Platform Politics – Katie Harbath

Katie Harbath (00:00):

I think platforms can run from politics, but they can't hide.

Eric Wilson (00:06):

Welcome to the Campaign Trend podcast where you are joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. Our guest today is Katie Harba, chief Global Affairs Officer at Duco, experts from 2011 to 2021. Katie was the public policy director at Facebook where she led global outreach to elected officials, political parties, and campaigners across the world. In our conversation, we check in on the state of digital campaigning in the 2024 elections and Facebook's role in the campaign. Katie, I included this excerpt from your recent anchor change newsletter, which is a must read for anyone listening, and I'm a proud subscriber. So you wrote, I do not understand what the Republicans are doing. Recent numbers show that the Democrats are vastly outspending Republicans, online Republicans are spending more on television. If you look at where people spend more of their time, it is not on traditional broadcast. This is especially true if you look at where some of those few persuadables are in quote. So why do you think republicans are resistant to a follow the voters strategy?

Katie Harbath (01:18):

Well, first, thanks for having me. I always love talking about this and going back to my roots of working and doing digital campaigning, even though it's been a while since I've worked, I think

Eric Wilson (01:28):

You worked in e campaigning, you OG was

Katie Harbath (01:31):

Campaigning. It was 2003. I always like to remind people that I started in this before Facebook existed, Twitter existed, YouTube existed. People forget that that time period was around all this. And I think there's actually talking about that going back in that history, I see ebbs and flows with both parties in terms of how they think about digital and you see it. What I find happens is in 2004, it was actually Republicans that were seen as innovative, right? With Microtargeting, it wasn't online yet, but you were kind of using consumer data, marrying it with the voter file, using that to figure out where to advertise online. Then famously 2008, 2012, the Democrats kind of caught up. You had the Obama campaign, all of this praise and everything put on them about how they were really using data and digital. And the Obama campaign kind of broke one of the molds that you see, which is what tends to happen is once a campaign or party wins, particularly the presidency, they're very scared to break the mold.

(02:29):

Like, well, we did it last time to win. Why do we need to change anything? Right? And as you and I both know, digital strategies and how people get their information changes vastly every four years, even every two years from a presidential to a midterms. And then what you saw is Trump of 2016 was the underdog. Nobody thought that he was necessarily going to be a contender. And what you tend to see with underdogs is they're much more willing to take risks. They're willing to try different things, particularly online. And the 2016 Trump campaign was very all in on digital. They were very much trying different experiments with different vendors around how to think about advertising, what were the best things to do. He was the first one to use Facebook Live. Frankly, in August of 2015, he live streamed himself getting off the helicopter in Cleveland and all that.

(03:18):

And you saw Hillary Clinton in 16, that team was like for us at Facebook, they were like, don't call us. We'll call you. Right? We know what we're doing narrator, not sure they did around all of it. And now you're seeing of Trump 2020 was just everybody was online, you were having to do it. But I think part of the reason I was thinking about this ahead of this podcast and why Republicans now, why is 24 Trump, so not online, but kind of online from an organic standpoint. I think it's a couple of reasons. One, I think that the people on his campaign are very different. They're very old school folks. Las Savita, Susie Wiles, folks like that. Exactly. It's not like they're a digital first type

Eric Wilson (04:01):

Of, you had Brad Parscale who was a digital

Katie Harbath (04:04):

Marketer campaign and Gary.

(04:06):

Yeah, exactly. So the campaign managers and who are a top really matter a lot. I think another part of this too is frankly, I think the campaign got complacent when they were running against Biden because if you look at the numbers online, Biden, they were still spending more than Trump. And I think part of that is small dollar fundraising has dropped a lot, which I know you've kind of covered on this podcast with other folks. A lot of money's going to legal fees, so they don't have as much money to maybe be spending in some of these places and all of that. And I think that they just didn't have very much competition online when it was a Biden. And now you have Harris, and I hate using the word vibes, but I'm going to use the word vibes. The vibes have just completely shifted and she now has, the coffers are just overflowing with money, organic, organic, organic and the paid.

