The 2024 cycle ushered in what can accurately be called the Creator-Candidate Era. The candidates who broke through were not simply those with the largest television budgets, but those who had mastered the influencer landscape of short-form video, podcasts, and direct-to-voter relationships. NBC News recently declared podcasts “the latest must-have for a major politician,” while Democratic members of Congress have taken to coordinating mobile-first social videos with the same urgency they once reserved for Sunday-show appearances.
This realignment demands a comparable shift in how campaigns are built and how political professionals add value.
Why the Legacy Model Is Misaligned
For decades, our industry has oriented its infrastructure around television advertising. Public-opinion research is designed to surface the handful of issues most likely to persuade the greatest number of voters. The senior strategists on a campaign are typically those who oversee media strategy and production, because TV spots remain the costliest line item and the most visible expression of message discipline.
Fundraising calendars revolve around mobilizing cash for a late-cycle ad surge. Earned-media teams often measure success by whether favorable coverage can be recycled into a television ad as a third-party validator. Opposition researchers shape their work around what can be weaponized in a thirty-second spot. Even our metrics—gross rating points, reach, frequency—reflect a worldview in which one medium can still speak to everyone at once.
That logic is breaking down. In an environment dominated by TikTok clips, livestreams, and long-form conversations on Spotify, authenticity and speed matter more than thirty-second polish. The cycle time from message conception to voter consumption has collapsed from weeks to hours, and the skill sets required to keep pace are different from those that defined the broadcast age.
Three Roles the Creator-Candidate Campaign Must Master
Content Production
The candidate remains the face and voice of the campaign, but Creator-Candidate campaigns need a producer who can edit, publish, and distribute content across multiple platforms at a relentless cadence. Unlike the traditional media consultant who perfects a few television spots, this producer trims a podcast into a vertical teaser before lunch and schedules three follow-up clips before dinner. Compensation models will need to evolve as well; tying production fees exclusively to paid-media budgets no longer captures the value of year-round content output.
Copywriting
The demand for clear, compelling copy has never been higher. Every piece of video needs a hook; every podcast requires concise show notes; every clip benefits from on-screen text that travels well in silent autoplay. Effective copywriters translate complex issues into digestible language that algorithms reward and voters retain. They also write blog posts and content summaries so that large language models like ChatGPT surface the campaign’s own material when voters ask questions. This is a departure from legacy copywriting, which was optimized for press releases and prepared remarks.
Analytics
Creator-Candidate campaigns generate a deluge of data—views, watch time, retention curves, click-through rates, subscriber growth, engagement. Someone must interpret these signals in a way that aligns with strategic objectives: volunteer recruitment, persuasion, or fundraising. The task is to distinguish vanity metrics from actionable insights and to feed those insights back into both organic content and paid targeting in near real time. Traditional data teams focused on paid-media efficiency; the new mandate is to integrate organic performance into the core decision-making loop.
Continuity and Competitive Advantage
Television’s reach is still unmatched, and no serious campaign will abandon established tactics overnight. Yet the Creator-Candidate Era is expanding the definition of what effective campaigning looks like. Teams that reallocate a modest share of resources toward continuous content production, modern copywriting, and real-time analytics will improve message discipline earlier in the cycle, deepen relationships with small-dollar donors, and make every traditional media dollar work harder.
Political communication has always adapted—from radio fireside chats to televised debates to micro-targeted digital ads. The next evolution is here, and it rewards those who can speak the language of today’s platforms without sacrificing the strategic rigor that wins elections. Campaigns prepared to staff and resource these new roles will secure an edge not just online, but everywhere persuasion happens.
