 3: The thing I will say that I think is a
Speaker 3: really important piece of the learning here is, like I said,
Speaker 3: Google is still top of the list. I think our
Speaker 3: party is very interested in understanding people's relationships to chatbots
Speaker 3: and AI As a search engine, that is incredibly important
Speaker 3: and it's changing rapidly. But people using YouTube as a
Speaker 3: search engine is incredibly underdiscussed. I think that YouTube is
Speaker 3: the number two search engine behind Google. Those data sets
Speaker 3: are obviously integrated under one umbrella, and it's a place
Speaker 3: that I think we definitely don't spend enough time thinking about,
Speaker 3: and we can actually do a lot more there than
Speaker 3: we can on chatbots.
Speaker 1: What do you when you say do more? Because you
Speaker 1: can you can.
Speaker 3: Manipulate, you can manipulate and run ads and produce video
Speaker 3: content that appears when someone searches for a topic that
Speaker 3: you want to appear on, right Like, we know for
Speaker 3: a fact that AEO is a hot topic right now.
Speaker 3: People really want to understand and how they can influence
Speaker 3: a search result in a chatbot. But we you know,
Speaker 3: YouTube search has been around for for such a long time.
Speaker 3: It's it's a lot easier to manipulate what comes up
Speaker 3: when someone searches for something on YouTube in a way
Speaker 3: that I think the Democratic Party needs to be spending
Speaker 3: a lot more time producing video than they do, you know,
Speaker 3: manipulating chatbot results.
Speaker 2: It's not it's not a choice.
Speaker 5: It's not.
Speaker 2: It's not it's a false choice. But I think we
Speaker 2: got to spend more time with it.
Speaker 1: I am of a certain generation because I'm old where
Speaker 1: YouTube is not the same to me, Like I didn't
Speaker 1: grow up using YouTube, obviously grow up with the Internet.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to discuss that here. And but like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people who are in politics,
Speaker 1: many of them are my age and older inn Gerontocracy,
Speaker 1: don't fully understand just like how big YouTube is that
Speaker 1: it's the biggest video platform in the world's biggest music
Speaker 1: platform in the world. It's bigger than Spotify on music,
Speaker 1: it's better than Apple podcasts or Spotify as a podcast platform.
Speaker 1: That it is just this gigantic thing that dominates people's lives.
Speaker 1: I don't think people really get that. But let's let's
Speaker 1: get to let's get to what you found about. Well,
Speaker 1: when you were analyzing this data, what are sort of
Speaker 1: what are the major insights you've got?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think the number one headline is that
Speaker 3: people are not searching for anything political. Of the six
Speaker 3: million searches that we acquired, less than one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: were political or even politically adjacent. The reality is, and
Speaker 3: I think the thing that you know keeps the team
Speaker 3: at Priorities USA up at night but also motivates our
Speaker 3: work is that people just aren't thinking about politics and
Speaker 3: we have to really if we don't understand that going
Speaker 3: into crafting a campaign, we're really going to miss miss
Speaker 3: the mark on how do we actually then reach someone. So,
Speaker 3: you know, I think in doing our analysis, we found
Speaker 3: a lot of really awesome patterns around when people do.
Speaker 2: Search for politics.
Speaker 3: It's eye opening for our team around how soon out
Speaker 3: from the election are people starting to search for their
Speaker 3: pulling location? When are they searching for information about their candidates.
Speaker 3: Like all our team is quite literally right now, it's
Speaker 3: you know, a Friday afternoon. That is like literally what
Speaker 3: they are working on to craft our twenty twenty six campaigns.
Speaker 3: But you know, more importantly, it's opening our eyes. I
Speaker 3: think to the thing that I'm the most excited about
Speaker 3: and nerding out about is this category of what we're
Speaker 3: calling politically adjacent categories that are a really awesome entry
Speaker 3: point for us to be having relevant conversations with people
Speaker 3: when they aren't thinking about politics, but they're one step
Speaker 3: away from thinking about politics. And let me just give
Speaker 3: you an analogy on this really quick, because I think
Speaker 3: it's helpful at kind of landing why this is important.
Speaker 3: I like to I spend a lot of time thinking
Speaker 3: about how can we as political advertisers compare ourselves to
Speaker 3: corporate advertisers because it's a billion dollar industry and there's
Speaker 3: a lot that we can learn from people that are
Speaker 3: quite literally doing similar work to us. But at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, you know, I said this to Peter,
Speaker 3: but Nike knows that you're training for a marathon, and
Speaker 3: they're using that information to sell you shoes at that
Speaker 3: particular moment, target knows that you are pregnant, probably before
Speaker 3: you do. There was that story that came out on
Speaker 3: that a couple of years ago. My algorith them currently
Speaker 3: knows that I'm shopping for fall shoes, and it is
Speaker 3: quite helpful to me, and I actually really appreciate the
Speaker 3: algorithm for knowing exactly what I want. The reality is
Speaker 3: that advertising writ large is like very contextually relevant and
Speaker 3: like very genuinely helpful in a lot of ways, and
Speaker 3: that political advertising is not that political advertising is just interruptive.
Speaker 3: We like show up in the most random moments and
Speaker 3: want to like interrupt your day. And we got to
Speaker 3: get closer to the corporate model. We got to create
Speaker 3: campaigns that are actually you know, relevant to someone's day
Speaker 3: and you know, behaviorally, I think we can take a
Speaker 3: lot a closer look at where people are actually interested
Speaker 3: and then create those connective points between what they're interested
Speaker 3: in and how can we can shift the conversation to
Speaker 3: politics and have a million ideas of what that looks
Speaker 3: like that I'm happy to dive into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I want to like you raised this very
Speaker 1: and I was very struck by that quote from you,
Speaker 1: and I.
Speaker 3: Gotta get starting paid I gotta get paid by Nike
Speaker 3: at some point.
Speaker 6: That's right.
Speaker 1: No free ads. As a rule, we have everyone who
Speaker 1: spends any time on the Internet understands that your phone
Speaker 1: is tracking everything you do and then giving you serving
Speaker 1: you information ads about that very thing. As you point out, right,
Speaker 1: like you have kids. It knows you have kids. Back
Speaker 1: to school comes, it's back to school stuff, right, it's
Speaker 1: they know you've done. You've done. You've searched Disneyland on
Speaker 1: the internet. Now you're going to get a bunch of
Speaker 1: Disney content. You're going to get advertised in a million
Speaker 1: different ways through you know, on Instagram, through TikTok, on
Speaker 1: your uh, you know, in your Gmail. You're going to
Speaker 1: get Disneyland ads for right, or from travel crims whatever else.
Speaker 1: If the corporate model is behavioral based advertising, what has
Speaker 1: the political model been to date? What is that based on.
Speaker 2: It's the same conversation we just had.
Speaker 3: It's based on your geography and your voter file score.
Speaker 3: I think ninety plus percent of democratic advertising investments to
Speaker 3: date have been based on.