(04:55):

So I think that that's part of the reason that we're seeing this regression. Frankly, I don't hold out too much hope that we're going to see much change in this election. I think it'll be somewhat detrimental to them. But I also, one thing that I pointed out in my most recent newsletter that I think is important for people to think about is while they are being vastly outspent unpaid, and I think that that's worth looking at from an enthusiasm factor because this is going to be a turnout election. How can you get both sides keeping their base up and wild up and all that? But because you have platforms like TikTok that don't allow political advertising, and that is where a lot of people are going to get their political news and information, since places like Facebook, Instagram and threads are deprioritizing politics that we need to make sure that we're not just paying attention to the paid and also looking at what is happening on the organic side of everything. Because I think the organic reach that the campaigns are going to be getting is also going to be really important. And that's something that Republicans have traditionally excelled at more than the left. And so I think we're still seeing everything equalize out after this crazy summer around all that. So forgive me if that was too long of an answer, but I think the history wasn't important.

Eric Wilson (06:10):

No, that was a good history lesson of how we got here and we'll get to TikTok in a little bit. But because Republicans aren't on the playing field, we may not get that advantage of organic boost. One thing that I think is really important here is at least as long as I've been following this, the way innovation works is one side loses because they're not doing something and then the other side catches up. Republicans really have not had that opportunity when it comes to digital advertising to suffer that defeat in a way that makes them revise their strategy. And that's partly because of the demographics. I mean, you point out it's the persuadables, typically younger voters, you're not able to reach them on tv, but there's a huge swath of the Republican electorate that is still reliably reachable on tv. And so we've gotten a little bit of a demographic reprieve for a while. It's just a matter of time before that happens. And then I'm also worried about what happens down ballot, right? So everyone's focused on the presidential campaign, but there are some states that are not competitive presidential campaigns where we have real shots at Senate and house seats where we're just not seeing that spending.

Katie Harbath (07:23):

Well, and I think also the whole, I'd be curious your thoughts on this, but the Republican digital vendor space has also very much changed in this post-Trump world. In past cycles, whatever vendor was or whoever was working on the president's digital campaign tended to go and then start their own company. You think targeted victory after Romney, you had a campaign solutions and stuff like that from the McCain world and all that. And there's that period of time there in the early two thousands through I'd say 2016, where you had quite a few folks that were available to campaigns for doing digital. And those folks still exist. Please don't get me wrong, I know many of you're listening, I don't want to say you don't exist because you do, but I think it seems like it's just a different field right now in terms of who campaigns, who the vendors are willing to work with, who the campaigns want to work with and where they're willing to spend that money online.

(08:20):

And I don't know if part of that's because of how the platforms have changed and it's harder on the advertising front, it's so much more fragmented, so it's not as easy as just being like, we're going to buy Google, YouTube, Facebook ads and be done with it. You would know that better than I do, but I feel like we're in this shifting of the online environment that people haven't quite figured out yet from a, how do you explain that and show the return on investment without being like, I don't know, we got to kind of experiment and figure it out. It kind of reminds me of the earlier days of the internet where it was hard to show what going to get for

Eric Wilson (08:55):

It. The expectations were so low, right? I think that there are a few, I don't have a grand unified theory, but a few thoughts come to mind. The first is, as long as you and I have been doing this, digital folks have been emphasizing the ROI of digital and really made Facebook and Google into direct response platforms when they stopped performing as effectively as direct response platforms to some changes that shifted the impression of what digital was for. The other reality is that digital has gotten significant enough that more established players are looking at it. And that's why there's an ongoing debate right now of who should buy connected TV advertising. Is it the people who buy TV because they know what goes on the big box in your living room, or is it the people who buy digital because it's programmatic? And then a third thread that I think is woven in there is we over the last decade have pushed towards full service digital firms where they do websites, social media or fundraising advertising. And that's just not where marketing is going, where everyone can be good at all of those things. We've got to push through to that next layer of digital as part of everything we do. And you happen to be a fundraiser, you happen to be an advertiser. So a few theories, we'll see how that plays out. So this is my podcast. Lemme go back to asking you the

Katie Harbath (10:21):

Question. I know, I'm sorry. I'm asking you the questions.

Eric Wilson (10:25):

So let's talk about the other side. What are the Democrats doing when it comes to their digital strategy that maybe you're scratching your head about and you similarly don't understand?

