What Campaigns Keep Getting Wrong About Creators

In the last few weeks of thinking about how to improve Chicago 312, many people have surprised me by saying that they’d like to see more communications and narrative “how to” guides, especially as they apply to Chicago. You’re getting this email as an experiment. If you already know you only want the weekly politics roundups, click here.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York showed what happens when narrative work does meet the moment. It also gave me a little bit of rare NYC fomo, especially because they won out over Cuomo’s obscene amounts of spending.

Capacity…

FOMO aside, it’s not that no one is doing narrative work right now in Chicago. It’s that there is simply too much narrative for everything happening all at once in Chicago, especially with Bovino and Noem peddle their xenophobic theater for the camera crews behind them.

So, the question is: what does it actually look like to build something better around narrative when things are quite bad?

When Border Patrol literally took a picture in front of the Bean yesterday and shouted “Little Village”?

When almost everyone I talk to is emotionally and physically exhausted from responding to ICE and Border Patrol, or so constrained by the scarcity that Trump’s cuts have caused that they feel stuck —

What does it look like to build something totally new?

One of the main reasons people are struggling with ‘narrative’ in this moment is because we’re also struggling with finding new ways to collaborate in a way that are about ‘power with’ instead of ‘power over.’

And one very concrete actionable way I’ve seen this play out is how movements work with narrative and digital creators.

And since I’ve been thinking about ‘creator network’ building a lot for a client project, I figured I’d start this series on narrative off with an exploration of what I’ve been seeing makes that kind of creator project effective and actionable, especially right now.

The ‘creator economy’ and what it means for movement narratives

Over the last decade or so, it has become possible for working people, organizers, and local journalists to reach hundreds of thousands of people without going through party infrastructure or legacy media. Unfortunately, as the algorithm changed to reward fraudulent spending, high volume emotive reactions, and celebrity, groups and institutions on the left haven’t caught up, especially locally. We’re still stuck in press release logic while the narrative battlefield has moved (and, unfortunately, because of the right’s online takeover and attacks on journalism, the Overton Window has shifted too).

Some of this is inevitable because the right wing narrative strategy requires tactics that are both awful (see: being Nancy Mace) and expensive — Taylor Lorenz wrote a piece yesterday on how it remains incredibly lucrative to be a right wing grifter, even as the right becomes more and more unpopular.

Similar attempts from the Democrats tend to be less than reputable, including Chorus, a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund that’s funneling tens of thousands of dollars to liberal influencers — but even that scandal is over a fraction of the money that the right spends on this kind of marketing.

Further left, I sometimes hear about (and have tried to build myself!) local creator networks, with the idea that a coordinated group of people 'boosting’ each other’s content ala LinkedIn engagement pods can help shift narrative effectively online. The right certainly has these groups in abundance, including, based on their X behavior, many of the right wing groups in Chicago gaining lots of traction.

But if you accept that ‘narrative’ is organizing a story of what’s happening, after weeks of seeing people patrol with whistles run towards their neighbors being abducted, with hundreds of people showing up in the streets, it’s clear that the narrative coordination systems are already there —  Chicago really does have the organizing muscle and the narrative coordination too, including the speed, the coherence, and storytelling that connects emotion to policy.

While Trump happily pays off his right wing grifter network with less engagement than ever, Chicago is furious and fighting back and actually showing up in the streets in a real way that I, at least, have been shocked and humbled by.

The Creator Silo is Fake

But many of the people who are patrolling at schools, going to Broadview, doing jail support, already have some kind of relationship with social media (even reluctantly). Some of them are influencers, journalists, or have gained social media attention because of the harassment + violence they’ve experienced. But many are also already organizers, coordinating in a lot of different ways, just as many of them are concerned people who get their news from social media, or X doomscrollers, or look at places to eat on TikTok, or some amalgamation of the two.

The silo between ‘creator’ and responder is imaginary — it’s all part of the same movement, relationship, and work.

This isn’t to say that all creators are the same — but understanding that creators can and should be organized says to me that it doesn’t matter if we can’t outspend the right on creator engagement. We just have to we keep getting better at collaboration on the left in Chicago — especially with people who understand their own digital world and what works best for the people they reach.

That is the only way to build a system where creators collaborate, amplify each other, or own the story in concert with organizers.

What Seems to Work for Creator Engagement:

These are the 5 main themes I’ve seen come up again and again for organizing groups trying to build stronger relationships with creators.

Space and Structure to Create: When you are a content creator, or just a thoughtful social media user willing to post every now and then, it’s very easy to work for free!

