Fresh Out The Slammer
Doomscroll 6.2.2024
Happy Sunday, and welcome to another edition of Doomscroll.
I’m Madison Morris, your host for tonight’s edition. As the Managing Director at IMGE, I’ve spent the past 7 years dabbling in everything from political and corporate advertising to brand strategy to business development. I first met Amanda when we worked together on RGA ads back in the day, and am flattered that she wanted me to moonlight as one of the guest writers while she’s on leave. Let’s all wish her the best as she embarks on this beautiful time away!
Now let’s get scrolling.
One Question
Thanks to the handful of folks who answered last week’s One Question about how you use AI daily in your job.
“ChatGPT is used daily for research, writing, op research, and networking.”
“I use AI in my copywriting mostly for proofreading or suggestions for alternative lines. It helps get through writer's block by getting a fresh perspective. It has also been useful in generating HTML and other things like that, but I always double-check it.”
I forgot to submit a response, so I’ll drop my thoughts here too. I’ve been incorporating AI into my day-to-day at IMGE. Our team has been thoughtful about leveraging tools to get to first drafts faster, supporting brainstorming sessions, enriching data analysis, scaling creative assets…and so much more! While some folks want to focus on the potential for misuse related to voter persuasion, I urge you to think of AI as a way to automate your most time-consuming tasks, allowing you to focus on the more creative and strategic work.
If you haven’t already, you should start using AI and testing out platforms/tools other than ChatGPT. According to the Work Trend Index Report by Microsoft and LinkedIn, “66% of business leaders wouldn't hire someone without AI skills, and 71% of leaders would prefer to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without.”
I would be CRAZY to jump into the rest of the newsletter and NOT talk about Trump.
So this week’s One Question is, how do you think the Trump verdict and subsequent fundraising haul will affect down-ballot fundraising? Are you feeling more or less optimistic about digital fundraising from small-dollar donors?
Who’s Doing What
—$52.8 million
On Friday evening, the Trump Campaign released a statement saying they had raised $52.8M through online fundraising in the 24 hours since the verdict.
Truly, this is an incredible fundraising milestone for a Republican Presidential Campaign, especially considering their claim that 30% of donors were new to the WinRed ecosystem.
The traffic to Former President Trump’s WinRed page was so intense it literally broke WinRed for a short period of time on Thursday night…Congratulations to the Trump Team for leading the largest fundraising day in WinRed platform history!
I reached out to the WinRed team for additional information and was told that WR processed $58.7M in the 24 hours after the verdicts were announced. 91% of that went to Trump, and at peak, the platform was processing $124K a minute.
Need help putting this all into perspective relative to the Democrats’ fundraising efforts? As Mike Hahn @ Frontline Strategies put it on X, “ALL of ActBlue raised $20.6 million on the day Roe was overturned - their largest day of the 2022 cycle. Trump - and just Trump - just raised $53M in a 24 hour period.”
One thing I’m curious about is the breakdown in organic donations vs. links from other candidates or paid ads; I hope the campaign releases more information on this historic haul soon!
The campaign poured over $1.3M into Google Ads the last seven days, with about 85% of that going towards text ads in just the last two days. The top states for the Trump campaign in terms of spending were California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Arizona.
Team Trump is crushing it online with social content, too. From quick response videos of pressers like this to heartwarming videos with the grandkids, they are putting up quite a powerful contrast message between the current and former presidents. Trump’s kids and grandkids publicly adore him, and it’s clear he’s a doting grandfather. We need more of this!
Merch Shout-Out
The NRCC and NRSC also brought in major fundraising hauls this week. One item that caught my attention was the NRCC jumping on the Scalia Appeal to Heaven flag news quickly and getting out this t-shirt appeal. I love it! I will say this until the day I die: Half the battle with digital fundraising is getting first to market. You aren’t competing with the Democrats; you’re competing against other groups on the right. So, the faster you can get your creative team or agency approvals and deploy your content, the better off you’ll be!
It wouldn’t be a major Trump event without a MAGA hat sale. Is Trump in his Reputation Era? One might say these Never Surrender hats are giving that… Fresh Out The Slammer vibe… Ok enough Taylor Swift. But these hats are slick and I can’t wait to see them on boat parades this summer.
I’ve seen a ton of CLF ads in my X feed every week. Recently, the focus has been on pro-Israel merch. I like the concepts but think there’s a missed opportunity to try some ads that feel more like UGC unboxing videos with the amount of new merch they’re pushing. If anyone on the list works with CLF, HMU if you want to try this! 😉
2024 Roundup
Here are a few things that caught my eye this week:
The Trump campaign is reportedly accepting crypto donations and vows to build a ‘crypto army.’ Read all about it. Who else would love to see WinRed partner with something like Coinbase to facilitate political contributions with crypto for high-dollar donations in future cycles?!
