The Billion-Dollar Plan To Make America Pay Attention To Kamala Harris

"Donald Trump wants to cut taxes for these guys," a narrator says as images of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the second-richest and richest man in the world, respectively, appear on screen. "Kamala Harris wants a tax cut for middle-class families." This six-second ad is significant as it is non-skippable, ensuring that less engaged viewers see it amidst their fragmented media consumption.

"Those sort of annoying ads that people see where they have to watch until you get to hit skip?" said Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager on Harris' team who oversees paid media. "That's the good stuff. You make sure you get that." This highlights the strategic advantage of unavoidable ads in capturing the attention of disaffected voters.

Or as Ishanee Parikh, the creative director at FF PAC, the super PAC behind the aforementioned ad, put it: "Any avenue where we can put paid media and get someone to have to watch something, we're there." This reflects a concerted effort to engage voters who are otherwise disengaged from politics.

Parikh and Fulks are among the leading figures in the sprawling effort - costing more than a billion dollars, involving hundreds of operatives and staffers, and resulting in a potentially uncountable number of ads - by the Democratic Party and other allies of Harris to solve one of the biggest problems they faced at the beginning of the election cycle: Disaffected voters, hammered by inflation, felt particularly disaffected toward the Democrats.

Read at HuffPost