Inside the first-ever White House holiday party for internet celebs

The Office of Digital Strategy’s work with creators has defined the Biden admin’s approach to online engagement in 2023

“It’s the influencer party,” I overheard one Secret Service officer mumble to another, as I and more than 400 attendees snaked our way through a labyrinth of metal detectors and security checkpoints, snapping the occasional selfie. 

We were in line for one of the annual White House Holiday Receptions, a longstanding tradition where allies of the President, dignitaries, and the press are invited to gather for spiked eggnog and hors d'oeuvres while touring the newly unveiled holiday decorations. Unlike past parties, however, the guest list for the reception I attended on November 29th was unprecedented: this event was organized by the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy.

That meant the median age of attendees was probably decades younger than most holiday shindigs in DC, and the cumulative social media audience of those in attendance approached 100 million followers.

Local DC influencer Tony P was there snapping selfies with fans, as was Elizabeth Holmes, an Instagrammer who makes content explaining the Royal Family’s fashion choices. Devon Rodriguez, an artist and TikToker with tens of millions of followers, was in attendance, so was journalist and producer Speedy Morman, video creator Hunter Prosper, and Nia Sioux, known for her role in the TV docu-series Dance Moms. 

The main event of the afternoon was an appearance by the First Lady herself, who gave a short toast while showing off the presidential cat, Willow. “Welcome to the White House,” she remarked. “You’re here because you all represent the changing way people receive news and information.”

I was impressed by the unique, historic nature of the event and the First Lady’s comments, so I connected with White House Director of Digital Strategy Christian Tom and Senior Advisor Patrick Stevenson to understand the context behind the party and dig into their team’s creator outreach work more generally. 

The below interview has been edited for clarity:

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: Whose idea was it for the digital team to get a holiday party? How did that conversation come about?

Christian Tom: It was our team’s idea with the support of some of the Senior Advisors in this White House. It was actually something that the team had discussed last year as a thing to try but wasn’t able to make happen then. This year it did. 

We put together an old-school, paper memo to make the case for the party. The toplines were exactly what you'd think: how there is an entire industry of communicators and digital creators who, for the first time, are being actively engaged by the White House, and that we have an entire team within ODS who are dedicated to doing that.

As a commitment of kind of all the things we've done [with creator engagement], the sort of capstone to the year would be to open up one of the most exclusive events on the calendar to share that experience. We were able to make that case to the First Lady's Senior team, and we’re very grateful that they agreed to do it.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: How did you all curate the list? Who was the one who invited @TonyPinDC?

Christian Tom: (Laughs) It was a really collaborative process. The goal was to both thank people who've been supporters of the President or our administration, who've helped to highlight our policies looking back, as well as to cultivate relationships with people whom we want to go and work with in the future.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: Did you all try to estimate the combined social following of the people in the room? And do you think it rivals that of any of the other parties?

Christian Tom: That’s a great question, I can say with a pretty good degree of certainty that the 400+ people who came through the gates that day had a larger social footprint than the guest lists of almost all other White House holiday parties, with maybe the only exception being the Congressional Ball. Then again, there are a lot of members of Congress who don't exactly have a large following on their official social media accounts. What do you think, Patrick?

Patrick Stevenson: Devon Rodriguez was there, and he might, by himself, have more followers than everyone at the traditional press party combined.

Christian Tom: In curating the list, our goal was to have not only a representation of racial or ethnic diversity but also diversity of audience - representing all sectors of the internet... It’s a good window into how we're thinking about [our creator partnerships more broadly].

Patrick Stevenson: …and we not only wanted to invite these creators, but also their representatives, talent agents, and managers too. We had a briefing with a lot of them beforehand to explain who we are, what we do, and how our team works.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: The First Lady’s remarks noted “the changing way people receive news and information.” Should legacy media outlets be kind of worried about this new type of institutionalized direct-to-creator engagement?

Christian Tom: In this building, inertia is a powerful force. The physical space is quite literally built around the press briefing room. The geography of the White House is built around their access. And you are starting to see not only with things like this Holiday party but with digital-first rollouts of policy announcements that we are doing. It's not changing overnight, but the tides are moving in [a different] direction.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: What have been some of your favorite ways your team has engaged creators or deployed interesting digital tactics this year?

Christian Tom: On the POTUS side of things, one of the things we’ve tried to deploy two or three times recently is the podcast format. Podcasts really suit this president in particular - he is not a short-form kind of guy, he’s loquacious and really enjoys connecting one-on-one with a person. [In July] he did the Jay Shetty podcast to talk about mental health. I would venture to say that the people who follow Jay Shetty have a very low overlap with the people who follow @POTUS. They’re very low overlapping audiences, and that, to me, is a really good thing. Mental health is an issue that the President has huge leadership on, and he used the podcast to talk to young people, saying “I can only imagine what it’s like to have gone through COVID and not had your prom, or graduation, etc. He used [the opportunity] to talk about policy, but also just empathy and having a good conversation.

