Campaigns Primarily Use AI to Draft Fundraising Emails for Testing
Sasha Issenberg · Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns · Nov 2, 2024 · at 43:37
Author Sasha Issenberg outlines the practical reality of generative AI adoption inside 2024 presidential campaigns.
0:00 / 0:48exact quote · 48.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Where people are using AI the most in this campaign is like, Sort of the same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails, you know, like most fundraising emails, they need to come up with new ones every day to send to people. They'll basically use the same types of themes and messages. You're probably going to AB test them anyway. So instead of having a bunch of, you know, 23 year olds who just, you know, graduated from liberal arts colleges, like Typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the one that scares people into thinking you're losing is going to do better than the one that has, like, JLo's signature under it. Why not have the machine come up with 10 different JLo ones and test those? And that's, I think, like, probably the, that the most we're seeing AI or automation being used in this campaign”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sasha Issenberg
Internal 2020 Data Showed Hunter Biden Story Did Not Move Persuadable Voters
“A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden. And then they did focus groups and it came out that people, people did not think that Biden…”
Biden's 2020 Campaign Ignored Progressive Boycotts to Advertise on Breitbart
“There'd been this effort on the left for a while to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites. The Biden campaign said, no, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing.”
Donald Trump Outsourced Presidential Ground Game to Elon Musk's America PAC
“And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that You know, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk funded super PAC.”
Fact-Checking Viral Disinformation Often Amplifies It Via Social Media Algorithms
“Maybe you shouldn't respond, and maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? You elevate it, you can end up engagement algorithms can end up, could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it.”
Unlike Business, Political Ad Mis-Targeting Actually Generates Votes for Competitors
“There are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing, and one of them is that the cost of a, Of mis-targeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you are,…”
TV Political Media Buyers Earn Effortless Commissions Compared to Digital Buyers
“And, you know, digital advertising is more labor intensive for them, but buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you can put ads on and, you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a commiss…”