Brands must think like political campaigns, says former White House comms director

In an age where a viral TikTok can upend a brand’s reputation in hours, PR and communications professionals face unprecedented pressure to adapt. The once-linear news cycle has splintered into a real-time, always-on conversation across countless platforms, where narratives shift by the minute and misinformation spreads faster than fact-checks can catch it. For leaders, this means the margin for error has never been smaller.

Ben LaBolt, former White House communications director and senior advisor for president Joe Biden, knows this world intimately. Drawing on his political campaign experience, LaBolt said that today’s communications environment demands the same agility and high-stakes thinking as running a presidential campaign: quick decisions, constant monitoring, and the ability to respond in real time.

“You win or lose at the end of the day, you're in the midst of a change in communications environment every single cycle. I try to apply that for brands,” said LaBolt at PR Asia Singapore 2025.

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LaBolt’s career spans the heart of modern American politics. He has advised figures ranging from Rahm Emanuel during his Chicago mayoral run to Senator Sherrod Brown, and later applied those lessons to corporate communications. But his formative training, he says, came from an unlikely source: improvisational comedy.

“There's a principle that comes from that called ‘Yes, and’. You can never tell the other character on stage no. You have to kind of go with what they're saying and start to build on it. It prepares you for the unpredictability of communications and marketing and the type of crisis moments we deal with, the type of positive moments we deal with when you're building momentum and you're building a movement,” he said.

For LaBolt, every campaign, administration, and now, brand, operates under the same pressure: adapt quickly or risk being left behind. He applies this mindset to corporate communications, helping brands respond with the speed and decisiveness once reserved for presidential campaigns.

Fragmentation demands agility

During the Obama administration, digital tools were nascent but revolutionary, said LaBolt.

“President Obama, in many ways, was elected because he was really the first digital-first candidate. The establishment had been supporting Hillary Clinton in that primary, and we needed to do things differently. We needed to find new voters and find new ways of communicating,” LaBolt explained.

At the time, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were emerging as critical tools. LaBolt’s team had to convince traditional media that digital announcements could complement, not replace, press releases. Fast forward to 2023 under Biden, and the media ecosystem had fractured.

“The day-to-day news cycle had completely washed away. People were not watching the news. They were getting their information from somewhere else, from TikTok, from Reels, from other platforms,” said LaBolt, adding that: 

“You really have to deal with every single platform just as much as you're dealing with the media itself.”

However, that fragmentation has created a heightened risk of misinformation.

“You can't just call an editor and say, ‘This isn’t factual.’ There's a piece of content that goes viral on TikTok. It has implications for the White House. It has implications for businesses as well. We're seeing businesses lose billions of dollars out of their market cap because of the piece of social video with claims in it that aren't true,” he said.

To combat this, LaBolt emphasises monitoring, platform-specific responses, and long-term reputation-building.

“Brands that do continual reputational marketing get audiences to pause and say, ‘That doesn't really sound like Walmart. That doesn't really sound like McDonald's. I'm going to go check and see whether that piece of information is true.’ That's what you want to be in a position to do.’”

In fact, crisis communication today is increasingly visual, he said. Reflecting on the 2023 North Carolina floods, LaBolt explained that people weren't satisfied until they saw images of the military taking off, landing on helicopters in the region, going home to home and trying to find people and help them out.

"Until that happened, they just kept saying, ‘Where’s the response?’," he added. 

As such, brand credibility now comes from showing, not just telling. Moreover, executives are now expected to be fluent across platforms too, turning speeches into digestible, video-first content. 

“People are not consuming linear television anymore. They're consuming television through YouTube. You can take a speech that they gave to 300 people and you're cutting it up into 15-second snackable segments with text on screen,” LaBolt said. 

Purpose and reputation, he stresses, are long-term investments. “From our research from many of the prominent American brands — big banks after the financial crisis, tech after the tech clash — have done about a decade of reputational marketing to establish what the company cares about beyond product,” he said, adding that consumers often notice that and will then decide whether they will buy a product or service from the brand.

LaBolt also frames long-term resilience around four pillars: a brand’s impact on its workforce, contribution to community, care beyond profit, and trusted stewardship of change. These lessons are essential in a broader era of global disruption.

“We're in an environment right now where there is going to be a crisis every day. You can make sure that you've got the best plan in place, the monitoring system, and the team structure to respond, and it has to be just as strong on digital as it is on traditional communications platforms,” LaBolt said.

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