Audio Manipulation • Are You Actively Monitoring Your Wiki? • Campaign Management Tools

Enter your best work: we just opened the entries for the 2020 Reed Awards. Check out the digital categories here. Some new categories we’re excited about:

Best Application of AI Technology to Optimize Creative
Best Use of Personalization in Fundraising
Best Voice Technology Strategy by a Campaign
Best Social Video
Best Use of Relational Organizing on a Campaign

The AAPC is funding an internship next summer. If your firm wants to apply, the deadline is today.

Friday fun: beat the hackers in Google’s cybersecurity game.

Remember Lyrebird, the fake audio startup? They’re running a private beta for a new tool called Overdub that lets users upload an audio clip and then amend what’s being said by the speaker by simply editing the transcript of the original audio clip.

Descript (Overdub/Lyrebird’s parent) stresses that they’re committed to only letting users synthesize their own voice.

But we all know that beating bad actors is a game of whack-a-mole. And even if Descript is successful on this front, it’s absurd to think every fake audio vendor will be (or will want to be).

The takeaway: sophisticated off-the-shelf audio manipulation tools are going to become as accessible as photo-editing tools.

2022 will be 🔥

Campaigns and organizations ignore Wikipedia at their peril, ACRONYM’s Brian Young wrote in C&E this week.

First and foremost, if you’re not actively monitoring your page, you really are behind! And even if you are, you can probably be doing a better job of it. A couple of basic tips to start:

The first few sentences of any page are the most important as they go word-for-word into Google’s Knowledge Panel and are spit out verbatim in voice search results.

If you're not editing your campaign's Wikipedia page, it's very likely your opponent is. And even if you may not trust Wikipedia as a reliable source, data shows that most people do.

Second, some food for thought on your editing strategy:

"There is some room for your campaign to dabble in the ‘dark arts,’ too. But be careful not to fly to close to the sun, Icarus. The truth goes both ways, and it's actually not too much of an edit to add sentences like "A candidate known for his proximity to X scandal," or "Known for championing a bill that caused X," within the first couple sentences of your opponent’s page.

Too many edits like this will, though, will draw the ire of the Wikimedia Foundation, which has recently banned the IP addresses of the entire U.S. Capitol building because staffers were fighting too public a battle.

When ACRONYM suggests an edit we make sure to include a citation from a reliable source so that it’ll pass an auditing editor’s scrutiny, and you’d be wise to do the same."

(And yes, this is the second straight week Young’s tech advice has featured in our newsletter. What can we say? He’s good.)

Five tools my business can’t live without:

Zoom - Working around the world is hard. Zoom’s ability to host quality meetings (with call-in or video conference) is key. The ability to record for review and requirement development is a lifesaver.

Miro (formerly Real Time Boards) - from workflows to logic models, this highly visual, fully collaborative, and fully integrated system is a planning essential.

Sketch - Our design team has moved from Photoshop to sketch, with its beautiful features for design systems, collaboration, hand-off to code and more.

Clickup - After many years with Atlassian's Jira, we are migrating to this streamlined yet flexible project management system.

Dashlane - So many damn passwords. I prefer this one for its secure notes feature where I can log private information and know it’s secure.

One app I can’t live without:

Civ iv - The phone app is almost as good as the computer game. Just because we promote sovereignty and democracy around the world in our work doesn’t mean I don’t need a little escape into world-conquering strategy now and then.

Facebook Doesn't Give a Fuck if Politicians Lie in Ads, But God Forbid They Misplace a Button (BuzzFeed News)

Facebook is ok with dishonest ads from candidates, but that doesn’t mean candidates can flout the tech behemoth’s ad policies.

Trump is Winning the Online War (New York Times)

The fact that Trump is an incumbent, without a significant primary challenger, means that his team and the RNC have had three years to build tools, collect data, test models and messaging, and mobilize supporters.

How Digital Media Could Help Decide the 2020 Election Winner (AdWeek)

What does a winning digital formula look like in 2020? OTT, digital audio, and precision in audience targeting will be necessities.