Speaker 2: Where you live.
Speaker 3: Not as a proxy for you know, you being close
Speaker 3: to a data center or on a user university campus,
Speaker 3: but just how likely am I if I were to
Speaker 3: throw a dart to reach a black voter or reach
Speaker 3: a college student like that. It is based on density
Speaker 3: and efficiency for the most part.
Speaker 2: That's like how people use geography to target.
Speaker 3: And then when it comes to a voter file, it's
Speaker 3: just you know, the ease of someone is building you
Speaker 3: a model. They're telling you which voter you should knock
Speaker 3: and which voter you shouldn't, which voter you should mail
Speaker 3: and which you shouldn't. And digital practitioners have been told
Speaker 3: for a really long time, hey, can you target this list.
Speaker 2: Of voters that we think is important.
Speaker 3: There's technology that exists to be able to upload an
Speaker 3: offline list and match it to the internet, but that's
Speaker 3: just completely you know, ignoring every online signal that you
Speaker 3: can add to to make sure that that you know
Speaker 3: becomes becomes relevant to the to the end user.
Speaker 2: So yeah, status quo is.
Speaker 3: I would say geography and voter file are like the
Speaker 3: primary drivers of current targeting and we're out here screaming
Speaker 3: there's more to it than that.
Speaker 1: Is identity part of that as well, at least like
Speaker 1: in a broad based way, like especially if you're back
Speaker 1: in the days when you're advertising on Facebook where you
Speaker 1: would be you know, targeting people of a certain demographic
Speaker 1: group or certain age group that you would be reaching,
Speaker 1: but it's not tied to any specific knowledge about what
Speaker 1: those people care about. Correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say like age and demographic come into
Speaker 3: play a lot, probably more rarely than you would think, right,
Speaker 3: Like I think when I was on the Obama campaign
Speaker 3: in twenty twelve, we definitely had age and gender tracks,
Speaker 3: we had demographic tracks layered on top of kind of
Speaker 3: our broadcast track, But in a small congressional race, Like,
Speaker 3: I think, that's a lot more rare than you might expect.
Speaker 3: And I'm not out here saying that age, demo, geographic
Speaker 3: targeting isn't important, it's it's highly critical. I think we're
Speaker 3: just saying that the next step beyond that of really
Speaker 3: trying to understand how to reach someone based on things
Speaker 3: that were not necessarily observing offline but instead online, we
Speaker 3: should be pushing ourselves to think in that category because
Speaker 3: it's just going to make it's going to make us
Speaker 3: better advertisers.
Speaker 1: Is cost prohibitive here or is that a problem? Is
Speaker 1: it much more obviously much more expensive to market to
Speaker 1: someone based on you know, specific targeted not you know,
Speaker 1: information about their online presence, that just targeting a group
Speaker 1: who happen to live in a certain zip code.
Speaker 2: Not in a major way.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, like I think Facebook, their CPMs
Speaker 3: get a lot lower when you kind of give them
Speaker 3: free will to pick out who you want them to reach.
Speaker 3: So when you're running a campaign on Facebook and you're
Speaker 3: saying as long as someone cares about fitness, go ahead
Speaker 3: and reach them, that gives them a lot more free
Speaker 3: will to target folks than if you were to upload
Speaker 3: a file and say I only want to target these
Speaker 3: hundred thousand people. So that does impact the CPM, but
Speaker 3: a in.
Speaker 2: A helpful way.
Speaker 3: We have a lot of questions and we're doing a
Speaker 3: lot of research aut period is around just how you
Speaker 3: can kind of validate that that data that you get
Speaker 3: on places like Facebook, YouTube.
Speaker 2: But no, I would say cost.
Speaker 3: If someone's bringing up costs as an excuse not to
Speaker 3: do a campaign like this, they're they're probably not fully
Speaker 3: grasping what we're talking about. Obviously, I think what I
Speaker 3: am describing here does require incremental costs.
Speaker 2: From a production standpoint.
Speaker 3: I think the model we are describing certainly requires you
Speaker 3: to make many, many more ads than a TV one
Speaker 3: size fits all program. But I also think there's a
Speaker 3: ton more that we can be doing on the kind
Speaker 3: of AI automation side to make the production process faster, easier.
Speaker 2: That actually has nothing to do with you know, AI slop.
Speaker 3: You can you can automate the back end without making
Speaker 3: the front end of it AI driven.
Speaker 1: But like, can we live in a world where using
Speaker 1: the voter file, we've identified a set of target voters
Speaker 1: in a swing state and we now know that this
Speaker 1: swing voter has been searching on This is creepy. A
Speaker 1: lot of people has been searching on the internet about
Speaker 1: cyclospora and food recalls. And then could you then get
Speaker 1: a camp, present a well funded, well run digitally forward
Speaker 1: presential campaign, then target that voter with an AD. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight, that said, you know, in the Trump
Speaker 1: Vance administrate, presuming Chade advances ceminy and the Trump Vance administration,
Speaker 1: they cut all the funding which led to these Bluebird
Speaker 1: recalls or Leus recalls or whatever else, Like, is that
Speaker 1: something that can be done at scale?
Speaker 2: So Google doesn't allow you to use offline data to
Speaker 2: do targeting. They got rid of that. I think it
Speaker 2: was twenty nineteen. But everything else that you describe, yes,
Speaker 2: would would be doable.
Speaker 3: I think, though, the reason that I care a little
Speaker 3: bit less about the front end, Like here's the voters
Speaker 3: I particularly care about is think about how a model
Speaker 3: is built. Right, You take a look at someone's vote history,
Speaker 3: and then you ask them a bunch of questions in
Speaker 3: a survey to infer you know how they're going to
Speaker 3: you know how they're going to vote, and you you
Speaker 3: apply that to a broader set of voters, and you
Speaker 3: make predictions about how you think someone's going to vote
Speaker 3: based on them being male, going to church, reading books
Speaker 3: on the weekend.
Speaker 2: Whatever. It is.
Speaker 3: Like, there's a bunch of really smart data people out
Speaker 3: there that are building really smart models. I think what
Speaker 3: we're saying, though, is, in addition to asking someone a
Speaker 3: survey question to inform.
Speaker 2: A model, what if you just observe what they do instead?
Speaker 3: Right, Like, how can we get to a point where
Speaker 3: we are, you know, not relying on offline data to
Speaker 3: predict where someone is and instead just you know, if
Speaker 3: someone's searching for whether their lettuce is contaminated, I don't
Speaker 3: really care how they voted in twenty twenty. I think
Speaker 3: that ad is probably quite relevant to them. So, and
Speaker 3: you don't even pay for an ad until someone clicks
Speaker 3: on it. So why don't we just try and get
Speaker 3: rid of the kind of front end marker to begin with?
Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into just sort of all right, So
Speaker 1: we got a bunch of these voters who are less
Speaker 1: politically engaged. You've looked at, you know, of the six
Speaker 1: million searches you had, you know, the rolling percentage of
Speaker 1: them were non political. What are these theoretically non political
Speaker 1: people doing on the internet? Where are they? What are
Speaker 1: they interested in?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So one of the most interesting, remarkable findings that we
Speaker 3: saw is just how much people are you know, searching
Speaker 3: for you know, what we're calling kind of public benefit programs.
Speaker 3: People searching for how to download a FASTA form, how
Speaker 3: to apply for medicaid? What is medicaid called in my state?
Speaker 3: Those are all I think it's a very like large
Speaker 3: percentage of the searches that we are seeing in that
Speaker 3: kind of politically adjacent field. And it's a really important
Speaker 3: signal to us that someone who is searching for a
Speaker 3: FASTA form should probably fall into a particular bucket of
Speaker 3: communication that looks different than someone who's searching for whether
Speaker 3: their lettuce is contaminated. I think that was the most
Speaker 3: remarkable finding that that I saw that I think we're
Speaker 3: eager to act on.
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Speaker 1: The grand mystery, right, it is like, I know where
Speaker 1: you get your information, or you know where someone like
Speaker 1: me gets my information. How but all these people who
Speaker 1: pay no attention to politics, like you don't actively pay
Speaker 1: attention to politics, are forming political opinions right or that
Speaker 1: like or even if they're very broad, they have a
Speaker 1: general sense of how they feel about political figures, political issues,
Speaker 1: things that happen in the news. You know, what are
Speaker 1: you what did you learn about where those people are actually? Like,
Speaker 1: where is that information coming from? How are they running
Speaker 1: into it in this crazy meatia ecosystem?
Speaker 2: For sure?
Speaker 3: So you know, I think it's that I like to
Speaker 3: throw out and remind myself of every day, is that
Speaker 3: fifty four percent of voters writ large are just not
Speaker 3: paying attention to news at all. They're they're trying to
Speaker 3: avoid it mostly, and so if they're not paying attention
Speaker 3: to news, how are they experiencing politics? I think we
Speaker 3: like to ask ourselves that question to really shape kind
Speaker 3: of what are the campaigns that we're going to together
Speaker 3: to reach them?
Speaker 2: And you know, I think a lot of democratic.
Speaker 3: Investment over the last couple of years has has focused
Speaker 3: on how do we make the news sexier, easier to reach,
Speaker 3: easier to access. There's nothing wrong with that endeavor, but
Speaker 3: I think it's it's going to have its limits. If
Speaker 3: there's just a if there's a swath of people that
Speaker 3: just really don't want to payge to news at all,
Speaker 3: and so we want to reach those voters, we have
Speaker 3: to do it in a different way. We have to
Speaker 3: have different cultural entry points. I think you hear Democrats
Speaker 3: say a lot like we need to be culture first.
Speaker 3: I'm frustrated that I don't actually feel like we have
Speaker 3: a next step to that question. I've never actually heard adequate,
Speaker 3: you know, ideas of what that looks like. And so
Speaker 3: I think part of the research that parties has been
Speaker 3: doing over the last two years is sparking ideas of
Speaker 3: what does that actually look like in practice? Knowing that
Speaker 3: beauty and fashion, true crime, parenting.
Speaker 2: Those are three categories that are reaching a really.
Speaker 3: Large set of voters who are both swingy and you know,
Speaker 3: switch from party to party, but also don't pay attention
Speaker 3: to the news. What would it look like for us
Speaker 3: to create a campaign where we develop true crime content
Speaker 3: and then use that content to like talk about Epstein
Speaker 3: or whatever. It makes sense, Like it's about really using
Speaker 3: you know, using this data to uncover those other kind
Speaker 3: of non news oriented entry points for us to then
Speaker 3: have conversations with people on their terms. Parenting is a
Speaker 3: category that I think is like highly interesting and super
Speaker 3: relevant to what we're talking about. What would it look
Speaker 3: like for us to create a track of always on
Speaker 3: communication that targets people based on the fact that they're parents,
Speaker 3: that talks about issues that are you know, highly relevant
Speaker 3: to parents. I think when we talk about you know,
Speaker 3: the march to twenty twenty eight and the fact that
Speaker 3: we're getting going early, that doesn't mean that we need
Speaker 3: to be advertising all the time. We're trying to advertise
Speaker 3: in moments that are highly relevant. Back to school great
Speaker 3: opportunity to you know, talk to parents about about how
Speaker 3: Trump's policies advanced policies reveals policies are personally impacting them.
Speaker 3: I think our goal here is is to be relevant
Speaker 3: and not necessarily always.
Speaker 1: On when people are whether they're like they're interested in
Speaker 1: true crime or gaming or fitness or whatever else. Like
Speaker 1: where are those voters hanging out? Right, It's like we're
Speaker 1: not in a world where they're going to true crime
Speaker 1: dot com on the web to read about So it
Speaker 1: was that they are in social media apps and they
Speaker 1: have both followed and are being fed that sort of content,
Speaker 1: you know, Like just I want to try to like
Speaker 1: get a little granular about where these people are hanging out.
Speaker 1: And I think why it's particularly relevant is, you know,
Speaker 1: as we have been absent in these spaces. Obviously that's
Speaker 1: why you're doing the work you're doing. But if you
Speaker 1: look at like health and beauty for instance, or wellness
Speaker 1: as a space, like we were absent. But it's some
Speaker 1: course of time since you know, twenty sixteen, twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: that category, which would have seemed demographical to be very
Speaker 1: much ours, you know, a very you know, you know,
Speaker 1: young mom, younger women category became like the birthplace of Maha.
Speaker 1: So I'm just trying to understand, like where these people are,
Speaker 1: like where they actually hang out when they say they're
Speaker 1: like they're into fitness or true crime or whatever else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean a lot of this research is very
Speaker 3: baked in YouTube, Like let's just name that. I think
Speaker 3: there's priorities to spending a disproportionate amount of time and
Speaker 3: money really trying to understand YouTube behavior because we know
Speaker 3: how easy it is to just light money on fire
Speaker 3: on that platform, and there's a ton of upside and
Speaker 3: better understanding, you know, how people are using the platform.
Speaker 3: Let me give you an example of a program that
Speaker 3: we ran earlier this summer that I think will help
Speaker 3: answer the questions.
Speaker 2: So we from our research, as we talked about.
Speaker 3: Young men super online super swing their swing voters, they
Speaker 3: you know, swung from from Trump, away from Trump, away
Speaker 3: from Biden in from twenty twenty to twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: From our research, we knew that young men are interested
Speaker 3: in podcasts, finance, gaming, fitness.
Speaker 2: I think those were the categories.
