Tareq Alani is a product leader who operates at the intersection of media, technology, and civic engagement. He is a Co-Founder at Chorus AI, where he leads product and growth.

Chorus AI was designed to transform the way nonprofits and campaigns engage with media and content creation.

Before Chorus AI, Tareq co-founded and served as the Chief Product Officer of PushBlack, the largest non-profit media company for Black Americans. While there, he spearheaded reader revenue efforts, generating more than $5M between 2017 and 2022.

He also developed PushBlack’s groundbreaking voter engagement program, which in 2020 reached 70% of Black Americans online and generated 230M peer-to-peer voting messages, making it the largest digital voter turnout program of its kind.

Throughout the conversation, we covered:

• How he got into the field
• Why politics can’t just be transactional
• How Chorus AI is approaching AI as a tool to help progressive campaigns and organizations do more
• How they’re building their tech in a way that’s in line with their values
• What sets them apart from the more household names in AI
• The important of social listening and how AI can help organizations get more done with less
• Other AI tools he’s excited about
• What he thinks the future looks like for AI, and tech in general
• What the media looks like in an AI driven future
• And so much more!

For links and more, head to hellomergetag.com.

If you know me, you know I’m a HUGE NERD for newsletters and email. Over the years, they’ve become one of the primary ways I get my news.

Along with reading those Republican candidate emails (so you don’t have to), I also read dozens of digital marketing newsletters. Literally.

And loads more about politics.

I’m kind of obsessed with the medium.

Of all of the many newsletters that I read, one of the most unique in my inbox, is called YELLO.

It’s run by today’s guest, Hunter Schawrz, and it bills itself as “a newsletter about politics, art, branding and design.”

I’ve heard Hunter describe it as a newsletter about what politics looks like.

And I love that.

It covers obvious political design topics, like logo choices and merch.

But it dives waaaaay deeper, breaking down how font choices affect audiences, how the federal government is approaching the internet in 2024, how campaigns stage their rallies and so much more.

In a world where the media continues to fracture, reaching voters online keeps on getting harder.

Hunter’s joined us to talk about what that means for campaigns, and what campaigns and brands can do to break through our fractured media environment.

Find links to Hunter's channels, studies and resources mentioned, and a whole more at HelloMergeTag.com.

Dan Pfeiffer is a giant in the progressive messaging space.

Along with many impressive titles under his belt, he worked on the Obama campaign and served as senior advisor and White House Communications Director for President Obama.

He then went on to become an influencer for democracy (my term, don’t blame him). He’s a best selling author and a co-host of Pod Save America. He also hosts the podcast Pollercoaster, co-hosts Political Experts React on YouTube and writes the extremely influential newsletter Message Box.

Needless to say, Dan is a man with a ton of insight into messaging for Democratic campaigns.

The primary purpose of Message Box is creating campaign messaging style memos for everyday people.

Campaign staff and operatives write and receive these all the time. But Dan realized that we can no longer win elections simply relying on campaign staff and operatives.

If the Democratic party wants to win elections, at every level of government, we all have to be involved in the process.

So in Message Box, he shares talking points and context around the stories of the day, in a way that is useful and relatable not for full time Hill staffers, but for anyone who wants to be involved in the march toward progress.

Because, in his words, “This whole election comes down to narrowing the news chasm between what is happening and the voters.”

We covered:

• The importance of trusted messengers and the need to give them the training to help get the message out
• Having different strategies for the public internet vs the private internet
• Why campaigns need to learn to give up control, and relinquish that control to our supporters. They know the people they’re communicating with, we have to trust them to speak in a way they know will resonate.
• The brand of the Democrat Party, both what it is and what it could be
• What Democrats can learn from Trump’s nurturing of the MAGA media system
• The all-of-the-above approach to reaching your audience
• Spam PACs and what the Democratic Party can do about them
• What could have become of the Obama For America campaign infrastructure after President Obama won in 2008
• And so much more!

Find all links, more episodes and more at HelloMergeTag.com.