Katie Harbath (10:35):

I don't know if I necessarily have sort of a head scratcher moment with the Dems at the moment. I think that they're investing a lot in a lot of different things. They've had a bit more of the infrastructure in building this out for four years of thinking about everything from influencer engagement, right to counter messaging, rethinking how they think about fighting various narratives and stuff that are online. But frankly at the moment, they just got the luck of the draw of this excitement change from Biden to Harris and Tim Walls and the fact that rather than having to create an internet wave, they're able to ride an internet wave, which is something that I think is something you can't manufacture. And I think they've done a pretty good job at the moment of riding that. But the question is going to be, again, I don't think this is about persuading anybody.

(11:25):

This is about getting people, making sure they don't get complacent and actually get out to vote at the end of the day. And so I think the only question I would have questions that they didn't have as much money coming in is if they were spending their money wisely, but they've got plenty right now to play with. I think one thing though, to what you were saying about down ballot, I think down ballot is worth keeping an eye on because almost traditionally, although we're seeing that opposite here again, is I oftentimes saw Republican down ballot races doing quite well on digital and sometimes the Democrats not doing as much. That has started to shift some, but I wonder if some of them start to get more creative as well about how do they break through the noise, especially if they are in a state that is a close presidential race. I think about my home state of Wisconsin. What would Tammy Baldwin and stuff do when you've also got a lot of presidential advertising? When I was home here over Labor Day was every other ad was a presidential ad, but I think I maybe only saw one Tammy Baldwin one or stuff like that. So sorry, I don't have a great answer on that one, but I'm not necessarily doing much head scratching on their side right now.

Eric Wilson (12:37):

Yeah. Well, I mean I think the big question mark is do the vibes shift change into votes? Does that result in votes? Because it's all well and good to share the latest TikTok sound from the debate. Are people going to go vote? And I think that's the question Mark, you were at Facebook now meta when the political ad library was introduced where we can see in detail what the other side is doing, who they're targeting, what they're spending. Are you surprised that it hasn't made digital spending more competitive in the way that TV buying is where the other side comes up with a thousand points, we've got to go on the board with another thousand points and maybe even 500 more to match them. Why do you think that dynamic hasn't materialized for us?

Katie Harbath (13:29):

I think part of it's because you don't see the press covering the digital spend as much. And as part of the horse race things, I've noticed that this cycle a little bit more because I think Harris was trying to push that they were doing an unprecedented $200 million ad spend or something like that around it, but it just doesn't get the, because when you do that, you're trying to show that you're competitive for sort of that DC inside the Beltway race. I think too that the measurement on digital, while it's more than what you necessarily see on TV and all of that, I think it's also hard for particularly, again, still some of the old school campaigners of getting their heads wrapped around of like, Hey, are these digital campaigns actually getting us the ROI in front of the eyeballs that we thought it would be in terms of spending that money? I will say too, the other thing too is there's so many ad creatives on those ad libraries that actually being able to glean insights. This is my whole big rant about transparency in general, is that it's not enough to have the data. You have to be able to analyze

Eric Wilson (14:33):

It.

Katie Harbath (14:34):

And yes, we have charts from great sites that chart out how much people are spending on each one, but we don't necessarily know are they attack ads? Are they positive ads? How many people are they actually reaching? How many people are they actually getting to with that? All you knew is that they spent X millions of dollars. And that doesn't give me a whole lot in terms of, because as you know, if you're in a competitive state like Wisconsin, you're going to be paying a heck of a lot more per click or whatever it might be than if you're advertising in another state and what that looks like. And so I think there's a long way that we still have to go around making some of that online advertising transparent and digestible. And the other thing too is also you mentioned about connected tv. So much of advertising has also moved to those streaming platforms that don't have ad transparency. So we don't even know what's happening on those.

