Cora Swanson

Big believer in Democracy and being outside 🌞
she/her/hers

[Mike Beauvais @MikeBeauvais]

If the cover of the New York Post isn’t this photo with this headline “SACREBLEU IT” then what are we even doing anymore?

[Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D @RVAwonk]

This is, to my knowledge, the first instance of an official social media account representing the government of a democratic nation intentionally spreading altered imagery maliciously targeting one of its own citizens.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Trump’s billionaire allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch.

They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets.

They control the AI you're asking for answers, the algorithms feeding you content, your personal data you've given up for access, and the devices you rely on.

The news and your privacy are now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is.

This is all by design.

[Walter Masterson @waltermasterson]

Nobody should learn anything from a historic election with the highest voter turnout in 50 years

-New York Times

[Adam Carlson @admcrlsn]

How can you not love New York City

[Mike (not a) Rothschild @rothschildmd]

The dude who singlehandedly controls the government is demanding it pay him a quarter of a billion dollars of our tax money as restitution for having been caught committing crimes.

[Cora Swanson @swansoncora1]

But his truth social dms!

[Sam Stein @samstein]

The Journal reports that it was, indeed, an errant DM that Trump posted to Bondi, demanding the Comey indictment

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

This is the story.

[Cora Swanson @swansoncora1]

I love this take. Contrary to a lot of the AI buzz I hear among consultants, the answer to winning isn't more and faster "creative" using AI. It will never feel authentic and personal in a way that inspires people to vote and feel like they're a part of a movement.

[Taniel @Taniel]

Brad Lander speaks: "Andrew Cuomo is in the past. He is not the present or future of New York City. Good fucking riddance"

[Jemele Hill @jemelehill]

When a terrible person commits good journalism

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

I'm very excited to launch Viewpoint Media today as a unified media buyer separate from Uplift.

Post-cycle we spent a lot of time internally thinking through how we could push our clients (and the broader party) into making smarter decisions. The biggest problem we identified was the incredible inefficiency that resulted from siloed media buying and vibes-based media planning that had absolutely no resemblance to media consumption in the real world.

We decided to fix those problems in two key ways.

First, we built our own media planning software called Calibrate. Calibrate ingests public and private audience and ad performance data from every platform that allows for political advertising. We can then run that information against any unique voter audience and budget to provide scores for each platform that reflect both the likelihood that we'll reach that custom audience as well as the efficiency of each medium in doing so. That means that all our media plans and mixes will be informed by true data science, not guessing or "experience" that may or may not reflect the modern world.

Second, we took our already great digital buying team/infrastructure (led by @sfalmy and executed by Maya Perez, Chris Darcy, Elizabeth Reyes and Josie Savaria-Watson) and fused it with a traditional buying operation allowing us to serve ads across linear, digital and streaming.

We hired Ann Bremer to run the traditional media buying operation last fall and she has proven to be the best at what she does. We then added strength to strength by bringing @Lili_McFarlane over after her stint on the @KamalaHarris campaign. Lili will be working with clients across all mediums and ensuring we incorporate the smartest thinking/lessons learned from an innovative presidential campaign into what we do.

The result is Viewpoint.

By breaking down silos in media planning we're eliminating any incentive to do anything other than what is the absolute smartest thing to do for our clients.

No more bad-faith fights between consultants and vendors. No more conflicting objectives, accidental bidding against ourselves or unintentional overlapping resulting in tragic inefficiencies. This is a unified approach to maximize reach, incremental frequency, efficiency and quality across any screen to give our clients the absolute best chance to reach their targets and move the voter they need to move.

Higher efficiency = more wins. It's that simple.

Viewpoint will be free to contract with any other outside agency -- though it will also work as the ad buyer for all @UpliftTweets clients.

Jamie Patton and I will be moving our media buying work over to Viewpoint, and we've chosen @swansoncora1 to lead Viewpoint. Cora is one of the hardest-working, most-organized and relentlessly cool under pressure people you'll ever meet in this business. She's the perfect person to run this company that will be built around optimizing efficiencies at every step.

https://t.co/RR4aIccsd5

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

These guys never mention how we had 90% taxes on the super rich and 3x the union membership — or how corporate profits have skyrocketed.

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Very excited to welcome @Lili_McFarlane to Uplift.