Speaker 3: What our team did is we ran this campaign in
Speaker 3: Ohio earlier this summer where all of the ads were
Speaker 3: about John Housted, but the ads was highly relevant to
Speaker 3: those categories that I just laid out. So you had
Speaker 3: like a guy lifting weights talking about John Houston running,
Speaker 3: you know, next to game to fitness content. You had
Speaker 3: someone who was an actual gaming creator talk about same
Speaker 3: topic in the context of you know, what a normal
Speaker 3: kind of gaming piece of content on YouTube might look like.
Speaker 3: Part of the theory here it's it was actually twofold.
Speaker 3: It was one our ads should natively look like the
Speaker 3: content that someone is otherwise watching on YouTube ads. Actually,
Speaker 3: you know, in today's world, it's actually better for an
Speaker 3: AD to blend in than to stand out. You kind
Speaker 3: of want that nativity. There's there's benefit there, and I
Speaker 3: think we had we had some research from previous cycles
Speaker 3: that that proved to us that that was that was
Speaker 3: a good theory.
Speaker 2: But then also, I think more importantly, anyone on.
Speaker 3: YouTube is kind of, especially a young man, is kind
Speaker 3: of like two clicks away from right leaning content and
Speaker 3: any given point, in part because of how much the
Speaker 3: right has invested in and just like having an always
Speaker 3: on content machine and being present in all the places
Speaker 3: that we are not such that if you're watching fitness
Speaker 3: content and then you skip past the next two videos,
Speaker 3: you're probably going to be on a piece of content
Speaker 3: that's a little bit Maha in nature. And so we
Speaker 3: had run a campaign a couple of cycles ago where
Speaker 3: we just had this theory of what would it look
Speaker 3: like to just run ads on the most right leaning
Speaker 3: content that exists and see what kind of persuasion effect
Speaker 3: we can have, assuming that just because someone's on Breitbart
Speaker 3: doesn't mean they probably chose to be there. They may
Speaker 3: have just ended up there because of the algorithms, and
Speaker 3: our theory proved out like we were able to keep,
Speaker 3: you know, retain these voters at a pretty high rate
Speaker 3: just by running positive pre roll ads before someone you know,
Speaker 3: was watching that brightbart content. And so the team was
Speaker 3: kind of like, how do we do this in a
Speaker 3: slightly more expanded way, not necessarily explicitly right wing, but
Speaker 3: these kind of right leaning places that you might not
Speaker 3: you know, expect on on the front end. So those
Speaker 3: those five categories are the ones that the team kind
Speaker 3: of proposed as let's interrupt these let's interrupt this user's
Speaker 3: journey with ads and see what happens. And the theory
Speaker 3: proved out right like we were able to effectively you know,
Speaker 3: stop from once from you know, getting to that right
Speaker 3: leaning content. A lot of the times someone was like
Speaker 3: opening up a new tab on Google and searching for
Speaker 3: more information about John Houston, which you know, it did
Speaker 3: the job of interrupting that that person's flow. So anyway,
Speaker 3: all of that to say, I think we are disproportionately
Speaker 3: spending a lot of time thinking about how to find
Speaker 3: people on YouTube, in particular, just because it is such
Speaker 3: a it's a high it's a high density, very efficient
Speaker 3: place to reach people, but it's a very easy place
Speaker 3: to to.
Speaker 2: To burn money.
Speaker 1: And it's important to note that we talked about TikTok
Speaker 1: all the time, but at last I checked, you still
Speaker 1: cannot run political ads on TikTok.
Speaker 2: Correct, You cannot run political ads on TikTok.
Speaker 1: That is true, yes, And so it's just out there
Speaker 1: destroying the world that we can't intervene.
Speaker 3: There's certainly interventions that you can you can do that
Speaker 3: are not you know, explicitly renting attention. Was that I
Speaker 3: liked my like nerdy way to talk about advertising, as
Speaker 3: you're you're renting someone's attention. We can earn attention on TikTok,
Speaker 3: but it's not something that we're going to be able to,
Speaker 3: you know, get in a short window.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about AI chatbots because in
Speaker 1: your survey I saw that just about half of voters
Speaker 1: are using an AI chatbot once a week. And you know,
Speaker 1: obviously Google is still king you pointed that out, but
Speaker 1: even Google is changing in the way a lot of
Speaker 1: people are getting their search results because they are coming
Speaker 1: in these AI summaries, which is interrupting the search ads
Speaker 1: that we've been spending gazillion dollars on for decades. And
Speaker 1: but so as we think as AI chatbots grow as
Speaker 1: a search engine for people, how should democrats be thinking
Speaker 1: about influencing those results? Like, we had a playbook, We
Speaker 1: had a both a. We had a advertising playbook for
Speaker 1: Google Search and we had an organic search SEO playbook
Speaker 1: for how to get our content near the top of
Speaker 1: the results. What the hell do you do when it's
Speaker 1: you know, a handful of very different, very independent AI
Speaker 1: chat bots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, first of all, there's a lot of really smart
Speaker 3: people who are tackling this head on. I think the
Speaker 3: folks that run for something coccai are thinking really extensively
Speaker 3: about how do you a understand and then be manipulate
Speaker 3: a chat bot result. It's really you know, AEO is
Speaker 3: just se O two point oh right, it's just understand
Speaker 3: what is just so people know, Yeah, it stands for
Speaker 3: answer engine optimization, and it's basically, what how do you
Speaker 3: manipulate what is going to show up in a chatbot result.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of really smart people out there who
Speaker 3: are thinking about, how do you, you know, understand what's
Speaker 3: showing up in a chatbot result?
Speaker 2: And then be how do you actually, you know, change it?
Speaker 2: You change it by updating your website.
Speaker 3: You change it by pitching stories to the AP, You're
Speaker 3: posting shit on Reddit because that's a place that's often
Speaker 3: getting picked.
Speaker 2: Up by by chat bots.
Speaker 3: All of this is going to change incredibly fast, and
Speaker 3: anyone who is kind of going out there with best
Speaker 3: practices today, the best practices are going to change two
Speaker 3: months from now, six months from now. And so I
Speaker 3: think it does require a lot of urgency and a
Speaker 3: shift in conversation across our party that if we always
Speaker 3: had to invest in digital infrastructure, now is the time
Speaker 3: to like double triple, quadruple down on that effort for
Speaker 3: us to like really understand how quickly the Internet is changing,
Speaker 3: like we have to be investing in innovation to make
Speaker 3: sure that we're able to stay on top of these trends.
Speaker 3: I think the work that Priorities is doing, though, in
Speaker 3: the kind of chatbot space beyond just you know, understanding
Speaker 3: what a result is, an understanding how you might manipulate
Speaker 3: that result, is really understanding when and why are people
Speaker 3: turning to chatbots, what is the kind of driver of
Speaker 3: why someone's using it, and how does that, you know,
Speaker 3: change how we should be thinking about intervening and better
Speaker 3: understanding their their media journey. And so I think, you know,
Speaker 3: the result the research that we did over the summer
Speaker 3: I think was highly It was incredibly helpful at uncovering
Speaker 3: that people are not necessarily searching for information about a
Speaker 3: candidate as much as they are searching for information about
Speaker 3: policies and issues in a much more granular way. You know,
Speaker 3: I think, as you know, Ai Con, I don't know
Speaker 3: if you feel this personally, but I think as I'm
Speaker 3: you know, scrolling TikTok and on YouTube and seeing content
Speaker 3: in my feed that feels a little like is this real?
