How a strategic clipping campaign placed the gender-affirming care debate in front of 3 million new eyes — at a fraction of traditional media cost.
The content generated significant organic reach well beyond the typical policy-research audience — delivering substantial earned media value relative to the investment.
For context, the industry-average CPM for policy and advocacy content on social platforms ranges from $30–$60. This campaign delivered impressions at $3.51 per thousand views — roughly 10x more efficient than a traditional paid media buy in this vertical.
The campaign was designed around a simple thesis: policy research only matters if it reaches people beyond the usual audience. Here's how we executed.
Arranged a long-form interview featuring Leor Sapir on the Emily Austin Show, providing a credible, accessible platform for the research around gender-affirming care policy. A second interview with Scott Jennings provided complementary source material and broader political framing.
Extracted the most compelling, shareable moments from both interviews — optimized as short-form vertical video for Instagram Reels. Each clip was designed to stand on its own while driving curiosity back to the full conversation.
Rather than distributing through traditional policy or right-of-center channels, we placed clips across entertainment, humor, gaming, and general-interest creator pages — putting the debate in front of audiences who would never seek out a Manhattan Institute research paper on their own.
The placement strategy triggered genuine debate in the comment sections, further boosting algorithmic reach. The content performed because it felt native to each creator's page — not like a policy ad dropped into a feed.
We conducted a sentiment analysis of audience comments across all 40 placements to understand how the content landed. The results confirm the core thesis: this campaign reached people far outside the usual audience for policy research — and made them engage.
The key finding: 65% of commenters either aligned with the campaign's message or engaged in substantive, good-faith debate about the policy questions at the heart of Leor's research. This is not a preaching-to-the-choir result — this is evidence of genuine persuasion and discourse happening in real time.
The comment data clusters around four dominant themes — each of which validates a different dimension of the campaign's impact.
The single most common argument across the entire dataset. Commenters — including those who self-identify as pro-trans — repeatedly made the case that children lack the maturity for permanent medical decisions. This is the campaign's core message landing organically.
Significant commentary demanding accountability from the physicians and therapists involved. Multiple commenters — including a self-identified doctor and a psychologist — weighed in with professional perspectives supporting more rigorous gatekeeping.
A meaningful portion of commenters drew a distinction between surgical intervention and other forms of gender-affirming care (therapy, social transition, pronouns). This nuance shows the audience is thinking critically — exactly the kind of discourse the research is meant to provoke.
A recurring reaction across placements was genuine shock — commenters had never encountered detransition stories or questions about pediatric gender medicine before. Their surprise confirms these audiences were not previously being targeted with this information, validating the entire placement strategy.
A selection of comments that illustrate the depth of engagement this campaign generated — from medical professionals to parents navigating these issues in real life.