She's joining at a fun pivot point for us that we'll be announcing in full soon. We've haven't exactly been hiding what we're up to though.

With Lili and our hire of Ann Bremer last year (as Head of Linear Buying) we're building a best in class integrated ad buying operation. We're doing this not to compete with the old model of political media buying but to help foster a new one.

We're believers in breaking down silos between media, inventing new approaches to planning/reporting and trying to give our clients the best way to win in this new disbursed and complicated media landscape. We're making substantial investments in technology and people to do this and Lili is an extremely obvious fit with this strategy.

Lili is very smart, capable, organized and driven. But she also has the type of mindset and worldview that we value so highly. She's going to do great here and I'm excited to add her smarts and experience to what we're up to.

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

We're so excited to welcome @Lili_McFarlane to Uplift! Lili comes to us from the the @KamalaHarris campaign where she was Deputy Director of Paid Digital.

She'll be adding her smarts and experience to our ad buying shop and working in our NYC office. Welcome Lili!

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Super proud of our two companies for being @C_and_E Reed Award finalists

@UpliftTweets for:
- Best Employer
- Best Use of Online Targeting for a Ballot Prop
- Best Online Video (2 mins or under)
- Best Online Video That Never Saw the Light of Day

@Rise_Suite for:
- Innovation in Online Ad Measurement
- Best Data Analytics Solution

[Cora Swanson @swansoncora1]

we need Walz on @Strava

[Cora Swanson @swansoncora1]

Ascend just keeps getting better. If you work on campaigns it will make your life so much easier.

[Rise Digital @Rise_Suite]

Welcome to all our new followers looking for the ad competitive data we're posting each week for the duration of the presidential race! While you wait, did you know Ascend has 22 different data feeds and apps? And half of them are free!

Our newest addition is email deliverability data via postmaster tools. Take a look and activate any tools that fits your use case >>> https://t.co/JueydFcBta

[Sam Almy @sfalmy]

Interested in tracking ballots from other states but also want to track other digital ads and trends too?

📈Ascend has it all
Tally - Early ballots returns nation wide
SCAN- Facebook, Twitter, Google ads from any political candidate
Email & Social Tracking
...And more 😮

[Cora Swanson @swansoncora1]

👋 Ascend! Hard to overstate how cool this platform is. Give it a whirl!

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Meet Ascend.

Ascend is an all-in-one data platform for campaigns developed by our subsidiary Rise Digital Properties.

With Ascend you can:

- Get competitive advertising data and creative for any race, in any medium, anywhere in the country. Broadcast, digital, streaming, radio, cable, satellite...we've got everything and make it searchable in one place

- Track data and mentions of any social profile

- Get news clips and media monitoring

- Monitor early ballot returns

- Analyze website, email and fundraising data

- Verify and append email and cell phone numbers to any data set

And that's just the initial batch of data sources and applications we're launching with -- twenty in all -- with several more in development that'll be live in the coming weeks. Plus you can customize your feed to only follow data that matters to your campaign or project and ignore stuff that doesn't.

This is going to be the standard reporting platform for all Uplift clients going forward (all our ads reporting gets funneled into Ascend too), but like with all Rise products this is open to anyone else to use. All you need to sign up and start using it is an email address.

Roughly half the functionality is free and the rest is paid data sources that we've tried to make scalable to any size of race. We want Ascend to facilitate smart decision-making for any race, whether they're our client or not and no matter how big they are.

You work at a four-person digital fundraising shop and spend way too much time on reporting? This is a free reporting platform that gives you customizable and saved searches and let's you securely share reporting with only those you permission.

You're running a city council race and want to keep track of your opponent? See everything they do online and in paid media.

You work for an IE and need to track OTT and YouTube spending in 30 races across the country? Set up saved searches to catch every single streaming ad and get modeled spending data in each race.

And while you can use Ascend for many specific use cases, Ascend is very much the manifestation of our belief that the artificially siloed nature of information and decisions on campaigns leads to bad outcomes and has to change. The best campaigns and political operatives are thinking about how the entire media ecosystem impacts a race -- not pretending digital, television and mail are all happening in a vacuum.

We built Ascend to evangelize that belief and intend to keep adding to and iterating on it for years to come as we continue to espouse that worldview.

Sign up for Ascend here >> https://t.co/daoIotNKZH