Speaker 3: Is this not like I am personally opening up JGBT
Speaker 3: claude and saying, hey, can you fact check this for me?
Speaker 3: There's a I think a ton of it almost feels
Speaker 3: like the Spider Man meme. Where we're because of the
Speaker 3: insurgence of AI. People are using AI to check if
Speaker 3: things are AI.
Speaker 1: It's it doesn't seem great for the world, but yes,
Speaker 1: that's where we are.
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Speaker 1: We're in the MIDI twenty twenty sixth section. You guys
Speaker 1: are focused on, among other things, trying to define the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight potential nominees, most notably Jade Vans and
Speaker 1: Marco Rubio. Talk to me about why start that process now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 3: I've been working at a superPAC for almost a decade now,
Speaker 3: which is crazy, and I am very much of the
Speaker 3: opinion that the way that our party uses superpacks is
Speaker 3: outdated and not to the maximum that we can and
Speaker 3: certainly not to the maximum that Republicans do. And the
Speaker 3: way I would describe that as quite simple. I think,
Speaker 3: as much as this role of a superpack is to
Speaker 3: raise money that a campaign cannot raise, aka we are
Speaker 3: able to raise beyond the contribution limit that campaign has,
Speaker 3: we also have time that a campaign doesn't have, and
Speaker 3: I think really leaning into that time element is a
Speaker 3: thing that I feel really important as the role that
Speaker 3: a super pac can can play in today's world. And
Speaker 3: so I I think in the aftermath of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: when we're sitting around asking ourselves, why the hell did
Speaker 3: we just lose that election and what can we do
Speaker 3: differently next time, our team got to work on a
Speaker 3: couple of things including, you know, at a high level,
Speaker 3: how can we do a better job of listening to
Speaker 3: the internet to be able to drive decision making. We
Speaker 3: can talk about polling and all the reasons why polling
Speaker 3: is flawed, but you know, priorities is very much of
Speaker 3: the opinion that with the you know, availability of AI,
Speaker 3: we can we can observe qualitative data at such a
Speaker 3: larger scale in today's world that we might as well
Speaker 3: lean into it. It's exactly how the Republicans are making
Speaker 3: their decisions, right Like we like to look at the
Speaker 3: Kamma is for they them AD, I think is a
Speaker 3: perfect example of how the Republicans said that has likes
Speaker 3: to it, it's sticky, it's doing really well online, let's
Speaker 3: put money behind it, Whereas on the Democratic side we
Speaker 3: have to like let an AD go through an entire
Speaker 3: polling brigamarole in order to take it seriously. Anyway, all
Speaker 3: of that to say, priorities got to work after twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four to build a tech stack and do research
Speaker 3: to really understand how can we be leaning into listening
Speaker 3: to the internet to understand what's going to resonate and
Speaker 3: what's going to break through. At the same time, you know,
Speaker 3: we recognize that the march to twenty twenty eight is
Speaker 3: going to be long, and it's going to include a lot.
Speaker 2: Of Democrats fighting each other.
Speaker 3: I think if this summer was indicative of anything, it's
Speaker 3: that primaries are challenging and they can be really helpful,
Speaker 3: but ultimately they're tough, and we are about we're about
Speaker 3: to face that on a level that is going to
Speaker 3: be different than what we.
Speaker 2: Just experienced over the summer. And I'm really worried that
Speaker 2: our party.
Speaker 3: Has not been you know, we have not gone through
Speaker 3: an election without Trump on the ballot in quite some time.
Speaker 3: I think our muscle memory there is quite We're going
Speaker 3: to be running against someone new no matter what happens,
Speaker 3: and the Democrats are going to be fighting each other.
Speaker 3: So the team at Priorities was like, what can we
Speaker 3: do to be the most value ad heading into twenty
Speaker 3: eight Let's get going now, Let's actually start to think
Speaker 3: about what it looks like to define our eventual opposition
Speaker 3: so that by the time we have a nominee, they
Speaker 3: have a slightly less uphill climb to be able to
Speaker 3: go after and you know, compare theirselves to the Republican.
Speaker 3: So that's the work of Prologue. We're really excited about it.
Speaker 3: Our tech stack all feeds into kind of what we're doing.
Speaker 3: It's not going to look like a traditional advertising campaign.
Speaker 3: It's going to be always on, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 3: we're all on all the time. And we have a
Speaker 3: million ideas that we're excited to dive into.
Speaker 1: So the I am in after twenty seventeen, sorry, after
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. In twenty seventeen, one of my strong views
Speaker 1: was that we should take a lot of the money
Speaker 1: that was flowing into democratic politics and make of Trump
Speaker 1: and be always right into like not as you say,
Speaker 1: not always on like we're going to run ads for
Speaker 1: the rest of time, but in moments, high leverage moments,
Speaker 1: you would run advertising to shape that impression, to shape
Speaker 1: that moment where people paying attention in their minds in
Speaker 1: our favor. And I was I liked that idea because
Speaker 1: I believed correctly. I think that we were just so
Speaker 1: outgunned in the media space that we were competing with Trump,
Speaker 1: being with Fox News, being with Facebook at the time,
Speaker 1: this is this very powerful entity that was a sort
Speaker 1: of conduit for MAGA adjacent messaging, like we needed to,
Speaker 1: you know, put some like messaging thrust behind the things
Speaker 1: that happening. I went around, I sold this lots of people,
Speaker 1: and the thing that everyone came back to me to
Speaker 1: say was and smart people was there is no evidence
Speaker 1: that early ads work. And then you're basically recommending that
Speaker 1: we were lighting money on fire. I was never fully
Speaker 1: convinced of that, but I also was in capble of
Speaker 1: convincing the people who said that to do something different.
Speaker 2: What is your response to that, I mean, does that
Speaker 2: logically make sense?
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense? Well, I mean there's they will
Speaker 1: throw a bunch of political science research issue that people
Speaker 1: have very short memories or are not paying attention at
Speaker 1: the time, and so it doesn't the impressions are not
Speaker 1: worth the money, I guess.
Speaker 3: I mean, research also didn't show that smoking caused cancer
Speaker 3: until recently. No, I just I think that I really
Speaker 3: appreciate the folks in the academic space for pushing us
Speaker 3: to be rigorous. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: like I think it's really important to name that political
Speaker 3: advertisers and what we were trying to do when we
Speaker 3: are trying to win elections is fundamentally different than any
Speaker 3: other you know, communication challenge, marketing challenge.
