Kamala Harris's “Brain Rot” Ads

Hey there,

Kamala Harris's Brat summer is over, and her "content sludge" fall is here. The Harris campaign has been very online since it began, and it wasn't too bad at it either because it understood the medium it was playing in. That is still true about the "overstimulation" ads I write about in the story below, but there's something surreal about a presidential candidate trying to appeal to an audience by conceding that this audience had its brain fried by the internet and is no longer capable of holding its attention on a video ad for 10 seconds without additional visual stimulation.

-Emanuel

The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is experimenting with running ads that follow a popular formula of viral social media posts popularized on TikTok and commonly referred to as “overstimulation,” “ADHD” or “content sludge” videos. 

As explained on Know Your Meme, this genre typically involves a split-screen of at least two videos, with the top half being the “main” piece of media—like a clip from a movie or TV show—and the bottom half being totally unrelated but visually stimulating video, like vibrant gameplay footage from the mobile game Subway Surfers or a video of someone cutting colorful bars of soap. The basic idea is that in a world where people have instant access to all types of hyper stimulating media on multiple screens, and especially on TikTok where an infinite supply of short vertical videos that are algorithmically served to users in a way that maximally harvests their attention, watching a short Family Guy clip on our phones is not stimulating enough. We have a condition that has come to be known online as “brain rot,” meaning we need at least two videos playing at the same time to hold our attention for more than just a few seconds, or videos that are so potently absurd they can’t be ignored, like skibidi toilet. 

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The Harris campaign ads that follow this logic are tame in comparison to the most extreme examples in this overstimulation genre, some of which feature more than two videos playing at the same time, but are undeniably copying that formula.

I first saw one of these ads while scrolling through YouTube Shorts. The entire ad is about 10 seconds long, but uses the split screen format to attempt to hold the audience’s attention. In the top video a narrator highlights Harris’s experience in contrast with Donald Trump’s and includes a short clip from a stump speech in which she says that “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.” The bottom half of the video is a totally unrelated 3D animation of colorful balls or marbles rolling along on a track. 

By searching the Google and Meta ad libraries, I found that the Harris campaign also made another campaign ad in the same format which features the same video in the top half, and a spinning, chrome 3D shape that kind of looks like a triquetra in the bottom half. 

According to Google’s ad library, the Harris campaign has been running one version of the ad from August 31, spending between $0 - $100 to put in front of YouTube’s audience, and that so far it has been shown between 0 and 1,000 times. According to Meta’s ad library, there are 27 versions of the spinning chrome shape ad and 27 versions of the rolling balls ad on its platforms. The Harris campaign has spent about a few hundred dollars on each and cumulatively they have been viewed tens of thousands of times. One version of the ad running in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, for example, was served to an audience of between 500,000 and one million people, but so far it has only gathered between 2,000 and 3,000 impressions, the majority of which are between the ages of 25 and 34.

As Yashar Ali noted on Twitter, the Harris campaign's official "Kamala HQ" account posted a similar video on TikTok with Trump talking about roe V. Wade next to a video of Subway Surfers.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

As is often the case with media trends, this type of overstimulating, short attention span media consumption was first apparent in pornography, where people developed the practice of “gooning,” which involves viewing multiple porn videos on multiple devices at the same time to create a kind of sensory overload.  

Harris’s overstimulation ads appear to be in line with a larger strategy of running campaign ads that copy the style and format of other viral social media videos. For example, there’s this video ad which features a cutout of a person holding a tiny wearable microphone to their face discussing Harris’s plan to stop the rising cost of housing while showing relevant photos, video, and images of articles in the background. There’s no reason for the woman in the video to hold the microphone as opposed to just have it attached to her shirt, or for the entire video to be shot in a studio and for it to look more polished and professional, other than to make it look like the kind of videos that regular Reels and TikTok users share and go viral with on those platforms. 

It’s not surprising that the Harris campaign would cater to a very online audience, given the campaign initially being embraced with joyful memes about coconuts and Kamala’s brat summer. But while these ads are technically copying the format of other viral social media posts, they don’t appear to be going massively viral organically, and I certainly wouldn’t say that they come off as authentic. They read as political ads that are obviously trying to appeal to a specific audience–in this case, Gen Z and the terminally online.