The campaign shelled out millions to firms that promised they could recruit influencers and independent media figures to the cause.
Influencer marketing agencies were big winners this election season, thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s losing campaign.
Looking to boost Harris’s odds with a younger, more online audience, the campaign poured big money into several marketing firms that rely upon social media stars.
Harris’s top-paid consultant was Village Marketing Agency, a firm that received $3.9 million from the presidential hopeful in exchange for “digital consulting services,” according to Federal Election Commission disclosures.
The agency describes itself as a “performance-driven influencer shop, fueled by creativity and powered by relationships.” The agency says it leverages influencers to “deliver business results for our clients,” including Amazon, Spotify, Anheuser-Busch, Netflix, and Soul Cycle. The firm, founded in 2013, was acquired by WPP in 2022, at which point it had grown to employ more than 150 staffers.
Village Marketing Agency website says it counts “two presidents on our client roster,” having done work for both the Biden-Harris campaign and for the Obama family.
In 2020, founder Vickie Segar told Business Insider that her firm was “planning how Biden should work with influencers in a way that would allow us to have real conversations and get out to a younger audience,” particularly in the middle of a pandemic, which put constraints on candidates’ outreach.
As part of that effort, the firm set up video calls between Biden and internet stars including Khadeen and Devale Ellis, Allison Holker, Keke Palmer, Bethany Mota, and Jerry Harris. Segar said none of the influencers were compensated to post videos with Biden, who was the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time.
Campaign advertising that relies on Influencers is largely unregulated by the Federal Election Commission. While the FEC requires paid campaign advertising to carry a disclaimer identifying who paid for the communication, there are no federal rules that require disclosure when a social media personality is paid to promote an election-related message.
Because money passed through the social media marketing agencies like Village Marketing to the individual creators, it’s almost impossible to know which influencers received a paycheck for their online endorsements.
Village Marketing relied on some 5,000 social media creators to promote the Harris-Walz campaign, according to the New York Post.
Influencers were a hot topic at the Democratic National Convention earlier this year, where some 200 social media stars were treated like celebrities as Democrats hoped to gin up positive messaging online.
“I know why they want me here,” one foodie influencer told the New York Times during the Chicago convention. “I’m not here to ask any embarrassing questions.”
That the campaign installed several Village Marketing employees at Kamala HQ, according to the New York Post, is just further evidence of the campaign’s reliance on social media messaging.
The campaign’s second highest-paid consultant was another influencer marketing firm, Good Influence.
The agency, which was paid nearly $444,000, is a progressive “influencer network built for campaigns and causes.” It has worked on behalf of a number of left-wing groups and issues, including the pro-abortion Yes on Prop 3 movement in Michigan, MoveOn, United We Dream, Wisconsin Democrats, the Brennan Center for Justice, SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center, and Moms Against Greg Abbott.
“Good Influence creates meaningful impact for causes and campaigns through our network of powerful online messengers,” its website says. “Rather than paying to work with a single influencer or content creator, Good Influence bundles elite news and cause-focused online creators together to create a network effect for our partners. With their combined audience and a united voice, our creators effectively mobilize awareness and action for issues we care about.”
New York–based People First Marketing, which coordinates “microinfluencer marketing at scale” also took home $215,000 from the Harris-Walz campaign.
While its website does not describe what it did for the Democratic nominee, the firm claims to have “activated an army of BIPOC influencers to win a Presidential Election” in 2020 on Biden’s behalf.
People First claims to “source real people to share authentic experiences with their communities on their favorite channels.” It counts Tommy Hilfiger, Walmart, White Castle, and Johnson and Johnson among its clients.
But for all the work Harris’s campaign put into capturing a younger audience with the help of influencers, that target demo actually shifted toward Trump, compared to 2020.
While Democratic candidates in past elections dating back to at least 2008 have typically enjoyed support from roughly 60 percent of young voters, according to NPR, exit polling found Harris lagging behind with just 52 percent support. Trump, for his part, notched 46 percent of the young vote.
Young voters were split by gender, with 58 percent of young women supporting Harris — though that was still less than the 65 percent who supported Biden in 2020 — and 56 percent of young men voting for Trump, a huge boost from the 41 percent support Trump enjoyed from the demo in 2020.
