What ChatGPT Can Teach You About Influencer Targeting
Last week we began to tackle one of the biggest recent developments in public affairs advocacy—how AI has upended expensive, black box forms of influencer targeting. This week, we continue the conversation, showing you how natural language processing, the same technology underlying ChatGPT and other popular AI tools, means that advocates no longer need to pay thousands of dollars for black box influencer targeting data.
Influencer Targeting Defined
To refresh on what we mean by influencer targeting, we define it as a strategy to reach the influencers of policy-makers. The goal is to reach not just the decision-maker, but the people the decision-maker listens to. When done properly, influencer targeting creates an echo chamber around the decision-makers, so they hear about the issue from their most trusted advisors.
Most Influencer Targeting Is A Black Box?
Several vendors sell products that they market as data sets they have compiled of various elected officials' influencers. There are many catches, but the two most important are:
So after paying what can be tens of thousands of dollars before even running a single ad, you get a black box and a "trust me" from the vendor that the expense is worth it.
AI Makes Black Box Influencer Targeting Obsolete
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of AI that focuses on enabling machines to understand, interpret, generate, and interact with human language. It's the foundational form of AI underlying ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa and other tools you're probably familiar with.?
NLP transforms influencer targeting because it allows us to find and reach people who consume content about particular elected officials, issues, bills, or other topics.?
Try this quick thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to reach Congressman Brett Guthrie's influencers.?Now imagine an important influencer to Congressman Guthrie who never consumes content about him.?We think you'll find this impossible to do. In other words, NLP creates a digital breadcrumb trail of his influencers.
And once those influencers come into focus, we can reach them with advocacy messages, wherever they are on the open web.
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To be clear,?this is not search?targeting. With search targeting, you would only find people Googling Congressman Guthrie or finding him through another search engine. But his influencers don't need to Google him. What we're interested in here is finding people who?consume?content about him, not who?search?for content about him, because that is the behavior of his influencers. This is precisely what NLP allows us to do.?
This tactic works for any elected official, any issue, or any bill you might be advocating on.?It means you no longer have to pay thousands of dollars for black box sets of data, and that you can reach influencers more precisely than ever.
Three Ways To Operationalize This Email
??? Review the last campaign where you deployed influencer targeting and see how much you paid for the data before even serving a single ad.??
??? Ask your data vendor for the?full list?of names they're trying to sell you for your next influencer targeting campaign.?Not a few sample names, but the full list of names?they claim to have compiled.
??? On your next campaign, try natural language processing to reach the influencers of your target, and compare the cost and effectiveness of the two approaches.
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??? If you'd like to learn more about how AI creates a digital bread crumb trail of influencers, contact us today.