With roughly 100 days until Election Day, politically-focused AI startups are hoping the burgeoning technology can help national and local candidates quickly adapt to unexpected changes and put in place the right guardrails.
Since privately launching this spring, BattlegroundAI has been helping state and local-level candidates use generative AI to create YouTube scripts, social content, and digital ads. Powered by leading large-scale language models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, BattlegroundAI’s platform helps solo campaigns and smaller organizations leverage top AI models to create content and analyze data quickly and at scale.
After working in both advertising and politics (including on former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign), Battleground AI founder and CEO Maya Hutchinson wanted to build a platform that would act as a “central nervous system” for streamlining the adoption of AI-powered advertising, while teaching political campaigns how to use AI in advertising. Next month, the startup is preparing to launch a public beta program, with pricing based on the size and volume of content, starting with five free messages at first, or a $19 monthly subscription for unlimited messages.
“This kind of jump-starts that process, especially as you’re seeing right now, there’s going to be a lot of money going into these elections, fundraisers,” Hutchinson told Digiday. “A lot of that is going to go into advertising, so how do you launch 100 search ads right away? … There’s going to be a lot of volume, and variation is going to be really important.”
Battleground is just one of a number of AI startups that have emerged in the past year. Another company, Quiller, which launched a year ago this month, started out by featuring AI-generated email campaigns but has since expanded to assist campaigns with AI-generated copy for social media, digital ads, press releases and op-eds, while others are using visual AI and LLM to generate AI to create audience segments for political ads on CTV and other online platforms.
According to Quiller co-founder Mike Nellis, AI is “revolutionizing political campaigns, but in the most tedious way.” Using AI to write emails faster can not only help with fundraising, but also drafting responses to key events, whether they’re related to a candidate or not. “The first person to post a tweet, the first person to send a fundraising email, the first person to put out a press release, those are the people that usually get the most attention.”
Small campaigns are often “one-man armies” and can’t necessarily afford to spend a lot of money to hire the content and media agencies that national and state-level campaigns contract with. One example Nellis gave was a mayoral candidate in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who runs a campaign with just one volunteer, but is using Quiller to cut down on the time he spends writing fundraising emails. But Nellis also said that small campaigns are more likely to adopt new technology than national and state-level efforts, in part because many of the headlines about AI-generated political ads have been about “the worst use cases of AI,” like deepfakes.
“Both political parties are afraid to use it. [are] “They’ve been very reluctant to do that and not leaning into innovation the way they should,” Nellis added.
Not all agencies working with political candidates are using AI for content creation yet. Tyler Goldberg, director of political strategy at Assembly Global, believes the biggest growth market for AI is in contextual audience building, rather than focusing on using AI for content creation. He isn’t using AI for email creation yet, but he thinks it could help reach new audiences and engage more voters in the democratic process.
Goldberg believes that, like past technological innovations in politics, AI will soon become just a tool with new privacy responsibilities. While AI needs regulation and transparency, he said it would be “easy” to ban the use of the technology in politics altogether and miss out on some of the benefits.
“I used to volunteer for campaigns and I actually dialed numbers and used headsets, and that was not that long ago,” Goldberg said. “…There was a time when it seemed impossible to run political ads on television. It was the same with radio, and it’s likely to happen with buttons at some point.”
Many companies in the advertising technology space are already using AI to create new audiences based on consumer and voter data, and today Yahoo and Resonate announced plans to integrate Resonate’s voter segments into Yahoo’s demand-side platform, giving advertisers access to over 1,000 audience segments based on political affiliation, interests, shopping behavior and health categories.
“Even in national campaigns, by design during the election period, the majority of the budget is still allocated to very small geographic areas where the race is close to 50-50,” said Giovanni Galdelli, vice president of advertising data products at Yahoo. “And both parties are trying to pick voters who are still neutral and undecided. Regardless of what level the election is being held at, you’re seeing the majority of the budget being very concentrated in small geographic areas.”
The news comes just days after Resonate released its annual list of 10 voter segments for the 2024 election, shedding light on the types of audiences campaigns may try to target based on political learning and various data sources. “Progressive Professionals” and “Safety Net Seniors” are both left-leaning groups focused on social and environmental issues, with the former active on social media and the latter preferring traditional media. “Non-Voting Neutrals” are politically apathetic Gen Xers who are not registered to vote, are financially pressured, and have limited media engagement. “Money-Minded Undecideds” are retired Baby Boomers making less than $25,000 a year who are focused on saving money, health care, gun control, affordable medicines, and corporate oversight.
Incumbent U.S. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race creates a “very dramatically different situation” that could allow political advertisers to reach voters they wouldn’t normally target, said Erica McCoy, chief marketing officer at Resonate. Many voters and donors are “putting their money on the sidelines,” but with more money raised and more money being spent, that could change quickly, she said.
“Everybody’s really been holding back thinking this is an election they don’t need to invest in, and now they’re going to have to mobilize certain segments of the electorate in some way…There are now more people who can be persuaded based on different interests and groups. [campaigns] We need to act now.”
Prompts and Products: AI News and Announcements:
OpenAI is testing a prototype of an AI-powered search engine called SearchGPT that could rival giants like Google. Publicis Groupe is moving further into the creator economy by acquiring startup Influential to integrate Epsilon’s consumer data. The plan is to use AI on both platforms to provide advertisers with an enhanced creator network, identity-based content, and cross-channel media to better match creators’ content with the right audiences. Meta announced its latest AI model, Llama 3.1, and debuted new features for Meta AI, including seven new languages, new creative tools including editing tools and a way to create personalized AI-generated images, and expanded access to Meta AI via Meta Quest. The FTC is investigating whether eight companies offer “surveillance pricing,” which sets prices based on personal data (such as location, demographics, credit history, and browsing/shopping history). The companies that received the letter are Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, McKinsey & Co., Revionics, Bloomreach, and Task Software & PROS. Condé Nast reportedly issued a cease and desist order to Perplexity AI for data scraping without permission. Amazon announced a new tool for AWS to help contact service agents use generative AI to respond to interactions and analyze data. AI model provider Cohere reportedly raised another $500 million for enterprise AI models but cut some staff. Brandtech Group appointed James Dow to the newly created role of Gen AI creative director. Officials in the United States, European Union and UK issued a joint statement to investigate alleged antitrust violations related to the AI race. Former NFL star Colin Kaepernick announced Lumi Story AI, a new AI startup developing a creator-focused platform to generate text and visuals. It is backed by Seven Seven Six, a venture capital firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
1s and 0s: AI-related research and reports
Gartner published its Digital Marketing 2024 Hype Cycle report, which details the continued adoption of generative AI along with the use of “emotion AI” to engage with people with chatbots using natural language processing. Google’s quarterly earnings again had many mentions of AI, although the news about not retiring cookies only came up once. Canva and Harvard Business Review released a new data report on creativity and the use of AI in the workplace.
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