Eric Wilson (15:28):

And I think you've given me idea about the identifiable victim theory where you give people a big statistic and it's not as concerning as here's one scary TV ad that's really going to hurt us. And then the transparency in some places is nice, but as you're correctly pointed out, it's inconsistent. You're listening to the Campaign Trend podcast. I'm speaking with Katie Harath, chief Global Affairs Officer at Duku Experts. Now Katie, you were at Facebook for about a decade helping with their political outreach. What do you make of the platform's current posture towards campaigns? You mentioned the kind of elephant in the room, which is that they're deprioritizing political. We have certainly noticed that with the changes in targeting some of the Facebook ads have been not as effective as they once were. So give them a grade. How do you think they're doing?

Katie Harbath (16:14):

It's going to be a complicated report card because I don't think I can do just one overarching, listen, I think platforms can run from politics, but they can't hide.

(16:23):

I think people want to talk about politics. I understand why Meta started to pull back from it after 2020 because they were just like, we gained nothing from being in the middle of this argument. I think people were burnt out from politics and news and stuff coming out of Covid and all of that. And so I do believe it's true that when Meta says, people told us they wanted to see less of it in feed, that was true. And you actually see for Morning Consult, when Facebook started showing less news and stuff, their approval numbers went up. So I can see, again, from a business perspective why, however, I think what they didn't bargain for is again, this vibe shift that happened where now again, it's cool to be online because the Democrats now have a candidate around that. And I think people want to be talking about that, and I am going to be interested to see if this actually hurts meta in the long run because influencers aren't going to want to do that on Instagram or other places, and they're going to want to do it on TikTok. Now they got the Taylor Swift endorsement of Harris, so maybe it's all moot around, and that was on Instagram.

Eric Wilson (17:27):

So good get from that.

Katie Harbath (17:28):

That was on Instagram. Listen, as somebody who spent a decade building that up at that company, I would be, I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed in the pullback. I think there's responsible ways to do this. I think that it's still a place that campaigns need to go to reach voters and they want to be there and doing nothing. Also a political act. And one thing I always appreciated when I was there was that we were willing to be in that fight. We were willing to do a lot of this stuff. We were willing to not back down, and we were willing to work with campaigns and recognize that giving. We've lost the plot a little bit in trying to mitigate all the bad that we saw coming out of 2016 and stuff, to forget the fact that there was a lot of good that these platforms bring, particularly to down ballot races.

(18:19):

You before, if you wanted to buy New Hampshire ads, you had to buy Boston TV market. Now you can do that type of targeting. You have issues and candidates that would never exceed the light of day by earned media or mainstream media being able to build their campaigns in doing this. They can get in front of voters without having to buy expensive advertising. And I worry about what pulling back from the conversation does to our long-term civic engagement as a community and stuff like that. And Mark was recently out there being like, now he's on his no apologies tour and saying that he apologized too much. And I think there's some truth to that. All of our ills are not. I'm like, we could get rid of Facebook tomorrow and it doesn't change where we are at and this isn't very, it's a

Eric Wilson (19:07):

Symptom, not a cause. Yeah,

Katie Harbath (19:09):

Exactly. But rather than trying to stick our heads in the sand or just trying to be like, please, dear God, don't pull me into politics type of thing. I think that instead we need to model what this can look like to a lot of other people. And I have a feeling that the Facebook pendulum will swing back the other way as we go into 2028 because that's what the company tends to do. It's fascinating to watch newer platforms like TikTok, like Substack, others, discords or twitches that don't have the scars of 2016 and how they're trying to approach this while trying to learn some of the lessons that we had. So I don't think this is said and done by any stretch of the imagination of what politics on these platforms will look like, and it's just going to continue to be a headache for campaign operatives like yourself and others who have to constantly be adjusting their strategies around what works and what doesn't.

Eric Wilson (20:06):

Exactly. It's always going to be a cat and mouse game, but I think it's really encouraging to hear you say this because it has felt like Facebook has pulled away from the public square, and Columbia Journalism Review just had something today about how local media is suffering, again for a lot of different reasons, but where do we go? And so the public square is now in private hands at places like Meta, and I think the unintended consequence, and I've tried to always make this point, is that when you pull back from politics, it is the center that suffers because the ideologues, the fringes, they're always going to find their place. The John Birch Society can always get a meeting room, and if you push mainstream conversation out of your platform, you're just handing it over to the loudest forces and you follow the global elections. This is happening around the world, not just in the United States.

