Brewer asks Melillo how CFB selects influencers and differs from traditional media

Thank you very much.

Just a few.

How do you decide which influencers you want to work with?

What is the difference between campaigns you create with these influencers and those created for traditional media?

And then also, I think you have said that you have brought your influencer campaign in-house.

I didn't know what that meant.

Those are my three questions.

Sure.

I'm going to actually step back and answer the second one first.

So when we're thinking about reaching younger voters, what traditional advertising generally looks like is some sort of branded campaign asset that is professionally designed.

It usually has a field-tested message attached to it, a call to action.

And you can generally tell what these advertisements look like pretty clearly in the subways or whenever you're seeing it out in the world.

I think what research has pretty consistently shown, especially for younger people who just have been incessantly targeted by ads from the time they were children,

is that they are increasingly suspicious of traditional advertising and prefer content that feels more authentic to them.

So this is why you've really seen the rise of influencer partnerships and advertising, because in these sorts of short-form content, influencers are creating posts or making videos, or it's really just someone to...

talking to a camera or maybe posting some words, and it seems like it's coming from a person as opposed to an organization.

So I would say a number of agencies, not just the Campaign Finance Board, have been experimenting more with this type of, these types of ways to reach voters, especially for the past five to six years, as a lot more of our work has sort of

migrated online as these generational changes occur.

So when we are going out, and what I mean by when I said we brought that work in-house,

before we were paying an advertising agency, which was at the time Miller Advertising, we aren't currently working with them, and they sort of went out and identified some potential influencers.

We have a social media manager in-house, as many government agencies do.

And our social media manager actually began doing the work.

As someone who is much more online as I am, I admit, she began doing the work of really looking at who are New York City-based influencers that don't make content that's political in nature, but it's very New York City-specific.

So we have, you know, we've partnered with outlets such as Public Opinion, who does like man-on-the-street style interviews.

We've partnered with the influencer behind Righteous Eats, who like profiles mom and pop shops and eateries around, especially the outer boroughs.

People who aren't necessarily creating content that is political.

political in nature, or even civically engaged, but have an interest in the outcomes of New York City.

So generally that is like our first cut of who are New York City content creators who live in the five boroughs and their audiences are in the five boroughs.

And then from there,

we start to winnow down.

Our social media team will sort of do a review of what are the types of things that they've posted.

Do we think that this would be an appropriate content creator for the campaign finance board to partner with?

Have they posted political content in the past that could be seen as partisan in a way we don't necessarily want to be associated with?

You know, sometimes they're content creators, depending on what they do.

Maybe they've posted things that aren't suitable for work.

Maybe we shouldn't partner with them as a government agency.

But for the most part, we will sort of come up with a short list and then go from there and then ask ourselves,

Is anyone on this list, or do we need to find additional people who are reaching out to our priority audiences, especially in-language audiences or people that are harder to reach?