"jerks on the internet"

Advertising

Facebook Is the Only Game in Town for Digital Political AdsBloomberg.com"A decade ago political campaigns loved Facebook for its ability to turn clicks into donations and email lists of likely voters. But in interviews, a dozen ad agency executives and digital strategists say they now see a platform that offers a fraction of its previous return, because a stagnating user base and policy changes have made it harder to target specific kinds of voters. Meta declined to comment."

Tracking The Spending Of The $9.8 Billion Midterm Elections – Kyle Roberts (AdImpact)BusinessOfPoliticsPodcast.com"Kyle Roberts, CEO of AdImpact joins us on the show today to discuss the latest spending data around political advertising in the 2022 midterms, the trends underlying the numbers, and his strategies for selling software in the political industry."

Campaigns

The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote MachineWired.com"The analysts compared the batch of targeted Iowans with the publicly available list of people who voted. They came back with what they saw as a solid win. About 3,300 more of the targeted residents had turned out to vote than had been forecast to. The ads, they concluded, had worked, and at a reasonable $15 per vote. That’s about what Biden had spent nationally in 2020 while defeating Trump, though he spent more per voter in swing states."

Democrats’ new midterm message: “Fund the police.”FWIWNewsletter.Substack.com"Since the first week of September, his campaign has run this ad everywhere online - spending around $215,000 serving it to Wisconsinites on Facebook and Instagram, and another $623,000 promoting it on YouTube. That’s a very large amount of money to put behind one piece of ad creative online. An interesting note - the majority of these ads exclude younger audiences in their targeting criteria, and on YouTube, they overwhelmingly aim to reach voters over 35."

Email

RNC says Google suppressed more than 22M GOTV, fundraising emails in September, exploring 'legal options'FoxNews.com"The RNC provided Fox News with data showing that party emails go from "strong inbox delivery— 90-100%" down to 0% at the end of the month."

Fundraising

The Most Toxic Politicians Are Dragging Us to Hell With Emails and TextsNYTimes.com"They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon."

Social Media

Most people on Twitter don’t live in political echo chambers — but mostly because they don’t care enough to bother building oneNiemanLab.org"So only about 1 in 4 followed even three of these politics-heavy accounts. Only 2.5% followed 50 — a number I’d wager a lot of American journalists could claim."

TikTok Politics and the Era of Embodied MemesNewsletters.TheAtlantic.com"We looked at users who left comments on TikTok videos and searched to see if they’d also posted their own content—and the difference between TikTok and YouTube is stark. On YouTube, only 18 percent of commenters we looked at created five or more videos. On TikTok, the number was 78 percent."

Three reasons Washington is freaking out about Elon Musk right nowPolitico.com"If the world’s richest man reinstates Donald Trump — along with other controversial politicians banned for rules violations — Republican campaign managers could again find their days wrecked by Tweet-driven headaches."

Technology

3 Political Tech Questions for Gerard Niemira of Higher Ground LabsCampaignsAndElections.com"I think what has been nice is that you’re seeing people who are more willing to step up to fund these companies because there is a potential for either an exit or ongoing revenue. And that can sustain an investment ecosystem that otherwise wouldn’t be there."