HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT
HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT
In 2019, I joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President. I was inspired by her fight for justice, and I believed strongly that she was the future of the Democratic Party.
In 2024, I joined the Joe Biden re-election campaign as a Senior Digital Ads Strategist — when, all of a sudden, Kamala rose to the top of the ticket. It was truly a full-circle moment.
I was so proud to be on her team. Together, we raised more in grassroots fundraising revenue than any political candidate in history. I personally wrote, trafficked, and optimized hundreds of digital ads that raised over $3M. The story of my work is below.
Yahoo Native
Yahoo is an ecosystem of email, sports, finance, and news. Its userbase closely resembled our target donor demographic. I wanted to see whether advertising within Yahoo could generate positive returns, so I ran a few tests.
To do this, I created a profile on Yahoo’s DSP and built multiple audiences: mostly interest-based (i.e. law, politics, current events) and lookalike (using existing donor lists). I launched both display and native creative with an initial investment of $50K. While the display creatives hit 20% ROAS, the native ads were over 150% — well above benchmark. We turned off the display creatives and secured a $500K investment from the campaign CFO to scale up native.
In our first week, we averaged $2K daily spend on native. Within weeks, average daily spend rose to $20K (10x growth). Meanwhile, ROAS stayed above benchmark. We continued to scale aggressively and were fortunate to receive a 50% inventory discount from Yahoo. Our daily spend peaked at $106K.
All-in-all, we raised $1.7M on $1.5M spend via Yahoo native. Creating native ads, refining targeting, and monitoring bidding became a main focus during the final months of the campaign.
AOL Send Confirm
AOL sells a unique ad unit called Send Confirm that displays a full screen ad after users send an email. Like Yahoo, AOL was a popular service for our target donor demographic.
Before I joined the campaign, my team purchased 100% of Send Confirm impressions two days-per-month at 120% ROAS. I wanted to scale up, and I received CFO approval to increase investment to two days-per-week. With the increase, we needed to double the amount of new creatives launched and more aggressively turn off low-performing ads. I went to work, producing & launching 5-10 new creatives per day while communicating frequent rotation updates to AOL.
By Election Day, we scaled up to 5 days-per-week and maintained a stable ROAS. In total, we raised $1.2M on $1.0M spend.
Daily Kos
Daily Kos is a progressive news and blog site. Over the years, the DNC had tested various Daily Kos inventory & found their desktop interstitial inventory to be most valuable (200% ROAS daily).
The campaign had a $110K contact for 100% of desktop interstitial inventory through August 2024. My job was to keep returns high and secure 100% of the inventory through Election Day. I produced & launched 2-4 campaigns per week while sharing frequent rotation updates with Daily Kos. When the existing contract expired, I received CFO approval to invest through Election Day.
In total, we raised $329K on $176K spend via the Daily Kos desktop interstitial unit — 187% ROAS..
Wunderkind
With the success of Daily Kos and AOL Send Confirm, we learned that high-visibility, full-screen pop-up ads were most likely to net positive returns. I went searching online for this inventory & arranged calls with multiple publishers: Washington Post, Daily Beast, Associated Press. The publishers shared the CPM/CTR for their inventory, and I used those numbers to project future revenue. Unfortunately, most of the CPMs were too high ($30) and CTRs too low (0.2%) to hit our 120% ROAS benchmark.
However, I did discover a programmatic partner — Wunderkind — that specialized in high-visibility inventory, had existing deals with hundreds of publishers, and sold their inventory 50% cheaper than publisher direct deals. I arranged a $25K test of four high-visibility inventory units. Of the four units, the desktop overlay unit returned at benchmark.
I secured an additional $200K to double-down on the desktop overlay unit. I produced and launched various creatives (static image, countdown timers). Only one stayed above benchmark at-scale: direct-to-camera fundraising videos featuring Kamala Harris. So, I had our creative team make multiple static “skins” which Wunderkind stitched our fundraising videos on top of.
Over the last few weeks of the campaign, we cycled through a dozen videos and 5 static skins. In total, we raised $241K on $223K spend via Wunderkind.