In fact, the day this interview is published, President Biden will be recording a very popular podcast – I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll just say it has a very different energy and audience than Jay Shetty. He also just did an Anderson Cooper podcast all about grief and loss. Taken together, three very different podcasts and audiences in the past few months - and he’s done those really well.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: That makes a lot of sense. 

Christian Tom: Another example is our team engaging with digital outlets when the President is on the road. We did it with COURIER and More Perfect Union in Illinois recently, and subsequently he did one in Pueblo, Colorado in Lauren Boebert’s district with Meidas Touch. These are “pro-democracy,” sometimes left-leaning digital-first outlets that are not CNN, not ABC News, where we can go and create content in a short amount of time. The point is not to go and replicate the whole press pool for an event, but there are a bunch of ways to take [a POTUS event] and atomize it and get it out on different platforms. 

That’s a net new thing we’ve just developed over the past few months, and it doesn't involve more than a few minutes of the President’s time. That is also kind of where the internet has been heading - short form, quick hits.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: Shifting gears to the social platforms themselves: The internet is changing rapidly. You all recently made the decision to join Threads. What determinations do you make when a platform is reaching critical mass like that? What was your thought process in deciding to join?

Christian Tom: In particular with Threads, it reached a breaking point or milestone where we think it is sustainably going to be here for the long term. It’s obviously part of Meta’s Instagram product, so we have some confidence that Instagram is going to continue to find ways to drive retention and to build the product and the audience there. It’s something that I discuss frequently with Tericka Lambert, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Digital Strategy, who oversees our content (platforms/video/design) teams.

You’re right, the internet is a wild place right now, and some of the public internet like Twitter / X are at a point where, while we're not going to stop publishing there right now, but it's not an enjoyable experience to look at the comments on many posts. Or at the leader of Twitter’s feed. So it behooves us to start building audiences in the places that we think are viable or strong alternatives.

We see things like industry reports and ingest them and use them as part of our decision-making processes.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: Is there anything else you want to share?

Patrick Stevenson: One of our goals here is to convene people and tap the resources of the progressive ecosystem. While we’re in the White House, we have the opportunity to bring folks into the work we’re doing and find continued ways to collaborate and work together. Not only the progressive ecosystem, but identifying people that reach and are trusted by specific audiences and finding a way to bring them into the White House. - Continuing to figure that out is a big priority for me personally.

Kyle Tharp, FWIW: It seems like trying to reach everyone everywhere, all at once.

Christian Tom: …and doing so with a relatively small staff and an infinite number of priority issue areas - that is the challenge.

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By the numbers

FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $9.7 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Conservative media outlet the Daily Wire continued to spend loads of money on a digital ad campaign hawking premium subscriptions and promoting its latest anti-trans film. The company has spent $4.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads alone in the past 90 days. 

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is spending heavily on year-end grassroots fundraising ads. This week, however, they launched a new video ad on Facebook and Instagram targeting swing-state voters with economic messaging. "President Biden has got our backs because he is not only thinking about our present but also our future,” the ad states. 

Speaking of Biden fundraising, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been running ads on Facebook and Instagram in order to rake in cash for Biden in the wake of Newsom’s recent debate with Ron DeSantis. Newsom’s stunt reportedly raised several hundred thousand dollars for the President’s re-election bid. 

Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $1.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Sen. Jon Tester, facing a tough re-election battle in conservative Montana, is running biographical and policy-focused ads on Google and YouTube. In one recent ad, he reintroduces himself to voters while asserting “I’m defending our way of life with all I’ve got.”

On Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $2.9 million on advertising in 2023. That’s a decrease from off-year elections in 2019 ($4.2 million) and 2021 ($4.8 million) Here are the top ten spenders YTD:

…and I’m excited to share a new weekly spending chart for you. X (formerly known as Twitter) is now publicly providing a spreadsheet of YTD political ad spending on its platform. I’ll try to include these numbers each week, as long as the company is able to provide them on a consistent basis. According to X, political advertisers have spent $4.8 million on the platform in 2023. Here are the top ten spenders YTD:

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Your 2024 digital dispatch

FWIW, here’s how much money the 2024 presidential candidates and their affiliated PACs have spent on Facebook + Google ads to date (1/1 - 12/9):

…and here’s how weekly digital ad spending compares between the Trump and Biden campaigns (this data includes MAGA Inc, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump):

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From around the internet:

• As part of his push to sell NFTs, Trump is also selling snippets of the suit he was wearing in his infamous Georgia mugshot.

• Despite TikTok’s popularity with young voters, most major politicians still aren’t actually on the platform.

• A weird Catholic blog has become one of the most engaged pages on Facebook, due to the platform’s algorithm changes in recent years.

  Garbage Day
  has an interesting write-up about it.

• A candidate running in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional district has reportedly become the first to use an AI chatbot to make outreach calls. Not great!

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That’s it for FWIW this week! For free subscribers, this will be the last issue of 2023 as I take a holiday break and plan for next year. For premium FWIW subscribers, I’ll be back in your inboxes next Tuesday. Thank you for sticking with FWIW during this wild year, and I hope this newsletter has provided valuable insights to keep you informed or help you do your job better. 

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