Selected Citations

“The campaign didn’t start the Dark Brandon stuff. It really did emerge organically online from people who are just supporters,” Bunnett said. “They’re being smart about it and letting people kind of feel ownership over this thing and associating themselves with it without necessarily taking it away from the people who invented it.”

“If you want to do something about it, you’ve got to show the people who like raising money the damage they’re doing,” said Will Bunnett, principal at Clarify, a digital marketing agency that has worked with Democratic campaigns. “But nobody has come up with a way to quantify that.”

“It’s absolutely standard practice and has been for over a decade to suppress what we call the ‘inactive people.’ Maybe they haven’t actually gotten around to unsubscribing, but they’re not really interested anymore,” Will Bunnett, principal at the digital firm Clarify Agency, said, describing the practice. “If the RNC just started doing that, they’re well over a decade behind.”

Bunnett says some of their most effective ads have tapped into a “hyper-traditional sense of masculinity,” like themes about saving damsels in distress. “An ad might feature a guy saying, ‘Hey, you might not be able to get pregnant, but this is really, really important to the women in your life and they need you to step up,’” he said.

The focus on targeted ads likely helped Trump gain a big lead in early fund-raising, according to Will Bunnett, a principal at the progressive digital ad agency Clarify. But Trump may have another advantage over Biden in using the platform, he said, because of the way Facebook’s algorithm puts ads in front of people who’ll interact with them, often by getting riled up.

“Tech has made money and insider access less important in politics,” Will Bunnett told Tech Wire Asia. “It used to be that you needed a lot of money to win.”…“Just look at Donald Trump getting outspent by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and still winning the race,” Bunnett observed.