Speaker 2: In the broader world.
Speaker 3: Right at the end of the day, Not to bring
Speaker 3: Nike back into it, but like Nike spends millions of
Speaker 3: dollars a year to think they're a really cool brand.
Speaker 3: They run ads up around every sporting event to make
Speaker 3: you like them, but ultimately they're trying to sell you shoes,
Speaker 3: and they get to use shoe sales as a proxy
Speaker 3: for whether they're just do it ads are working or not.
Speaker 2: We don't have that.
Speaker 3: We do not have proxies that we get to use
Speaker 3: to understand whether someone's mind is being changed. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: that's why surveys are you know, we invest so much
Speaker 3: in surveys because it's the it's the closest we can
Speaker 3: get to be able to get being able to ask someone.
Speaker 2: Were you persuaded by this? Did we did we sell
Speaker 2: you the shoe?
Speaker 3: And you know that I've spent a huge chunk of
Speaker 3: my career trying to get to a point where we
Speaker 3: can like zero in and understand how to you know,
Speaker 3: properly measure a persuasion effect. And it is it is
Speaker 3: quite challenging, and it is probably the hardest thing that
Speaker 3: I've had to you know, face in my career. But
Speaker 3: the reality is, you know, the Republicans are investing close
Speaker 3: to a billion dollars over the last decade in always
Speaker 3: on infrastructure and communication, and I think it is quite
Speaker 3: obvious that it has paid off.
Speaker 2: Right you look at you know, the example I like
Speaker 2: to give is Trump.
Speaker 3: After the shooting, you know, within an hour he had
Speaker 3: people on the internet talking about the ballroom and how
Speaker 3: the shootings has the hated that the need to build
Speaker 3: a ballroom. We don't have that amplification you know program
Speaker 3: on our site. There's a lot of folks that are
Speaker 3: working really hard to build it. But it just shows
Speaker 3: the long term payoff of what always on infrastructure looks like. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: you know, Democrats sit around and our amplification is like
Speaker 3: crossing your fingers in toe hoping for a retweet from
Speaker 3: Barack Obama. If you want to look at that and
Speaker 3: say that our situation is work is better, I just
Speaker 3: don't buy that. I think that's at the end of
Speaker 3: the day, like our and science have to have to
Speaker 3: come into play, and we have to be able to
Speaker 3: use our judgment and be able to say that, you know,
Speaker 3: always on communication it has to matter, right, like we
Speaker 3: can see it playing out in front of our eyes.
Speaker 3: But I think a critical reason that we are doing
Speaker 3: things differently, and I empathize with the criticism of always
Speaker 3: on and that sometimes you can look at the way
Speaker 3: it plays out in a budget and just think, well,
Speaker 3: there's no way in home we can afford that you
Speaker 3: can't afford to like be at the impression levels.
Speaker 2: Now that we would want to be, yeah, in the
Speaker 2: fall of twenty twenty eight. But that's why the.
Speaker 3: Priorities approach of really using behavioral targeting as an entry
Speaker 3: point to have these conversations is I'm so excited about
Speaker 3: this program because it's the first time that I've really
Speaker 3: looked at a program through the lens of how do
Speaker 3: we reach people not necessarily during a time when they're
Speaker 3: registering to vote or when news is breaking, kind of
Speaker 3: those natural political moments, but instead during the moments of
Speaker 3: case I'm googling whether my lettuce is safe, Like, that's
Speaker 3: the perfect time to have a political conversation.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean we're going to be on all the time.
Speaker 3: In fact, we're not on right now, but like the
Speaker 3: next time something you know, politically relevant happens, you'll.
Speaker 2: See us go up.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm going to look at some of your
Speaker 1: ads because they are they look nothing like a typical
Speaker 1: democratic ad.
Speaker 5: Love it.
Speaker 1: Let's start with one about jd Vance. Let's plan it. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm jd Vance as Vice president.
Speaker 6: I cast the time breaking vote to cut your healthcare
Speaker 6: and I've been helping our great leader create tremendous wealth,
Speaker 6: which has been trickling.
Speaker 7: Down to you.
Speaker 6: Rome wasn't built in a day, of course, but ultimately
Speaker 6: you're gonna feel the benefits and you're medicating.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, that's just in material minute show.
Speaker 2: Anyway, get back to work. You're almost like your second job.
Speaker 1: And President Trump and I have to get back to
Speaker 1: redecorate it. Okay, I believe that was Donald Trump taking
Speaker 1: a leak on Jada Vance's head to make a point
Speaker 1: about Tracadan economics. I love it. Yeah, so go ahead, Yeah,
Speaker 1: talks to me. Just talk to me about the concept
Speaker 1: of the ad, who who you showed the ad to,
Speaker 1: and what the reaction to it was.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, you know, my friends at home think being an
Speaker 3: executive director is like out there talking to you know,
Speaker 3: rich people. It's actually just getting a slack from your
Speaker 3: CMO that says, hey, how do you feel about an
Speaker 3: ad with some piss in it?
Speaker 2: That's quite literally the reality of this job.
Speaker 3: But you know, I think this ad is about recognizing
Speaker 3: that if you can't actually get someone to watch your ad,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter how well it tested. Right.
Speaker 2: The number one thing that we need to be aware
Speaker 2: of is the.
Speaker 3: Skip button and the second screen that exists in the
Speaker 3: fact that people are just naturally going to tune out
Speaker 3: of what we were saying. So if we want to
Speaker 3: be able to actually get our message across about gas prices,
Speaker 3: we need to deliver it in a format that's going
Speaker 3: to capture people's attention. This is just one ad, right,
Speaker 3: I think it's it's really you know, the media responds
Speaker 3: really well to Hey, look at this one ad and
Speaker 3: cover it and get some media attention on it. The
Speaker 3: reality is, like Prologue is going to be thousands of
Speaker 3: ads over the next two years. We're going to throw
Speaker 3: shit at the wall, see what sticks, and then move
Speaker 3: on with our lives. This ad is one example of
Speaker 3: something that we tried. It actually did get a ton
Speaker 3: of attention. People watched it all the way through. I
Speaker 3: think we were really excited about the metrics that we saw.
Speaker 3: People want humor, they want things, they want the po
Speaker 3: they want politics to be a little bit less a
Speaker 3: little bit less serious, and so that was our attempt
Speaker 3: to kind of play around with those insights.
Speaker 1: So, you know, the typical way we have been measuring
Speaker 1: the efficacy of ads and messaging and over the last
Speaker 1: you know, decade. Here is persuasion effects?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: How much does it based on a We're testing the
Speaker 1: AD in front of tens of thousands of people and
Speaker 1: to what how many points did this take off of
Speaker 1: Trump's approval? Or how much did it move vote choice
Speaker 1: in our favor? And these are all in polarized environment,
Speaker 1: very small numbers that you know, we're like an AD
Speaker 1: it could be three times as effective as another AD,
Speaker 1: and it's because it's moving approval three times that three
Speaker 1: points at one point. Yeah, what is your metric of
Speaker 1: success here? Is it completion rate? Are you? Are you
Speaker 1: testing persuason effects? How are you thinking about it?
