Digital influence trends: Lessons from the Berlin Campaign Conference 2024

On the first floor of the Marriott hotel in central Berlin, a door was opened by attentive uniformed staff, and I escaped the late summer heat as I entered a large air-conditioned conference hall. The room felt spacious, not just because of the high ceilings and the noise-absorbing carpet but also because of the space between each seated individual, allowing them to work on their laptops or take notes without disrupting the person next to them; the social distancing of business class, rather than pandemic protocol.

At the front of the room, a large screen displayed the words “Berlin Campaign Conference”.. The two-day event, which cost between 250 – 500 euros per ticket, was set up for centre-right practitioners from across the world to network and share lessons from their work. Throughout the day, speakers stood on a raised stage and presented to an interested room of around 250 people. On a glance around, the majority of the attendees were white, between their 20s and 60s, male, and represented campaigns from the US, New Zealand, Australia, and a selection of European countries. I was glad I had decided to choose clothes a little more formal than usual Berlin work-wear, as most of them were dressed in suits.

The presentations and conversations at the conference revealed the tools, tactics, and strategies of the campaigns in attendance and, as shown throughout this article, were representative of 2024 campaigning trends worldwide. Notably, these trends include the use of TikTok for youth engagement, the connection between the progress of AI and the use of deep-fakes, as well as how parties are responding to voters looking for alternatives in traditional media and politics. While the conference itself was focused on long-standing centre-right parties, the campaign techniques and voter habits described are important to understanding the next decade of election campaigns across the political spectrum.

The TikTok Elections and the Youth Vote

“We left no door unknocked, we left no tik untoked.”‐ Sean Topham, Topham Strategies, quoting Christopher Luxon, New Zealand National Party from his winning election speech, Berlin Campaign Conference.

One of the most referenced tools in the election success stories in 2024 was TikTok. Though TikTok officially does not allow any political ads on the platform, it does allow political representatives to create and share content. In 2024, TikTok was used in campaigns across the international political spectrum and is credited as contributing to the successes of campaigns in New Zealand, the UK, Italy, Indonesia, and Romanian elections – to name a few. The importance of TikTok in recent election campaigns reveals patterns behind the uptake of popular technologies by political groups, and importantly, demonstrates how the voice of the youth has been recognised as a vital base for formal electoral politics.

At the conference, a representative from the New Zealand National Party’s campaign described their use of TikTok. The presenter detailed how the campaign adapted their communication style to the platform by using more casual and personal approaches associated with “authenticity” giving examples of how the now Prime Minister Christopher Luxen engaged in TikTok trends such as his morning skincare routine where he had the chance to show a funny and relatable side by referencing how he is bald and his use of sunscreen.

Later in the same year, the UK Labour party engaged with TikTok showing a similar adaption to the communication styles of the platform such as through memes, pop culture, and other trends in humourous content such as those shown below. Both the New Zealand and the UK campaigns, while opposing each other politically and geographically, won landslide victories over the previously ruling party in their respective countries.

Images from Labour's election campaign on TikTok, accessed 20 September 2024.

Both the UK and New Zealand campaigns described the same internal process for how they worked with TikTok content. At the Berlin Campaign Conference, the New Zealand campaign representative said only two roles were needed to approve content, and they only used one criteria for approving TikTok content: “Do I understand it? If yes, we shouldn’t do it”. Similarly, at a talk held by the Labour campaign at a separate event, one representative said the management were the only ones who needed to sign off and had “no idea” what they were signing off.

These two noted features of the process are interconnected: to develop content for TikTok it’s important to be ingrained in the specific trends and in-jokes of the platform, and therefore digital teams are given more trust to develop content without needing constant approval from other teams. For over a decade, successful political campaigns have noted the importance of involving digital teams from the start of their campaign and letting them decide which content to produce. Given the success of these two campaigns, it is likely that more control will be handed over to digital experts and content creators in the years to come.

The importance of TikTok in 2024 election campaigns also signifies a strategic choice to target a younger population of voters. While turn-out is still statistically lower among younger voters, this audience has been a focus for right-wing campaigns, including in Italy, Germany and New Zealand. One campaign representative at the conference noted that the New Zealand National Party won the 18-24s for the first time. The youth vote is important to the political party campaigns not just to win last year’s elections, but also to anticipate which tools and channels their audiences will access in future elections. One presenter described how the channel is as important as the audience, as statistics show that media consumption habits don’t change after age 40 or 45, so the younger generation will likely never turn to TV or newspapers. Therefore, any investment in digital now will benefit campaigns in the future.

Since its launch, TikTok has been criticised for the lack of transparency, especially due to its opaque algorithms, and consequently amplified filter bubbles and echo chambers. However, this issue was not raised as a concern at the conference. In fact only one speaker criticised TikTok, when she warned against using it due to its connection with China. This fear shows that national security is a stronger motivation than the fear of polarisation, datafication, or other concerns associated with social media platforms for many of these centre-right campaign practitioners.

With few concerns, an important demographic audience, and as TikTok does not require an advertising budget (other than for behind-the-scenes sponsored influencers), it is likely to remain an important channel for political campaigns.

Gen-AI and Deep-fakes: Same Tools, Different Face

The elections of 2024 saw an increasing interest and impact of generative AI tools, which produce text, image, and video content. However, during the conference the conversations around AI were mostly speculative rather than demonstrative. One session was dedicated to how to use AI in campaigns in which the presenter described several potential uses for AI mostly centred around producing images, text or videos such as scripts for chat-bots or creating video content including avatars, customised accents, and background music. Along with each suggested use presenters gave lists of tools, including tools that support the use of AI, such as an AI assistant tool to help create better prompts for AI. The conference content focused, for the most part, on what these tools can do, rather than what they’ve already done.

