In our first newsletter of 2025, today we begin to tackle one of the biggest recent developments in public affairs advocacy—how AI has upended expensive, black box forms of influencer targeting.
This is a high-impact topic with several important technical threads, so this will be the first in a multi-part discussion. Today we'll start with a quick summary of what influencer targeting is, why it can have a huge impact on issue advocacy, and a high-level overview of how AI now makes it possible to reach influencers at dramatically lower costs, and more precisely than ever.
What Is Influencer Targeting?
You'll hear various ways this term is used, so let's first define the lingo. We mean influencer targeting as a strategy to reach the influencers of policy-makers. The goal is to reach not just the decision-maker, but the people the decision-maker listens to. This could include any number of categories of people including the following:
🔱 Staff
🔱 Family and friends
🔱 Major donors
🔱 Other legislators
🔱 Journalists
🔱 Opinion leaders
🔱 Activists, community leaders, and super voters
🔱 Lobbyists
When done properly, influencer targeting creates an echo chamber effect around the decision-makers, so the people in their outer orbit influence the people in their inner orbit, and their inner orbit influences the decision-maker.
Here's new House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie as an example:
It's one of the highest-impact tools in public affairs advocacy, because it gives you multiple touch points to influence the policy-makers through their personal advisors.
How Influencer Targeting Was Done Until Now
Several vendors sell products that they market as data sets they have compiled of various elected officials' influencers. There are many catches, but the two most important are:
The data sets are EXTREMELY expensive.
The vendors WON'T TELL YOU WHO IS IN THEM.
You read that correctly. After paying what can be tens of thousands of dollars before even running a single ad, you get a black box and a "trust me" from the vendor that the expense is worth it.
AI Upends The Pricing and Precision of Influencer Targeting
Even if you took the data vendors at their word in the past, AI has transformed the cost and precision of influencer targeting. We'll dig deeper into how in next week's newsletter. But at its most basic level, with AI we can now precisely reach the people who consume content about the policy-maker, whether that content is in print or on TV.
So try this quick thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to reach Congressman Guthrie's influencers. Now imagine an important influencer to Congressman Guthrie who never consumes content about him. We think you'll find this impossible to do. And this conclusion means that there's a digital breadcrumb trail of his influencers, who we can now reach without buying expensive black boxes of data.
Next week we'll show you how.
Two Ways To Operationalize This Email
🔱 Review the last campaign where you deployed influencer targeting and see how much you paid for the data before even serving a single ad.
🔱 Ask your data vendor for the full list of names they're trying to sell you for your next influencer targeting campaign. Not a few sample names, but the full list of names they claim to have compiled.
🔱 If you're enjoying this content, please consider forwarding this email to a colleague or friend. If you'd rather not forward it because you think the content makes you seem smarter compared to that annoying co-worker . . . it's a new year, it's a new you. Let it go already!
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