Speaker 2: All of the above.
Speaker 3: I think we're of the opinion that there's no singular
Speaker 3: metric that's ever going to tell you your AD is working.
Speaker 3: You have to take a really wide lens and like
Speaker 3: take it all in. You know, we didn't do creative
Speaker 3: testing in twenty sixteen. I think in the aftermath I
Speaker 3: was really excited when the idea of creative testing kind
Speaker 3: of came into the ecosystem because I was like, okay,
Speaker 3: like we can finally like understand before we put money
Speaker 3: behind an AD, how is it going to do. And
Speaker 3: I don't know if you guys remember like twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: the biggest thing was like so many of our ads
Speaker 3: were causing backlash. They were actually like moving people in
Speaker 3: the wrong direction. And I was like such an eye
Speaker 3: opening thing. And so I was always of the opinion
Speaker 3: that you know, you can take a look at a
Speaker 3: creative test result and weed out the ads they're going
Speaker 3: to do harm and actually move people in the wrong direction.
Speaker 3: And then if you have five ads at the end
Speaker 3: of the day that move people in the right direction,
Speaker 3: put them all online and see how they do. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: let's let's compare offline and online metrics against each other
Speaker 3: to really understand, you know, how how they're going to
Speaker 3: both be complementary and maybe disagree with each other. Not
Speaker 3: to to to shout out the team at on the
Speaker 3: Newsom campaign, but they did this really well during during
Speaker 3: the PROF fifty campaign. I think their whole theory was
Speaker 3: we're going to test our ads. We are going to
Speaker 3: see what works in a kind of lab environment, and
Speaker 3: we're going to see what horse race looks like. But
Speaker 3: instead of you know, picking the top ad that has
Speaker 3: the highest horse race effect, we're just going to put
Speaker 3: everything out there that doesn't do harm and then see
Speaker 3: you know on YouTube which audience does which which ad move.
Speaker 3: I just give them a lot of props for kind
Speaker 3: of taking that that theory. It's in strong alignment with
Speaker 3: kind of the priority theory of the case, and it
Speaker 3: obviously had a really awesome impat in that race. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I think part of our theory, and this is one
Speaker 3: of the other tools that we're actually in development on
Speaker 3: right now, is what does it look like to amass
Speaker 3: a much larger set of signals to understand how something.
Speaker 2: Might resonate online beyond just you know.
Speaker 3: How something tests in a creative test and how something polls,
Speaker 3: How is an issue being talked about on a podcast,
Speaker 3: how is it being talked about in a comment section
Speaker 3: and a search trend At the doors. There's a million
Speaker 3: different data sets that we have available to us that
Speaker 3: we can be listening to, and part of what Priorities
Speaker 3: is doing is amassing all of those into a centralized
Speaker 3: view so that we can take everything in and make
Speaker 3: strategic judgments accordingly.
Speaker 1: All right, let's look at a ad about Marco Rubio
Speaker 1: and now let's discuss Okay.
Speaker 7: I think America can't get any more expensive that we
Speaker 7: can't afford another pointless war. Well, the call isn't yours
Speaker 7: to me? Kids with a little Marco Invasion action place
Speaker 7: at the boots that are too big promises, He can't
Speaker 7: keep you cont He starts the wars. We pay for
Speaker 7: its social security not anymore medicare Bye bye the toy,
Speaker 7: the tends your boys off to war, the little Marco
Speaker 7: Invasion action place at.
Speaker 6: I love it.
Speaker 1: I love little Marcoup similar vibe to They all have
Speaker 1: a south parking and south parking and I guess the
Speaker 1: their term vibe to them, which which I do?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: Who is the target audience for this ad and how
Speaker 1: did it do?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, generally speaking, Priorities is always kind of trying to
Speaker 3: go after the young voters and voters of color as
Speaker 3: our primary audience. Looking ahead to twenty twenty eight, our
Speaker 3: team has identified just over ten just under ten million
Speaker 3: voters across the battleground states that kind of fit into
Speaker 3: that category.
Speaker 2: So that is, you know, the primary audience for this.
Speaker 3: I think for this particular creative brief, we were also
Speaker 3: quite interested in having an effect with young man in.
Speaker 2: Particular, just because those those are that's a tough audience
Speaker 2: for us.
Speaker 1: You know you I heard you say to you mentioned
Speaker 1: the YouTube that's earlier that you read them, and that
Speaker 1: they're actually sort of influencing some of the creative decisions
Speaker 1: you're making, which is a far cry from which is
Speaker 1: probably causing data nerds within the party to lose their
Speaker 1: mind that we would look at YouTube comments. But one
Speaker 1: thing you said to Peter Hanby was that the YouTube
Speaker 1: comments about JD Vance and Marco Rubio were different in
Speaker 1: one very notable respect. Could you say what that was?
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So let me explain quickly why we care so much
Speaker 3: about comment sections at parties, because it does cause a
Speaker 3: lot of stress, but I do think it's it's super valid.
Speaker 3: So we did a research project last summer where we
Speaker 3: interviewed a bunch of young men on how they watch YouTube,
Speaker 3: and by far and away, the biggest takeaway from that
Speaker 3: research project was just how reliable these young men are
Speaker 3: on comment sections. They watch a video, they jump to
Speaker 3: the comment section. They really want to understand what their
Speaker 3: peers think. They really want to understand if there's agreement
Speaker 3: or disagreement. It is like peer validation that is like
Speaker 3: happening in front of our eyes. And it is like,
Speaker 3: you know, people like to say the Internet is not
Speaker 3: real life. Comment sections are not real life. I'm not
Speaker 3: here to say that people who are commenting on videos
Speaker 3: are representative of voters, but it is an environment where
Speaker 3: conversations are happening and we need to take it seriously
Speaker 3: and learn from it. So that is why we care
Speaker 3: so much about observing what is going on in these
Speaker 3: comment sections and what we saw when.
Speaker 2: We were crafting you know, initials.
Speaker 3: Stead of pulling on on Vans and Rubio in particular,
Speaker 3: you know, our team was going about, you know, picking
Speaker 3: out the messages that you would you know, pull out
Speaker 3: when you're pulling together a pole. But we also spent
Speaker 3: a lot of time kind of scouring the Internet to
Speaker 3: understand what are the narratives that are kind of naturally
Speaker 3: occurring around these guys, What are the late night hosts
Speaker 3: saying about these guys, what are comment sections, what are
Speaker 3: podcasts saying about them, so that we could you know,
Speaker 3: have a little bit of an Internet first lens to
Speaker 3: the narratives that are appearing in our polling. And we
Speaker 3: found that while comment sections about JD Vans were often
Speaker 3: you know, quite negative, definitely poking fun at him. People
Speaker 3: are not afraid to poke fun at Jdvans. Mark Rubio's
Speaker 3: comments were.
