Mediaboss Marketing

Acronym was able to drum up eye-popping donations from very wealthy people, such as billionaire Seth Klarman and venture capitalist Michael Moritz, because it adopted the vernacular of startup culture, promising to disruptand innovate inthe formerly staid world of political advertising. As an Outline story revealed, though, it doesnt seem to do much innovating; it basically just gives a roomful of millennials no other direction or strategy than to create anti-Trump content. They call it a startup environment as an explanation for why no one knows whats happening, one staffer said. Acronym apparently told donors that it would create content, which would gin up a lot of impressions on social media, and that this, far more than any traditional advertising strategy, was a better investmentbut to date, Acronym, according to the Daily Beast, has not managed to spend very much of the money it promised to devote to taking down Trump.

So where is that money going, exactly? Acronyms principal is a political operative named Tara McGowan, who had worked for Priorities USA, the main super PAC supporting Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign. She is also the owner (and apparently the sole employee) of Lockwood Strategies, a for-profit digital consulting company that, as it happens, received $1 million from Acronym in the fall of 2018. In other words, almost immediately after she failed to win the most important election she had ever worked on, McGowan managed to convince some of the wealthiest liberals in the country to shower her with money to produce ineffective trash. This is called disruption, and it now powers the American economy.

Most galling of all, McGowan has promised to raise $25 million for Courier Newsroom, a liberal news network, or perhaps more precisely, a sketchy network of content mills producing newslike content in various swing states, overseen not by anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper but by a former Vice editor andmore to the pointmarketing and communications professional who was once recognized by Ad Age for her role in creating one of the 10 Best Branded Content Partnerships of 2017. The idea was to create content and pay Facebook to place it high up on peoples news feeds; in reality, Acronym is asking donors for money by promising both to beat the right-wing disinformation network and to save that precious commodity rich people know the United States needs more of but dont feel much like subsidizing: local news.

Twenty-five million dollars could support an enormous amount of actual news, just as it could be put to much more potent political messaging purposes. But because of the deeply broken state of our money-choked and mostly unregulated election machinery, those funds go instead to people like McGowan, who wield power within the party because they are able to raise money, not because they have shown any real ability to spend it in ways that help Democrats win elections. This machine is designed to extract cash from people with too much of it and distribute it to insiders in the permanent campaign. If an election gets won here or there, its mostly incidental.

Excerpt from:
Democrats Embrace the Grift - The New Republic