The presenter also described how AI tools can be used to manage a campaign’s image, using the example of removing a tattoo (while clarifying ,“I’m not against them”) from someone in a photo. The presenter then showed an image of several people gathering as if at a campaign meet up, and described how you could remove one of the people, just like the tattoo, from the photo. He said this might be helpful if, for example, the person in the photo had a bad reputation for making weird comments online. Ultimately, the presenter focused here on AI as a tool to alter real photos to manage a campaign’s image.

Meanwhile, the deep-fakes session was framed in the programme as a session on how to respond to the risk of deep-fakes, but the actual session felt like a pitch for the tools which produce deep-fake content - very similar to the generative AI content. In the deep-fakes session, the presenter began by normalising the role of misinformation by drawing on historical examples of “trickery” in campaigns from Octavian to Stalin. The presentation turned briefly to how individual candidates can protect themselves, with one slide on the tools they can use to detect deep-fakes. The speaker also offered ways to respond to the opposition’s use of deep-fakes, from shaming the opposition party to educating your audience on clues to spot deep-fake content such as flat eyes, out-of-sync lips, and odd shadows or lighting in videos.

Quickly, however, the presenter moved on to a more detailed description of tools used to make deepfakes, speaking of their ease, speed, and cheapness with the performed awe of a salesperson. For example, he showed a video they made of Kamala Harris and commented on how it only took them 10 minutes to make. The presenter then showed another tool which he pointed out was only 10 dollars a month. The question and answer session confirmed the sales approach to deep-fakes, with the moderator suggesting to start with a question about the positive potentials of the tools. The speaker responded that you can use them to present your candidate in a location or a community where they might not otherwise be able to travel to or access. Another audience member asked how far the tools are from fixing small problems such as flat eyes and the speaker responded that if you have time, you can do anything.

Notably, there was very little difference between the output of tools presented in the AI session – which mostly focused on Gen-AI - and those presented in a session on deep-fakes. While this may be obvious, given that they are both mostly based on the same functions of AI, the lack of clarity in distinguishing Gen-AI tools and deep-fake tools speaks to the danger of these campaign trends and the direction of digital content becoming more synthetic and representing activities and actions that did not really take place.

As this tactic of producing altered or completely synthetic images is becoming an inevitable part of the landscape to manage, control, or disrupt a campaign’s image, the presenters of both sessions advised on how to work with the tools. The presenters advised that campaigns help their audiences to get to know the tools by creating deepfakes of themselves which can both reveal how the tools work, scale the campaign’s presence, and can be used to poke fun at the opposition. This can be part of a tactic of pre-bunking – making people aware of deep-fakes so that people are more wary of the content they see. The presenter also advised campaigns to create guidelines to protect authenticity such as watermarking synthetic videos and images, creating AI-detection procedures to share with their followers, and selecting a point person or working group to research the best tools and platforms to use.

Alternative media, Alternative politics, Alternative voters

Throughout the conference, speakers and participants double-downed on the importance of reaching voters “where they are at” which was a comment often made in the same breath as dismissing traditional media. One speaker specifically warned against the “media traps” of Berlin and Brussels. Speakers recommended alternatives including direct contact such as going door to door, using social media and podcast influencers, and engaging with personal digital spaces such as WhatsApp groups.

Alongside the alternative media channels, alternative political choices were also highlighted as a feature of the success of parties in recent years. This was not just the case of opposition parties being an alternative to the ruling party, but also one of presenting candidates as ‘alternatives’ within their own party. The candidate profile could give “an illusion of alternatives”. For example, Boris Johnson’s campaign was referenced more than once as an example of an alternative candidate within a governing party. This image of the conservative party under Boris Johnson was created through content such as a lo-fi music video called "‘lo fi boriswave beats to relax/get brexit done to’", a TV ad based on the popular film, Love Actually, and FactCheckUK: an account pretending to be a fact-checker run by the UK conservative party that mocked fact checking accounts (referenced by a speaker).

This ‘alternative’ election landscape is also defined by new voter bases for parties. Beyond the youth vote described above, there has also been a notable shift in the economic and education levels of the voters behind the traditional parties in countries, especially in the US. As one presenter colourfully put it, the Country Club Republicans in the US no longer make up the Republican base, and instead the new base “doesn’t know what a cocktail party is and haven’t been into a university campus unless it’s to clean it.” This speaker went on to describe “the diploma divide,” which he believed is more important than income in the switch of voters in profiling the centre-right audiences. According to his research, college-educated voters have massively shifted left, whereas white voters without a college degree who used to be the base of the Democratic party are now shifting to the Republican party.

According to several presenters, the major concern across all voters is the economy. One speaker, introduced as “the Wizard”, was the research lead of the Australian CT Group, who has worked internationally with right-wing political groups. Their research suggested that economic concerns are the core to voters’ interests worldwide. The fact that the economy was identified as a key issue – including among youth – was framed as an advantage for the right. Many speakers highlighted that they believed that the centre-right’s strength was their ability to manage the economy effectively, as well as security, law and policy and the right’s ability to “get things done”.

The conversations at this conference did not focus on changing legislation or policy, or the role of political campaigns in choosing leaders who will create the next few years of political society. Rather, this group was focused on getting votes on election day. In the coming years, we will continue to see these same practitioners continue to use the tools of 2024 – TikTok and generative AI - and adopt new tools as they come in their race to win their campaigns. It is harder to predict how the values and messaging of ‘alternatives’ will play out over a longer period of time and as these candidates and media systems become more established. In all cases, a continued close eye on the processes of democratic elections will be needed to ensure transparent and fair use of technologies in campaigns.

Author: Amber Macintyre, Project Lead Tactical Tech

Thank you to Christy Lange and Cassie Cladis for their comments and guidance.