Katie Harbath (21:03):

And I think there's a real opportunity. I was a journalism major at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and I actually tell students right now, I think there's, if I were back at Madison, what I would be doing probably is maybe trying to move, go back home to Green Bay or something and starting a newsletter, start doing local video. There was so many tools, you don't need as many people now to be able to do some of this, and you could have some really impactful work that could happen at the local level, empowered by these tools. And you do see some companies like Microsoft and OpenAI and others trying to kind of build on that. Now, there's a trust factor that we have to put into that too. But yeah, I hope that we can see some of these bigger platforms when we get past this electoral period, maybe taking a step back and rethinking about what their role should be and trying to think about how we're building out this new information environment that we're all continuing to live in.

Eric Wilson (22:05):

Alright, so as you mentioned, we're going to have to keep chasing Facebook. We can't quit them no matter how hard we want. 62% of voters log into Facebook every single day. Every time I say that, I point out that is more than watch their local TV news on a daily basis. That said, are you surprised that we're more focused on TikTok than Facebook this election cycle?

Katie Harbath (22:27):

I'm still surprised we're not focused on YouTube at all. True. In all honesty, listen, I think that there is still Facebook attention, but I think it makes sense that, especially given the pew numbers of just, what is it, nearly 50% of people under the age of 30 I think it was, are getting their political news and information from TikTok. They're going there to search for it. There's been a couple of great studies I'm going to be linking to in my newsletter on Sunday of looking at TikTok, and so I think it's natural and it makes sense because of where the content is. But I do think the biggest thing we need to remember is that none of these platforms exist in silos. I am so tired of getting asked questions of like, is Elon Musk going to throw the election on x? X has never been where the voters are. X has always been about influencing journalists,

Eric Wilson (23:17):

About 15% of voters. Yeah,

Katie Harbath (23:19):

Yeah, please. That hasn't changed. Right? And a lot of people are on Facebook too and YouTube, and they're also watching cable news and they're also listening to podcasts. They're reading newsletters. We need to stop being like that. It's going to be any one platform that is going to make the difference. I just think because of how more and more complicated this continues to get, it's really hard for people to get their heads wrapped around how do we really understand how people are getting information, how they're synthesizing it, how they're trying to decide what is misinformation, not misinformation, what to believe, not to believe, et cetera. And so we tend to, as humans, try to simplify that a bit more and frankly go to where if you're the news media, we forget that they're a business too, and they're just trying to figure out where the clicks are

Eric Wilson (24:15):

And what's headline. The theme of your newsletter this year has been panic responsibly, and we thought for so much of 2024 or not, but the media thought that AI was going to be the major disruptor of the election. Was the hype about AI overblown? Did everyone panic too much or are we panicking

Katie Harbath (24:38):

Responsibly? The pendulum I'm worried about has gone back to, so it was a ton of panic, which is why I came up with the phrase panic responsibly, because last fall it was like, this is going to be the last human election, all of that. Then you saw the pendulum swing these last couple of weeks or so, and everyone's like, oh, wait, maybe it's not as bad as we thought it was. And now I'm not seeing very much conversation about it. Although Oprah has her new special that I have a feeling it's going to just drive me bonkers because of the people, the hosts that she has around the fear mongering of this. So I don't believe we're in that panic responsibly area where I would like us to be. Our pendulum keeps swinging right past it from one side to the other. We have a long way to go.

(25:19):

But I think the thing that I want to really implore people, and I'm already starting to think about Life Post 2024, is just like with any campaign technology, as you know, it takes campaigns a while to adapt this stuff. It does not happen overnight, and I think that even if we're not seeing AI used a ton, we'll see examples for sure, but I think we will see it used more in the midterms and in 2028 in terms of campaigns using it in terms of content and everything else like that than we are going to see it in this election.

Eric Wilson (25:50):

Well, my thanks to Katie Harth for a great conversation. Make sure you go subscribe to her newsletter Anchor Change. It's on substack. We'll link to it in the show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, maybe you're even ready to panic responsibility. All we ask is that you share it with a friend or a colleague, makes you look smarter. More people hear about the show for just $10 a month. Campaign Trend Insiders get bonuses, like exclusive content. You can learn more@campaigntrend.com slash join. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio.

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