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

Six-second videos, brain rot and the battle for disaffected voters.

One of the most important ads of the 2024 presidential election is only six seconds long.

“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.”

Why is a six-second ad, barely long enough to say the names of both candidates, so important? Because unlike most ads on YouTube — and a lot of other social media platforms — the viewer is not allowed to skip it, which is important in a fragmented media environment where viewers rarely have to watch anything they don’t want to watch. And the low-information, low-propensity, disaffected voters who may end up deciding the 2024 presidential election don’t pay attention to politics and don’t want to pay attention to politics.

“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.”

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.”