The secret winner of the election: influencer marketing
Trump's campaign proved that the game has changed — whether you like it or not.
Joe Lazer is the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and the fractional head of content & comms at A.Team.
You can learn a lot about marketing from presidential elections — seriously.
In the digital age, presidential campaigns are essentially billion-dollar marketing experiments. The winners are usually the ones who master the most cutting-edge tactics first.
Take Obama back in 2008. He became the first “internet president” by leveraging the web and social media to generate massive grassroots support. His campaign flooded Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter with aspirational content, turning young supporters into a social marketing army. Behind the scenes, the campaign was a digital-marketing pioneer, relying on sophisticated voter databases, precision-targeted ads, and relentless A/B testing of emails and SMS to maximize donations and turnout.
The '08 Obama campaign started a trend: Winning presidential campaigns market like forward-thinking CMOs. Losing ones get stuck using last season’s playbook.
In 2016, the Trump campaign demonstrated this again, masterfully using Facebook micro-targeting to turn out infrequent voters in droves (albeit, with help from Cambridge Analytica's data-theft pixie dust). His strategy mirrored the way the most aggressive D2C brands gamed the Facebook and Instagram ecosystem.
In 2024, we're seeing the next evolution: influencer marketing. The Trump campaign went all-in on deep collaborations with creators, inviting influencers onto his private plane, doing marathon podcast sessions, and creating behind-the-scenes content. And unlike most CMOs, Trump was willing to embrace some of the most controversial and misogynistic influencers on the internet like Andrew Tate. It worked. His campaign shifted the young male vote 28 points to the right — one reason why pundits are dubbing this the "manosphere election."
Whether you’re for Harris, Trump, or hate politics period, there’s a lot to learn here. As I wrote in this deep dive, the Trump campaign’s marketing win makes it very clear how much the game has changed in 2024:
Influencers > ads. The Harris campaign put most of their money into Meta, Google, and TV ads. Team Trump went all-in on relationships with influencers, and like most CMOs I know, saw a much better bang for their buck.
Newspapers and TV stations have way less influence than you think. Creators and influencers have way more. If you don’t have an influencer strategy, you need one.
Deep, authentic relationships with influencers matter. The Harris campaign used influencers, but mainly to create one-off clips. Trump went deep, and it made a world of difference.
This may all seem like a dizzying TikTok fever dream, but the game has changed, and we need to adapt accordingly.
The AI Hype Matrix maps the latest AI news stories across an unimpeachable scale of Hype (everyone is talking about this!) and Fear (will this kill my career? Will this kill EVERYONE?). Here’s this week’s rundown.
Trump's return to the White House has the tech world buzzing about what's next for AI. While his allies can't seem to agree if the technology is humanity's greatest threat or ultimate salvation (looking at you, Elon), one thing's clear: Biden's AI regulations probably won’t survive day one.
Career transitions seem to be in the air. If you're in the market for work, prepare for your strangest interview yet as companies start unleashing AI recruiters. If you're hunting for a role in sales, however, you may be in luck: Salesforce is hiring 1,000+ people to peddle its new AI product. Or, you could try your hand at the arts (apparently, that's where the real money is). Case in point: Sotheby’s just sold a painting made by a robot for more than $1 million.
Finally, it wouldn't be the 2024 tech news cycle without some kind of OpenAI drama. This week, a bombshell report hints that the company's next-gen model isn't living up to the hype — and a dwindling supply of high-quality training data may be to blame. The bad press hasn’t stopped the company from pursuing its next headline-making move: launching an AI agent in 2025.
The great AI debate: buy vs. build
A recent Bain survey shows that while everyone's eager to jump on the AI bandwagon, they're split on whether to build their own solutions or shop off the rack. The DIY approach is winning big in areas like new product development and R&D (about 75% going custom), but surprisingly, most enterprise companies are also building custom tools for marketing and coding, instead of just buying ChatGPT Enterprise or GitHub Copilot off the shelf. The main reason? Off-the-shelf GenAI tools just aren’t at a level to satisfy enterprise use cases yet.
Your content has something to say
Remember those robotic text-to-speech voices that made every audiobook sound like a GPS having an existential crisis? The AI audio revolution has come a long way. ElevenLabs is a voice generator that's pushing the boundaries of synthetic speech, offering realistic-sounding audio in 32 languages — complete with those subtle inflections that make us sound like, you know, actual humans.
The fine art of trendjacking
Attempting to piggyback on the latest hot new trend is a high-stakes game for brands. Get it right, and you're the talk of TikTok. Get it wrong, and you're... still the talk of the TikTok, just not in the way you’d hoped. This week's prompt helps you evaluate trending topics and craft authentic ways to join the conversation — without looking like the corporate equivalent of the Steve Buscemi "How do you do, fellow kids?" meme.
Suggested prompt text:
"Take these three current trends [list them] and generate 10 ways our brand could authentically engage with each one. For each idea:
- Rate its relevance to our brand (1-10)
- List potential risks or backlash
- Suggest specific platforms and formats
- Identify what success would look like
- Create a 'cringe test' checklist to evaluate authenticity
Analyze which approaches feel forced versus natural, and explain why. Finally, create a decision framework for evaluating future trends."