Kamala’s Digital Ad Blitz - Let's talk about it

Are you watching tonight's debate?

The way we do online political advertising needs more thoughtful consideration, this post opens that can of worms.

My interest is not to persuade you of any candidate politically but to educate you on political marketing ethics. If you like this topic let me know by pressing the 💖 button - the algorithm really likes it when you do that (as do I)

Remember when politics was about ideas, and debates mattered more than campaign dollars? Yeah, neither do I.

Having said that, Barack Obama’s 2008 grassroots campaign still stands out, particularly for its use of digital media. With a team of 100 managing his online presence (a first), Obama raised more than $750 million from small donors via email and social media (another first.) His campaign efficiently used data analytics, created viral content, and, (in another historic first) Obama announced his 2012 re-election campaign via a YouTube video.

Barack Obama spent $22.25 million on online political ads.

Fast forward to 2016, and attention-seeking-drama-farmer Donald Trump’s relentless use of Twitter became a defining feature of his candidacy and presidency. Trump bypassed traditional media entirely, using X to speak directly to his (shall we say, questionable?) base—often in real-time. Trump’s campaign demonstrated how social media could be used not just for engagement, but for setting the news agenda and controlling the narrative.

Donald Trump's campaign and the subsequent Russian scandal changed the way we do online political advertising forever. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, there's a sequel to this Russian saga happening live, grab your popcorn.

It's 2024, enter Kamala Harris.

By giving her staff 2 months to spend $200 million on digital ads, Harris officially launched the largest digital ad campaign in U.S. history. This level of spending isn’t just unprecedented, it marks a substantial shift in how political campaigns are expected to operate now and in the future.

Where Obama used social media to mobilize grassroots support, and Trump used it to set the narrative, Harris is using the digital space as the central battleground of her campaign. Her team is actively deploying these ads across social media, streaming services, digital audio platforms, and connected TV - but more on this in a second.

For the purpose of this post, I'll lean heavily on social media ads to make my point, primarily because that is within my expertise and, secondly, that's where most of the budget is going.

As of this writing, September 10th, 2024 - the day of the first (and only?) presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump - there are exactly 4300 ads currently running on Meta for Kamala and 360 ads for Donald.

Mind you, while I've pulled these numbers straight from their official Facebook pages, I'm confident more ads are currently running for both candidates through different business accounts.

At a glance, Trump's team seems to have initially put out unexplainably off-brand creatives, only to later settle on awkward videos of him talking directly into the camera. His tone is generally aggressive and accusatory of the opposition with a sense of urgency. The fact that he is asking for donations whilst sitting in a private jet is painfully (un)ironic, but certainly not as (un)ironic as his donations landing page.

To each his own - I have to remind myself, tongue firmly in cheek.

(For my marketing role at Visible, I’ve done an Online Perception Report on Trump you can scroll through here.)

Now let's look over to the other side.

In the last 24 hours, the official Kamala Harris Facebook page has launched 100 new ads trying to get people excited for the debate happening in a few hours. Every recent poll, every new influencer video, every time she does or says anything with the potential to go viral, they pour gasoline on that fire.

Her team is on it like hair on soap.

Running 4300 concurrent ads is as difficult of a task as it sounds. And while I can't see into their dashboard, from what I was able to gather, they quickly run through hundreds of ads, on sub 1M audiences, presumably to micro-target. This is common practice, they are testing different demographics, copy, and creatives. There's urgency and scarcity, there's influencers’ endorsements, there are interviews, there are strong calls to action, and there's something for every type of consumer voter. They've done their homework.

And Meta is just one slice of the pie.

According to the 24 year old staffer who runs her TikTok account - each campaign's social media platform has a distinct personality. For example, the campaign's X account targets "political junkies," Instagram appeals to a "millennial crowd," Facebook focuses on "older generations," and TikTok is designed for a "younger audience."

Kamala has been building goodwill for a while now.

During the 2022 midterm elections, fueled by women's multivitamins and directed by a great publicist, Harris was one of the DNC’s leading figures in collaborating with influencers. She engaged in more than a dozen recorded one-on-one discussions with social media creators and produced multiple videos with them, which were shared across various social media platforms. I couldn't find any numbers on how many interviews she's done this year, but I'm confident it's substantial.

Her campaign has strategically partnered with popular influencers like Vidya Gopalan, Taylor Hale, Alex Pearlman, and Olivia Julianna to amplify Harris's message to their followers. And while I've read rumors about her team paying for positive endorsements, there's no real evidence to prove it, so I choose to believe the excitement around her candidacy is a reflection of their well-oiled social media machine.

The scale and sophistication of this effort dwarf even the extensive digital strategies of Obama and Trump.

But is it working?

It depends. Beyond the likes, views, and the positive broader social media conversation, the "real" numbers, a wise analyst would say, are in the donations and, more importantly, the votes.

But unlike running a typical Meta Ads Campaign where you have your boss breathing down your neck to increase ROI, improve average cart value and decrease the cost per lead, an online political campaign doesn't have any of those real-time pressures. Sure, you have the calls for donations and other metrics that could help you forecast, but they aren't guarantees of a vote.