Trump’s campaign has received praise from consultants on both sides of the aisle over its media strategy, which, like Harris’s, focused heavily on influencers and alternative media.
However, Trump’s team was more organically able to generate buzz than Harris’s, despite all the money the Democrat spent.
All the money spent on influencer marketing firms couldn’t replicate what Trump does so well on his own, with viral moments like his shift working at McDonald’s, driving a garbage truck, or bravely standing on stage after he had been shot at and turning to his followers to say, “Fight, fight, fight,” with a fist up in the air.
And while Trump appeared in TikToks with influencer and fighter Jake Paul and appeared on podcasts hosted by Joe Rogan and Theo Von, Harris’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, recently told Semafor that the Democratic campaign struggled to book its candidate on popular shows or to win over the support of big influencers.
The campaign looked to get Harris on sports shows and podcasts but “one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down,” the outlet reported.
Flaherty said the campaign struggled against a moment in which sports and culture have “merged together” and become more publicly associated with conservative values.
Influencers outside the sports world, including those who had previously engaged with the Biden White House, were also uninterested in coming out in support of Harris. And in fact, some of the influencers who came out in support of Harris may have done more to hurt than help her cause, like teacher-turned-TikToker Arielle Fodor, who told fellow white women to “put their listening ears on” when “BIPOC individuals” are speaking, in a viral moment that Elon Musk dubbed “next-level cringe.”
Flaherty said the campaign knew the race would come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news, yet the campaign still struggled to break into alternative spaces.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign employed several traditional consulting firms as well, including Fenway Strategies LLC, which was paid more than 250,000 for communications consulting.
Fenway, which was founded in 2013 by Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and national security spokesman Tommy Vietor, claims to be a “different kind of speechwriting and strategic communications firm with some of the highest-caliber writing talent on the planet.”
The agency says it has worked with presidents, first ladies, governors, senators and presidential candidates, along with celebrities outside the political world, including athletes, musicians, actors, and other public figures.
It is currently led by Ben Krauss, a Biden-Harris campaign speechwriter who later joined the Biden White House as a senior adviser to work on “strategic communications around implementing President Biden’s economic and clean energy agenda.”
Harris’s team paid another $236,000 for campaign consulting to Ethos Organizing, a “full-service field organizing firm with a team of seasoned campaign professionals, activists, and organizers,” working toward “expanding the community-based approach to create effective relational organizing, canvassing, ballot initiative, and voter registration programs.”
Ethos is led by founder Malik Hubbard, the former executive director of the Ohio Democratic Party. In his bio, Hubbard is said to have “interdepartmental expertise in the engagement and turnout of African Americans and other voters of color.”
Meanwhile, D.C.-based Wide Eye creative firm was behind the campaign’s simple, type-heavy branding. For that, it received $223,000.
It touts its work for the Harris-Walz campaign on its website, saying its staffers worked on visual identity, art direction, brand book, creative consulting, copywriting and motion design.
“Vice-President Harris needed to be reintroduced to the American people in a compelling, multidimensional way on a historically accelerated timeline,” Wide Eye writes. “She also faced the heightened scrutiny placed on women in politics and the challenge of establishing herself as ‘qualified’ to be our country’s first female commander in chief.”
“As such, it was impossible not to honor and consider the path paved by past female candidates for President before her—and in particular, women like Shirley Chisholm, Patsy Mink, and Hillary Clinton—while simultaneously making Harris’ unique vision for America clear and authentic,” it adds.
The branding was “inspired by a concept of fierceness, fearlessness, and ‘firsts’—from logo to type to color to tone,” and was “created to reinforce the candidate’s smart, direct, and fierce reputation as a no-nonsense prosecutor (running against a convicted felon).”
Harris also paid $200,000 to the Areva Martin Companies for media consulting. Martin is a civil rights attorney and media personality who appeared on various shows where she spoke favorably about Harris, her running mate, and her odds of winning the presidency.
Of course, the aforementioned consulting fees are just a small part of the campaign’s massive spending. Harris infamously paid more than $1 million to Oprah Winfrey’s media company and spent six figures on building a set for her Call Her Daddy podcast appearance.
Lavish spending on celebrity performances, among other things, left the campaign $20 million in debt, despite having fundraised a record-breaking $1 billion in less than four months.