The digital trends operatives want to ditch in 2024
Sure, everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence and its influence on campaigns heading into 2024. But that doesn’t mean all the other technologies that shape campaigns are just going to disappear — including the ones that strategists wish would.
Score spoke with more than a dozen operatives at CampaignTech East, a confab of digital campaign experts at National Harbor last week, to see which digital trends they hope campaigns ditch in the 2024 cycle. Here’s what they had to say:
Courtney Sieloff, founder and CEO of Woolf Strategy, a progressive firm: “The scary, mean, ‘I’m going to steal your dog’ emails.”
Austin Fiala, director of client strategy at Convergence Media, a Republican firm: “Definitely the somewhat misleading tactics that have kind of been inherent to the Republican fundraising space in the past. … Thankfully after 2022 and with everybody, including candidates, being very turned off by how the final months of that went, we are definitely seeing a lot of movement in the space for that.”
Eric Wilson, managing partner of Startup Caucus, a Republican incubator: “Low-quality, dragnet fundraising techniques that aren’t targeted to people who are qualified, likely donors.”
Emily Karrs, creative director at IMGE, a Republican firm: “Treating their small-dollar donors without respect. … Don’t send them threatening emails and fake deadlines and shouty messages. Treat them like the trusted and valued partners they are.”
Mia Logan, senior vice president at Precision Strategies, a Democratic firm: “SMS. I know that’s controversial. Stop texting me, get off my phone. I can’t believe it works. I know it works, but I just cannot believe it works.”
Madeline Twomey, founder and president of Rufus And Mane, a progressive firm: “SMS fundraising. I think people are burning it to the ground. … I think people are using it like it’s the new email, I think we’re going to burn it out real quick rather than treating people with respect in their own phones and their own inboxes.”
Atima Omara, founder of Omara Strategy Group, a progressive firm: “I would really love to see actual, thoughtful engagement that is not just [text] blasts.”
Taryn Rosenkranz, founder and CEO of New Blue Interactive, a Democratic firm: “A gazillion social media posts at a time when there’s just not much going on. … I hope some of that pressure for them to do mindless content that’s not relevant actually goes away a little bit because we are receiving so much information from so many different places, it makes information more important when it’s not all the time.”
Nicole Cairns, partner at FOGLAMP, a Democratic firm: “Hiring the digital team last. We have to launch campaigns’ websites within three business days, and I don’t think clients get the best results for it.”
Laura Carlson, chief digital officer at the Democratic Governors Association: “Jumping on something because it’s trendy and it’s not true to their candidate. I think that’s something that as we get more and more new social platforms, as our media landscape gets more and more fragmented, people can tell if you’re being true to yourself and your campaign and your story.”
Carter Kidd, senior vice president and COO at Campaign Solutions, a Republican firm: “I hope they ditch the churn and burn [of content].”
Kate Conway, partner and chief creative officer at Assemble the Agency, a progressive firm: “Spending too late. I think people blitz the advertising landscape the closer you get to an election, and it really should be a longer-term conversation. The earlier you could work digital in at a low rate and ramp up toward the election, the more authentic and nuanced that conversation becomes.”
Alex Muir, principal at WPA Intelligence, a Republican polling firm: “The tendency to throw yourself on a diversity of platforms and use their internal tools at the exclusion of thinking through what you want to get out of something. Talking about their internal algorithms, they’re optimized to do something, but that something’s probably not what you want.”
Ashley O’Rourke, director of analytics and audience insights at Majority Strategies, a center-right firm: “I hope we see the end of poorly-targeted digital advertising,” she wrote in. “It’s incredibly frustrating when you see organizations you already agree with wasting their valuable resources in an attempt to persuade you to support their cause.”
Ryan Fanning, chief of staff at DSPolitical, a Democratic firm: “Continuing to overinvest on TV in lieu of a true integrated media plan.”
Henri Makembe, CEO of Do Big Things, a progressive firm: “The launch video. … It’s typically very short to tell the whole story of the candidate and how they’re going to make their community better. They usually try to pack in way too much into way too little time and end up saying nothing.”
It’s Monday. Reach me at [email protected] and @madfernandez616.
Days until the Kentucky primary: 8
Days until the Mississippi primary: 92
Days until the Louisiana primary: 159
Days until the 2023 election: 183
Days until the 2024 election: 547
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The first survey is set to be released later this month, and polls will be released through the 2024 election.
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Source: https://www.politico.com/