Speaker 2: A lot more positive.
Speaker 3: There's just not a lot of criticism happening organically about
Speaker 3: him online. And it's actually why in rolling out this program,
Speaker 3: I think our team walked away feeling a lot more
Speaker 3: anxious about kind of what we have in front of
Speaker 3: us to define Marco Rubio just because A he's super undefined. B.
Speaker 3: People are not willing to, you know, go super negative
Speaker 3: on him online. And see, like in rolling out this
Speaker 3: program to the press, the only person anyone wants to
Speaker 3: talk about right now is JD.
Speaker 1: Vance.
Speaker 2: People don't want to talk about Mark Rubio, and that's
Speaker 2: a problem.
Speaker 1: The Jdvans thing is interesting because, like I think a
Speaker 1: lot about political messaging, when you're trying to define a person,
Speaker 1: if you kind of want to memify him, and you
Speaker 1: can either be memified in a cool way or in
Speaker 1: a bad way. Trump maybe the Trump may actually be
Speaker 1: the one person who resists meming because he kind of
Speaker 1: is a meme of himself, developed his own meme in
Speaker 1: the eighties and just like live with a sense, But
Speaker 1: you know it is what it's like, this is even
Speaker 1: before we even talked about memes, like that's what happened
Speaker 1: to John Carey with the windsurfing and the you know,
Speaker 1: the you know I was for before it was against.
Speaker 1: So like they he was mumified. He lost al Gore
Speaker 1: even before that, you know who, a man who was
Speaker 1: a let chosen by Bill Clinton to be on the
Speaker 1: ticket because he was thought to be the most ethical
Speaker 1: and moral person in the Senate. Then by by the
Speaker 1: end was turned into a giant liar who claimed that
Speaker 1: he invented the Internet and was so boring. He got memified, right,
Speaker 1: and so like Vance seems like like I always think
Speaker 1: about when we like you can I'm sure if we
Speaker 1: do message testing and we asked a million voters made
Speaker 1: focus groups, like like he would want to say they're
Speaker 1: bad on affordability, but that's not like it's not a
Speaker 1: culturally relevant message or cultural irrelevant message. Is that the
Speaker 1: JD Vance is a goober?
Speaker 3: I actually looked at the creative brief right before we
Speaker 3: got on because I wanted to remember our our create
Speaker 3: de brief literally describes like what we think the meme
Speaker 3: of these guys should be.
Speaker 2: For JD.
Speaker 3: Vance, it's the flannel shirt, doesn't fit him anymore. Right,
Speaker 3: he grew up seemingly middle class. He's now in the
Speaker 3: Trump administration, and like unfortunately the flannel shirt that he
Speaker 3: once wanted to wear no longer zips up. It's he's
Speaker 3: grown out of it because he's spent the last couple
Speaker 3: of years catering to the Trump administration. So what you
Speaker 3: thought you knew about him before, it's not so true anymore.
Speaker 3: So everything you're going to see us put out over
Speaker 3: the next couple of years, like for now, like I
Speaker 3: think the meme could evolve, and part of our our
Speaker 3: research is going to be to try to understand, you know,
Speaker 3: poke holes in that theory. But that's kind of the
Speaker 3: story that we're trying to tell about Vance And it
Speaker 3: also allows us to you know, tell that story through
Speaker 3: a climate change lens or an abortion lens or an
Speaker 3: economic lens.
Speaker 2: It doesn't require us to you know, pit issues against
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: I think every time as a party we're pitting issues
Speaker 3: against each other, we're losing. The meme I think that
Speaker 3: our team has picked out for Rubio is he's a
Speaker 3: chicken hawk. He's all talked, but when it actually comes
Speaker 3: to it, like he's never served in the military. He's
Speaker 3: actually nowhere to be found right now despite everything that's
Speaker 3: going on in Iran. So those like, like I said,
Speaker 3: like our team and putting together this creative brief and
Speaker 3: really distilling the research. It was less about what are
Speaker 3: the top issues and more what's the one sentence that
Speaker 3: you want someone to describe them as when they walk away?
Speaker 3: And I think that's really our theory on on narrative
Speaker 3: and messaging priorities before I.
Speaker 1: Let you go, Like, as we are sitting here today,
Speaker 1: there's somewhere between a dozen and four hundred people who
Speaker 1: are planning to run for president very soon. In those
Speaker 1: campaign headquarters, there are already people you and I have
Speaker 1: been these people in humans in the past, who are
Speaker 1: charting out at memos and slide decks what the campaign
Speaker 1: should look like, what the strategy would be, what the
Speaker 1: campaign structure would be. What advice do you have for
Speaker 1: these campaigns to you know, learn from what you guys
Speaker 1: have done and to avoid making some of the mistakes
Speaker 1: we've made in recent campaigns, where I think some of
Speaker 1: our structure and strategies have been anachronistic at best.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I would be remiss not to say that,
Speaker 3: like digital has to be at the table, like if
Speaker 3: you are not bringing the table. Yes, right, there's all
Speaker 3: the debate of digital as a team versus a tactic. Yes,
Speaker 3: Like I hope we are past that, but I have
Speaker 3: to say it, right. I mean. The other thing is,
Speaker 3: it's just like, you know, I think that if I
Speaker 3: get asked all the time, well, how are you guys
Speaker 3: actually acting on this research? It's really smart, it's really insightful,
Speaker 3: but like, how should it change my strategy?
Speaker 5: And I think my.
Speaker 2: Singular answer to that question is more is more and
Speaker 2: more video.
Speaker 3: You are never going to regret making more video for
Speaker 3: today the way today's Internet operates. I think Kyle Thlart
Speaker 3: put this study out a couple weeks or last week
Speaker 3: around just how much Corey Booker is just churning out
Speaker 3: video and constantly putting things out, and it's like earning
Speaker 3: him a ton of awesome, you know, goodwill on the Internet.
Speaker 3: You are never going to regret doing more. But I
Speaker 3: think that requires a fundamental shift in We need to
Speaker 3: stop editing ourselves on the front end. We need to
Speaker 3: stop putting things through twenty rounds of legal compliance, research review,
Speaker 3: and just start putting things on the Internet and seeing
Speaker 3: what sticks. The Internet is a place where we have
Speaker 3: a lot to learn. We need to stop thinking about
Speaker 3: it as just a distribution chann and instead think about
Speaker 3: it as a place where we can do a lot
Speaker 3: of good in listening and observing how people are responding
Speaker 3: to our content.
Speaker 1: Daniel Butterfield, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
Speaker 1: you for nerding out with me on my favorite topic
Speaker 1: in the world. This has been so much fun. We
Speaker 1: will be watching what you guys are doing to the
Speaker 1: rest of this selection of the next Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you Talk soon.
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