The Billion-Dollar Plan To Make America Pay Attention To Kamala Harris
One of the most important ads of the 2024 presidential election is only six seconds long.
“Donald Trump wants to cut taxes for these guys,” a narrator says as images of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the second-richest and richest man in the world, respectively, appear on screen. “Kamala Harris wants a tax cut for middle-class families.”
Why is a six-second ad, barely long enough to say the names of both candidates, so important? Because unlike most ads on YouTube — and a lot of other social media platforms — the viewer is not allowed to skip it, which is important in a fragmented media environment where viewers rarely have to watch anything they don’t want to watch. And the low-information, low-propensity, disaffected voters who may end up deciding the 2024 presidential election don’t pay attention to politics and don’t want to pay attention to politics.
“Those sort of annoying ads that people see where they have to watch until you get to hit skip?” said Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager on Harris’ team who oversees paid media. “That’s the good stuff. You make sure you get that.”
Or as Ishanee Parikh, the creative director at FF PAC, the super PAC behind the aforementioned ad, put it: “Any avenue where we can put paid media and get someone to have to watch something, we’re there.”
Parikh and Fulks are among the leading figures in the sprawling effort — costing more than a billion dollars, involving hundreds of operatives and staffers, and resulting in a potentially uncountable number of ads — by the Democratic Party and other allies of Harris to solve one of the biggest problems they faced at the beginning of the election cycle: Disaffected voters, hammered by inflation, felt particularly disaffected toward the Democrats and the party’s 81-year-old incumbent candidate, Joe Biden.
Whether Harris, the party’s nominee for barely more than 100 days, is elevated to the presidency will come down in no small part to how FF PAC and the Harris campaign used their combined war chests — nearly $1.4 billion, according to Federal Election Commission records — to find, reach and persuade the disaffected.
Switching from Biden to Harris helped with the problem. Disaffected voters, while they come in basically every demographic box in the book, do tend to be younger, more diverse and less educated. Harris improved the party’s standing with all of these groups. But selling them on voting, and on voting for Harris, first required finding them.
These voters do not watch the nightly news. “They’re not watching speeches of the candidates,” Parikh said. “They most likely didn’t watch the debate.”
In fact, many of them don’t watch broadcast or cable television at all, except for rare moments like the Olympics and NFL games, events for which both campaigns eagerly bought up television time. The Harris campaign and FF PAC each put more than half of their ad buys toward digital advertising, where they were joined by a second super PAC, Priorities USA, which only does digital advertising. Combined, the three groups have given Democrats a significant advantage over the GOP in digital advertising, with the Harris campaign outspending the Trump campaign 20 to 1.
That’s because the number of platforms you can spread ads across is massive. YouTube is the biggest player, but Hulu, Facebook, Instagram, Google search and a multitude of lesser-known streaming services all receive significant advertising dollars. The Harris campaign, in order to reach out to young men, advertised the candidate’s immigrant story during La Liga soccer matches and ads about how Trump inspired anti-Asian hate on the gaming website IGN.
Once you can find them, you have to grab their attention. Ashley Aylward, a research manager at HIT Strategies, a Democratic polling firm, recounted running focus groups of young women. The participants were shown a simple video of Harris, speaking at a podium and promising to protect abortion rights. The women agreed they found it persuasive. But they also agreed if they came across it on social media, they would swipe away before watching it in full.
“It’s a tough nut to crack,” Aylward said, recommending the party work with influencers as an alternative to using paid media. She noted young men, in particular, would recoil as soon as a politician spoke: “As soon as they see that it’s a political message, they just turn off their brains and disengage.”
The Harris campaign would occasionally deploy so-called “brain rot” techniques to grab viewers’ attention, for instance by running a clip of Subway Surfers gameplay alongside otherwise-normal advertising content. But most of their attention-grabbing techniques were more mundane: making sure ads used different angles, or making sure the person delivering the message changed what outfit they were wearing, so viewers wouldn’t just assume they were seeing the same ad for the second or third time.
Once they had their attention, it was about getting a message out quickly — like, really quickly. “What does your ad say in the first three seconds?” Fulks asked, referring to how long the campaign has to convince a viewer to watch the full spot. The campaigns tried to keep their message simple — something Democrats gave the Trump campaign credit for with his “no tax on tips” messaging — and tried to make sure it required almost no background knowledge about the two candidates.
But regardless of what platform they were using, the messaging did not change much. Both the campaign and its allied super PACs focused on basic economic messaging — hitting Trump on his tariff proposals and contrasting them with Harris’ support for an expanded child tax credit, for instance — and on savaging Trump over abortion rights. Those messages tended to perform the best in the extensive message testing now endemic to Democratic political campaigns.
“We’re not slicing and dicing the electorate or seeing big differences in the issues people care about,” Parikh said. “Because even people who care deeply about specific issues, their number one issue is still their wallet.”
There were some audience-specific messages: The Harris campaign, for instance, launched geotargeted digital ads aimed at college campuses to tell students Republicans were threatening the Affordable Care Act’s provision to allow children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26.
There are signs the push may have worked: New York Times/Siena College polling has consistently found Trump dominant among the slice of the electorate that did not vote in 2020 — as good a stand-in as any for low-propensity voters. In May, the survey gave Trump a 48% to 33% edge.
But in the newspaper’s last round of swing state polling before the election, Harris led among 2020 nonvoters, 48% to 43%.