Larry Hogan told voters to "respect the verdict" and Team Trump’s Chris LaCivita declared the Republican’s campaign for Senate all but dead. Read more.
Sen. Joe Manchin leaves the Democratic Party and registers as an independent. Anyone else think he’s gearing up for a gubernatorial run? Read about it here.
John McGuire, running for VA-05, dropped a new ad focusing on Trump’s endorsement of him in the primary. Watch it here. Related, Trump’s legal counsel sent a cease and desist letter to his primary opponent, Bob Good, related to signage supporting Trump. Read more.
The video game composer who is running for Congres in NV-03, Marty O'Donnell, just dropped a new direct-to-camera appeal on X. Gotta say I love these low-production appeals from candidates SO much more than fake polls to donate.
The Libertarian Party selected the self-proclaimed “armed and gay” candidate Chase Oliver as their presidential nominee. Party members have been having a bit of a meltdown over RJF Jr, saying, “[he] sucks the money out of the room and he gets the ‘I’m mad at the system votes’ that we used to get because we’re the only other guy on the ballot.” Keep reading here.
Have you kept an eye on the Utah Senate Race since Mitt announced he wouldn’t run again? Get to know the four Republican candidates who made it to the primary, in this interview hosted by KUER News.
Who’s Spending Where
From May 23 - May 29, the top conservative spender on Meta was Americans for Prosperity at $310,531. PragerU is second with spending at $144,078, and Hillsdale College at third with spending at $88,128.
Notably, Between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ pages, the Biden Victory Fund spent $816,313.
Trump National Committee JFC was the overall and top conservative spender on Google this week at $1.35M. That’s nearly a quarter of all the money spent on Google political ads this week. Damn.
Americans for Prosperity spent $147K and Make America Great Again Inc. spent $113K.
X Honorable Mention
The Rand team has been all over my X feed and I love seeing the variants they’re testing.
P2P
I got tired of the nameless/brand-vague messages and 9000% IMPACT matches, so this has been me for the last 18 months. I have very few interesting texts to share this week. If you really loved this section, perhaps my colleagues the next weeks will be able to share more.
Industry Watch
-Meta Generative AI Integration
Meta has launched enhanced generative AI features for advertisers, including full image and text generation capabilities. These new tools aim to improve ad performance by offering creative variations, automating parts of the ad creation process, and enhancing engagement through Meta Verified. The image generation feature allows for the creation of full image variations, text overlays, and seamless image expansion across platforms.
The real benefit of this service is that it will allow copywriters and designers to scale their work and provide AI-generated assets that are much more bespoke to a client’s advertising objectives. Read more about it here.
Of course, this feature is not allowed for political…yet.
-AI-Driven Search
Have you searched on Google recently? Then you may have noticed that Google rolled out a huge AI-integration to their search features. When you use Google Search now, you’ll see an AI Overview. Hilariously, Google’s AI has been veering in the wrong direction, doing things like telling people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza…There’s a long way to go, but so much potential, and I know my team is curious to see how it evolves. Read more from Google here.
-Social Content
In social media news, SproutSocial released its 2024 Content Benchmarks Report, and there were a ton of interesting factoids included. While I’m sure most of this content was NOT political, I do think there are solid takeaways for content marketers in our arena:
38% of consumers plan to use more social networks in 2024.
The average inbound engagements on content per day declined by 12.5%. This suggests consumers are more discerning about what they react to, comment, or share.
Consumers increasingly prefer short-form videos (under 30 seconds).
Video posts are underutilized, making up only one-quarter of brand posts despite being highly favored by algorithms and users.
The Grapevine
Convergence is hiring for a Client Strategy Manager, Campaign HQ is hiring for an Operations Coordinator, and IMGE is hiring for a graphic designer and marketing strategist.
Got a tip for The Grapevine? Job announcement? Job opening? Email ‘em to me at itsthedoomscroll@gmail.com
Last But Not Least
From the other side of the tracks:
I’ve been keeping an eye on the The Voter Participation Center’s Meta ads recently, as they have 1.1K active ads. I’m really impressed with the variety of creatives they’re testing.
The aesthetic of these ads is giving nonpartisan and fun and AI-generated or inspired ads and I’m lovinggggg it. To my point earlier, AI can be a great tool to help scale creative without placing a workload burden on your team.
This kind of large-scale testing also helps organizations make informed decisions on campaigns and allow them to allocate resources to the most effective creatives. It’s really smart to be testing this much now to inform fall campaign spending.
Are you using AI to scale for testing yet? Why not???
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! Did you like it? Consider forwarding to your friends!