In fact, you can do it forever, quite easily, unless you are very strategic and intentional about who you’re talking to and what you’re trying to do.

It’s much, much harder to find people who will work with you to understand your audience, your personal goals as a creator, and what works for your medium, voice, and engagement strategy than it is to find people who will ask you to do things for free.

The types of creator who are thinking about these things are the ones that are going to be a good long term fit for relationship building. And as a result, it doesn’t work to treat them as “paid amplifiers” rather than trusted voices in their own right.

Investing in creators by asking questions, making space to talk through what they’re trying to do, giving them content templates without any mandate that they stick to those templates, and acting like a collaborator is key, especially when you don’t have funding.

Relationship Building Through Growth and Feedback: I’m 35. I do not know what is trending on TikTok right now (though at some points in my life, I definitely knew way too much about what was trending on TikTok).

There are creators that are successful who are far older than me, younger than me, both more and less ‘online', all accomplishing what they want to be accomplishing in their respective digital creator wheelhouse.

I’ve also found that many creators are way more up on what’s going on in their neighborhood, or on what’s working in terms of canvassing messaging or what the moms at their kids’ school thought about a particular issue than I was, even if I had started by putting them in a particular box around digital content.

My point is that I often have no idea what I don’t know, and what my partner creators feel the same way. There is really no such thing as a ‘social media’ expert in 2025 — it’s all just people talking to their base (or target) on a particular platform.

As a team, we are best when we challenge assumptions and make intentional time to talk through how we see the media landscape and what’s worth doing, together.

Integrated Campaign, Integrated Relationships: I can’t decide if this is specific to Chicago or not, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about after seeing so many professional creators show up for Zohran (both paid and unpaid). Some of that engagement was wanting to be part of a hopeful engagement wave. Some of it was feeling connected and seen. But not much was, as far as I can tell, based on personal relationship.

Compared to my creator work on national campaigns, in Chicago I’ve often felt like my creator outreach was based on personal relationships with creators - someone knew someone, or a bunch of someones knew someone, and reached out.

But often that personal relationship didn’t necessarily translate to us giving that person what they needed to make good content.

Or — worse — because we all knew this person, they all knew us - and they already had their own opinions or relationship with whatever we asking them to do.

And the personal relationship often made it hard for us to give and get good feedback on what we were putting together in a way that made the project feel worthwhile for all of us. The internet’s messy democracy means everyone gets to choose what and who they amplify — which is why partnerships have to be chosen, planned, and facilitated.

Mutual Respect: Every time I’ve seen a collaboration or ‘creator engagement’ project fall through or go really poorly, IMO it’s been because of a lack of respect for the creator.

I’ve seen relationships totally destroyed for the long term, even when they started outside of a creator context, because the vibe felt transactional or less than honest.

It’s one thing to ask someone to copy and paste your talking points. It’s another thing to have watched their channel, thought about which of their videos seem to be performing well, or how they approach growth. But the flip side is that I’ve had creators refuse to take money for promotion, but make really detailed, loved videos that otherwise would have been way out of our pay range because we were willing to adhere to the kind of content strategy they were using.

Same Rules for Creators of Every Size: Until very recently, I felt like so much of what I’m saying here only applied to scrappy, DIY partnerships — that once budgets got bigger or platforms got larger, the rules changed.

But especially right now, these principles apply whether you’re working with a creator who has 300 followers or 300,000: every good creator partnership, no matter the scale, comes down to the same question.

Do both sides feel respected, resourced, and creatively free enough to tell the truth?

That’s the only way we’ll ever build something better than what the right has with their millions of dollars and miserable shiny X videos.

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Coming Soon…

Like I said, I wrote this in part because I’m in the midst of an interesting video creator project — I’m hoping to do some more reporting on that project soon.

But I also know I’m not the only one thinking about this — if you’re part of a group that wants to experiment with creator engagement (especially in a DIY way), be in touch!

Or if you’ve run an influencer style campaign recently, I’d love to hear about what worked.

More coming in this untitled, experimental Narrative 312 Section: How to run media spokesperson trainings that help people get better at talking to the media (it’s harder than you’d think!), why helping people trust themselves makes their tweets replies better, why video feels so hard for some of us, how to build an ‘influencer web’ that makes people feel valued, a core message so strong you can take it on those weird interview game shows, pivots that won’t embarrass you on talk radio, how to start a newsletter that doesn’t take over your life, why your video hooks keep flopping, and more.

LMK what else you’d like to see in the comments.