Essentially a super PAC, which is an entity that is not related to a political or a candidate's campaign. A super PAC was reaching out to influencers with offers to try and promote Cory Booker. The campaign was "Keep Cory in the race." Obviously, his polling numbers aren't doing great. This democratic group wanted to keep him in and so they thought influencers would be a good place to do that. There was a lot of backlash on it. It created an interesting conversation, which we're going to discuss later. First, let's talk about, just how poorly that campaign was run.

Because I think a lot of times influencer marketing, gets a bad rap. Sometimes it's because people are looking at influencers who I think are the kind of lowest common denominator of what you all do. I always say it's like saying actors suck and using like Rob Schneider as your example of an actor. Rob Schneider and Daniel Day-Lewis have the same job and they're very different actors, so you can't really say just because Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo sucked that like all actors are trash, right?

Don't at me with your take on how Rob Schneider is actually a great actor I'm not here for it. Sometimes, it's the influencer. They point to some thirst trap Instagram model and they say, look at this influencer didn't move any product. It's like, yes, okay, I get it. Sometimes it's the brands. Sometimes the brands do a really, really terrible job at executing these campaigns. We saw it a couple months ago where a few influencers got an offer to work on a campaign for a stroller, but they don't have children. That's just basic. You had one job, fuck ups that these brands are making. I think the Cory Booker thing falls into the brand screwing it up category.

I saw screenshots of the brief, it really was not a brief. I saw a couple of the influencers they reached out to and yes, it made no sense. It would have felt really far out of left field for that influencer to receive that brief and feel gross, right? Someone was asking to pay them to work on this thing. They maybe never really showed an affinity for Cory Booker or for politics in general.
I think for my brand people who are watching this, it's a good lesson and why it's so important if you don't understand the space to work with someone that does or to bring someone in house that does understand it. Because, there is a nuance to this, and there is a science and an art to it. There are people that are really, really bad at it. Look, we have done political advertising. We're doing political advertising right now. I 100% think there's a space for influencers and political advertising. I 100% think influencers should be a much bigger part of political advertising but done in the right way.

When when we do it, like we did work for the DCCC in the midterms. The DCCC was very insistent that our work they felt was super helpful in helping to flip the house. What we did was we found people who we felt like their stories aligned with the story that the DCCC was trying to tell. The story about health care and health care costs. We found people that had been through traumatic healthcare experiences. We then cross-referenced them with the voter registration online databases to make sure they were Democrats. We weren't reaching out to any Republicans because that's the last fucking thing we needed was to be on Republican Twitter.

We said, "Hey, we have an opportunity, think it's really interesting. It's a little bit different, so we want to get on the phone and talk to you about it, do you have some time?" Get on the phone with them and we say, "Hey we saw that you had this story where you had this kind of traumatic experience and the fact that the health care system in the US let you down. We're working with an organization that wants people to tell stories about that and about why it's important to keep healthcare costs low. Would you be interested in doing that?"

That created these real organic partnerships that were about the influencers story and how the DCCC fit into that story. Not just I'm paying you $1,000 to post something about how great Cory Booker is. That's insane. Of course, it didn't work. Like it's just lazy, I know the competitor of ours, this campaign, I'm not going to put them on blast, but shame on you.

That is just basic 101 shit and spray and praying out with influencers and just sending it to everyone and saying honestly who says yes, might be okay on a makeup campaign or something like that, that's a bit more transactional, but this is so personal, emotional, story-based, you have to be careful.

For my brand partners out there. If the campaign that you are doing as the tie deeply with someone's story or if it's something that's a little different, or could potentially be seen as controversial in any way, you need that much more care because this thing blew up in Cory Booker's face. He didn't even do it. It was a super PAC and it gives a bad name to influencer marketing in general.