Or as Ishanee Parikh, the creative director at FF PAC, the super PAC behind the aforementioned ad, put it: "Any avenue where we can put paid media and get someone to have to watch something, we're there."

Parikh and Fulks are among the leading figures in the sprawling effort - costing more than a billion dollars, involving hundreds of operatives and staffers, and resulting in a potentially uncountable number of ads - by the Democratic Party and other allies of Harris to solve one of the biggest problems they faced at the beginning of the election cycle: Disaffected voters, hammered by inflation, felt particularly disaffected toward the Democrats and the party's 81-year-old incumbent candidate, Joe Biden.

The Harris campaign, in order to reach out to young men, advertised the candidate's immigrant story during La Liga soccer matches and ads about how Trump inspired anti-Asian hate on the gaming website IGN.

Once you can find them, you have to grab their attention. Ashley Aylward, a research manager at HIT Strategies, a Democratic polling firm, recounted running focus groups of young women. The participants were shown a simple video of Harris, speaking at a podium and promising to protect abortion rights. The women agreed they found it persuasive. But they also agreed if they came across it on social media, they would swipe away before watching it in full.

The Harris campaign would occasionally deploy so-called "brain rot" techniques to grab viewers' attention, for instance by running a clip of Subway Surfers gameplay alongside otherwise-normal advertising content. But most of their attention-grabbing techniques were more mundane: making sure ads used different angles, or making sure the person delivering the message changed what outfit they were wearing, so viewers wouldn't just assume they were seeing the same ad for the second or third time.

Once they had their attention, it was about getting a message out quickly - like, really quickly. "What does your ad say in the first three seconds?" The campaigns tried to keep their message simple - something Democrats gave the Trump campaign credit for with his "no tax on tips" messaging - and tried to make sure it required almost no background knowledge about the two candidates.

There are signs the push may have worked: New York Times/Siena College polling has consistently found Trump dominant among the slice of the electorate that did not vote in 2020 - as good a stand-in as any for low-propensity voters. In May, the survey gave Trump a 48% to 33% edge.

But in the newspaper's last round of swing state polling before the election, Harris led among 2020 nonvoters, 48% to 43%.