(Part of me wonders if they're even able to break-even the ad costs with the donations, but I doubt that's a real concern they have.)

I imagine it's similar to running a waitlist campaign, where you hope all of that excitement building will lead to a purchase once the product becomes available. In my experience, less than half end up buying.

What if a like on Facebook equated to a vote?

Research has shown that liking a politician's posts on Facebook can accurately predict voter intentions. This study proved that even a single like can reveal significant information about a user's political preferences.

Facebook itself has also conducted a 61-million-person experiment demonstrating how exposure to political messages can significantly increase voter turnout.

Political ads on Facebook allow marketers to precisely target specific demographics and gauge how different groups respond to their messages. This level of microtargeting offers political campaigns a deeper understanding of voter behavior—insights that go beyond what’s typically available in standard commercial advertising.

And herein lies the problem.

While the scale of Harris’s campaign is impressive, it raises important questions about the role of money in political advertising, particularly when it comes to how voters are targeted and influenced.

When a campaign can afford to spend hundreds of millions on advertising, how accessible is the political process to candidates who don’t have access to such resources?

What about the ethical challenge that having access to this extremely well-targeted political profiling machine demands?

In a post-Cambridge Analytica, post-truth, post-privacy world, Harris’s digital push highlights the evolving nature of political campaigns, where virality is just as important as votes.

I've done my own Fermi calculations and with an average CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) of $17, a $200 million budget could generate approximately 11.76 billion impressions.

And with a voting-age population of approximately 255 million people, each individual of legal voting age would see an ad approximately 46 times.

That means you have 46 chances to press enough buttons and twist enough knobs to test and adapt your message to whatever your audience wants to hear.

And you could rightly say "isn't all marketing manipulation?" Sure it is, but most marketers don't sell the presidency of a country.

You would think that having the financial ability to reach a voter 46 times and influence them to ultimately decide on the future of the country, would trigger some governmental body to, you know, do... something?

Maybe audit the spending? Ensure a level of legal, ethical, or humane responsibility is maintained. I mean, at the very least, send someone with a clipboard to check if we're running a democracy or a future Netflix documentary.

For context, many democracies actually do impose spending caps on political campaigns. Countries like Canada, the UK, Belgium, Chile, France, New Zealand, and South Korea want to regulate the influence of money in elections - notably absent from this list. The US.

And as the U.S. continues to escalate its spending, it sets a precedent that could pressure other democracies to follow suit, leading to a global arms race in political advertising. This not only undermines the integrity of elections but also risks creating an environment where only the wealthiest candidates can compete, further marginalizing those with fewer resources.

You can thank Citizens United v. FEC (2010) for this shift, where spending limits were ruled unconstitutional as they were seen as a violation of free speech.

The same freedom of speech that allows political candidates to lie.

As long as it's not defamatory, lying in political ads is legal, and some would say, necessary. Why? Because political ads are considered political speech, and First Amendment law protects political speech above all other types of speech. The government actually has more leeway to censor commercial speech, but it has very little authority to regulate political ads.

Isn't that ironic? Don't you think?

Now, I realize it might sound like I’m suggesting freedom of speech is the problem—far from it. My issue isn’t with freedom of speech itself, it's with misleading speech that happens to be free, and some having the means to have more speech than others.

The one silver lining in all of this is that thanks to (insert expletive) Trump and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco in 2016, we now do have a few social media regulations in place for online political campaigns, such as:

• disclaiming who paid for the ad,

• disclaiming whether the ad contains digitally altered media,

• not running in Washington DC,

• not questioning the legitimacy of elections (thanks Trump, again, I guess)

• among others.

Looking at the current state of events, and seeing how the US has already sanctioned Russia for interfering (again,) and Kamala's mammoth ad spend, I'm quite confident more regulations will be implemented after this election cycle. Knowing this warms my heart in a way liquor cannot.

You've made it this far, are you tired yet?

Depending on where you live and your activity on Facebook and Instagram you will see more (or less) political ads. This was actually my biggest concern when I saw the news on Kamala Harris's ads budget. This level of spending will definitely contribute to voter fatigue and cynicism—it’s practically guaranteed. You can't flood every channel and expect people to not be bothered by it.

Instead of feeling empowered and excited by the information, voters will become disillusioned, seeing these ads as more of a commercial barrage than a meaningful part of the electoral process. With 65% of Americans saying they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, 55% feeling angry and only 10% saying they always or often feel hopeful about politics, this erosion of trust is already having long-term negative effects on the democratic process.

While the goal is to persuade and mobilize voters, there’s a fine line between influence and manipulation, doing it and over-doing it.

Humane marketing practices would emphasize the importance of delivering honest, informative content that helps voters make informed decisions, rather than overwhelming them with volume or using fear-based tactics. This approach not only respects the intelligence of (some of) the electorate but also contributes to a healthier, more informed democracy.

As digital ad spending in political campaigns continues to surge, so does the responsibility of marketing teams to maintain ethical standards. The sheer volume of spending in U.S. elections, especially when compared to other nations, begs for a thoughtful conversation about money’s influence in politics and the ethical challenges posed by digital marketing.

Because if democracy is for sale, we will all pay the price.

What about you?
Are you watching the elections tonight?