With Great Technology, Comes Great Reponsibility

Disclaimer: The intent of this article is to explore the use of digital marketing in campaigns. I hope you can appreciate the marketing strategies discussed regardless of your political views. 

By now, we all know that digital marketing is not just for brands trying to build awareness or sell products and services. Since 2008, politicians have incorporated digital marketing into their core campaign strategies. It's interesting to observe how these strategies have evolved over the last 12 years. An article from AdAge explores Biden's multi-faceted digital marketing campaign and its use of Gaming, Branded Content, Influencer Marketing, TikTok, and Facebook Page Partnerships.

Allison Stern, digital partnerships manager for the Biden campaign, acknowledges the need for Biden to compete with Trump on social media and discusses how finding the right partners online could deliver campaign messages authentically and at scale. 

"So much of marketing and communications is crafting the right message for the right audience. Our team focused less on the message, and more on the messenger. We worked to determine who or what is the right messenger to make this message most impactful with a very specific audience. We focused on using different voices, authentic to specific communities, and reaching people in their natural online habitat. Authenticity is easy to say as a buzzword, but the reality of execution is quite different. We achieved it and achieved it at scale."

"The Biden-Harris campaign was the first political campaign to embrace branded content at scale, including paid content partnerships with publishers like BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, PopSugar, Pet Collective, Mitu and more. Biden entered the campaign at an extreme social media disadvantage to Trump and borrowing audiences from leading social publishers and influencers across the internet was a way to level the playing field."

I find the use of new marketing technologies in campaigns both exciting and scary. Greenfly, for example, is an app that provides images and suggested social text for users to share quickly and easily. 

"At the base of the broad scale influencer effort was Greenfly, an app managed by the campaign with a library of approved social assets, which influencers, surrogates, and everyday people (“brand ambassadors”) could easily upload to their social handles and share. 

...it does create a systematic way for Biden supporters (whether that be LeBron James or a campaign staffer) to share inspiring campaign art on Instagram with suggested social text in under 1 minute. If your social feed was flooded with Biden-Harris content it was not an accident, there was a sophisticated team with data, content, software, and relationships making this happen."

This reminds me of this summer when there was an abundance amazing artwork going viral during the Black Lives Matter movement. This kind of viral loop feels good to me because I believed in the message, but what happens when there are people creating content and messages for nefarious purposes? We've seen this before with Facebook ads during the 2016 election. Do you think that all new marketing technology companies will eventually evolve to have their own in house censorship teams? 

As they (some) say, "With great technology, comes great responsibility."*

Articles: 

• https://adage.com/article/opinion/opinion-five-digital-experiments-helped-joe-biden-win-presidency/2307151
• https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-rise-of-digital-marketing-in-north-american-politics-1ea342c7d9e6

*I believed I was the originator of this quote until a quick Google searched proved me very, very wrong. Interesting investigation into the origins of the original quote.