As the Times explained elsewhere, Blue Rose handled much of the ad testing for the Super PAC Future Forward as it worked to support Harris’ campaign. Blue Rose’s team was effectively embedded within Future Forward, which served as Harris’ primary outside spender and spent $560 million to boost the Democratic ticket in 2024. It’s worth noting that many of the ads run by Future Forward were completely unwatchable — overstuffed with tidbits about various policies, provided too quickly for a casual viewer to process and often presented by random narrators.Blue Rose has worked with much of the Democratic Party apparatus — the Democratic National Committee; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its outside spending arm, Senate Majority PAC; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its independent arm, House Majority PAC.The firm is prone to bold proclamations. Among its contributions to the 2024 campaign was the idea that running negative ads against Trump was ineffective, and contrast was more important, according to people familiar with the Blue Rose operation. (Democratic National Committee officials are still incensed that Future Forward eschewed attacks on Trump.) Another was that the Super PAC should deploy its ads late in the campaign, when the cake was already nearly baked.These proclamations are typically based on experiments, randomized-controlled trials, that are supposed to determine the efficacy of ads and messages. Critics question whether this is a viable way to test the impact of political messages, as well as the methodology — which Blue Rose doesn’t share — based, in part, on who exactly is participating in its web panels.Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, made an apparent dig at the methodology on Sunday, joking on X that the Democratic Party is being run by “people who sign up to take online surveys about the persuasiveness of various digital campaign messaging vignettes via consumer reward programs.”
I'll add that this particular message memo concludes that these are bad messages:
They are correct. These are absolutely shit messages that no one should use! That is not the same as saying that the topic is shit. They're just shitty statements! There is a difference between "voters aren't concerned about this issue" and "voters think this is a fucking stupid thing to say!"