Marketing Briefing: How the Democratic presidential election upheaval will impact the political ad market

“At the end of the day, the dissatisfaction with Joe Biden was about age,” said Andrew Essex, senior managing partner at TCS Interactive. “This is now about a fundamental demographic shift. It’s as if a brand had a new product extension that was targeted [to] an entirely different generation. That means that the communications at a high level become much more youthful, much more generationally on trend.”

That’s happening almost immediately. Within the first 24 hours of Harris running for president this go around, pop star Charli XCX, whose latest album Brat debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 earlier this summer, tweeted Sunday night that, “kamala IS brat.” The campaign has already seized the moment by fashioning its X (formerly Twitter) header to mimic the aesthetic of the popular album, which has a lime green cover and simple black font.

“She has much more credible access to pop culture, to a diverse collection of proxies and storytellers who reflect her values,” said Essex. “That makes for a much more dynamic collection of messages that I’m super excited about.”

Aside from recognizing Harris’s ability to tap into pop culture in a way that may be more “authentic” than Biden, marketers and agency execs believe there will be “a real battle for both younger eyeballs and hearts and minds as well as hand holding for some of the older folks,” said one agency executive who asked for anonymity. That will likely lead to an increase in memes as well as influencer marketing efforts for the Democratic campaign in the coming weeks and especially following the DNC (which runs Aug. 19-22), should Harris secure the nomination.

The Biden campaign was already working with influencer marketing agencies, reportedly hiring Village Marketing for social media outreach. According to a source with knowledge on the matter, starting as early as Sunday evening Village Marketing had already begun reaching out to creators now on behalf of Harris for President.

Influencer marketing execs believe that the campaign will need to not only court major endorsements from politicians and celebrities but also work to bring in an organic groundswell of support from influencers of all sizes. In a bit of fortuitous timing, the campaign will have the chance to do just that ahead of the DNC as the White House Creator Economy Conference is set for Aug. 14, noted Danielle Wiley, founder of influencer marketing shop Sway Group.

“Micro-influencers will be the real winners during this cycle,” Tamon George, CEO and co-founder of Creative Theory Agency, said in an email. “Investments will be made in grassroots community leaders for hyper-targeted messaging. This is particularly interesting because micro-influencers will be leveraged more effectively than content creators to share messaging. You don’t need the largest following; you just need the right following who can be influenced by a ‘trusted creator,’ meaning someone with a smaller platform.”

Aside from potentially ramping up more influencer marketing efforts, marketing observers don’t see a shift in candidate changing overall spending much. Typically the largest ad spending occurs in the final three weeks ahead of the general election. Biden’s bow-out may cause spending to rise sooner, since whomever the presidential candidate will be for the Democrats, whether it’s Harris or someone else, will need to immediately raise their public profile in time to have a chance to win the election.

While the focus on digital and influencers to reach younger audiences will likely secure a larger share of budgets, much of the total ad spending is still expected to be distributed across local broadcast TV and digital, with a focus on the Southwest, the Rustbelt of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, as well as Georgia and North Carolina.

3 Questions with Ara Katz, co-founder and co-CEO of Seed Health

Where do influencers fit into Seed’s marketing strategy?

When we first started, we launched Seed University. Part of that education and that wanting to educate influencers came from wanting to be the antidote to the noise and misinformation that was happening in wellness — particularly in our world of gut mania and probiotics. We said, “Okay, if you’re going to do it in a university and you think that social media is a source of misinformation, put the university on Instagram as a big wink to say, ‘Well, how can we use that platform as a totally new way to actually cultivate the accountability and the integrity of information that we want to see in the world?'”

What kind of influencers does Seed typically work with?

We work with artists, we work with poets, we work with chefs, we work with people who have no social media, incredible clinicians and practitioners. We work with extraordinary scientists who are leaving the field and don’t have a Facebook account and don’t even know what Instagram is. And then of course, we work with people who are digitally native, who have extraordinary communities that trust them that we can use and collaborate with to get great information out into the world and be able to share our products that obviously have great health impact.

How do you maintain a consistent brand presence across a fragmented social media landscape?

When you march to your own drum and you’re always thinking about how you are never overly dependent on one platform versus another. … The way that we’re always thinking about it is: how do we shape-shift in these different places in a way that maintains our integrity and our accountability, our aesthetic — which [what] we’re really known for is never diluted from a scientific perspective — but also be very playful and play with a lot of the native gestures? That includes algorithm changes. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

This year’s Olympics is expected to be a global opportunity for brands, especially as the sports marketing arena continues to grow in popularity. While NBCUniversal is making a play for ad dollars around the Paris games, Gen Z is turning to platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram for Olympic content, according to a recent analysis from Captiv8, an influencer marketing platform. See below for more key findings from the report:

• 65% of young sports fans say big sports moments will find them on social media.
• With 85% of Gen Z influenced to buy by social media endorsements, influencers hold massive sway.
• Influencer marketing delivers 11x the ROI of digital ads and costs a fraction of the price of a TV commercial spot. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“Google has taken the ‘oxygen out of the room’ for over four years with their Privacy Sandbox.”

— said James Rosewell, founder of the Movement for an Open Web, when asked about the uncertainty around Google killing cookies in Chrome last week before this week’s announcement that Google would, in fact, not be killing cookies in Chrome.

What we’ve covered

• After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome
• Teads’ M&A rumors are firming up with a deal to merge with Outbrain
• Advertisers don’t seem too tempted by Meta putting ads on Threads