At a ritzy boutique lodge on Monday evening in Des Moines, Iowa, dozens of younger voters braved subzero temperatures to see Vivek Ramaswamy ship what they’d quickly study to be his last speech as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

After thanking his workforce, marketing campaign volunteers, and, after all, everybody watching the livestream, Ramaswamy suspended his marketing campaign. “We’ve looked at it every which way and I think that it’s true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” Ramaswamy advised his room of supporters. “There is no path for me to be the next president absent things we don’t want to see in this country.”

Since Ramaswamy launched his marketing campaign final February, his workforce had got down to energize millennials and Gen-Z voters, demographics which have historically supported Democrats in overwhelming numbers and that different Republican politicians have largely written off. To accomplish that, the marketing campaign flooded the web at each alternative together with his “anti-woke” imaginative and prescient for America in TikTook movies, Instagram livestreams, and podcast appearances. He tried to weaponize the far-right corners of the web as effectively, boosting conspiracies just like the great replacement theory.

“When we launched the campaign, we set up a podcast. You typically hire political staff in first, but we started with production staff,” a senior Ramaswamy staffer advised WIRED whereas describing the marketing campaign’s digital media technique Monday evening. “One of our first hires was a videographer to follow him around seven days a week.”

But it wasn’t sufficient. As millennial indie favorites from artists just like the Naked and Famous boomed over the ballroom’s PA system Monday evening, it turned clear that social media content material—even when paired with a ceaseless floor sport—can’t save a longshot presidential marketing campaign. Less than an hour after caucus doorways opened, main information retailers like ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC had called the state for former president Donald Trump, and the late-game “surge” the Ramaswamy marketing campaign foretold by no means actualized. As of publication, Ramaswamy completed with around 8 percent of the vote in Iowa, less than half of what Haley’s third-place end achieved.

Even as temperatures fell to effectively beneath zero over the weekend, Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur who funded his marketing campaign with the fortune he’d made within the biotech business, continued to shake mitten-covered palms in packed pizza joints and American Legion halls. Before arriving on the lodge Monday night, Ramaswamy had completed a powerful monthslong tour of the state, holding nearly 400 events throughout each county hoping to “shock” the pollsters, he repeatedly mentioned, by securing extra factors than Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley.

But most of his marketing campaign was centered on the web. While DeSantis and Haley drew comparable crowds in-person, Ramaswamy had them beat on-line. While racing from one marketing campaign occasion to a different, Ramaswamy spent his journey time on X livestreams, answering viewers questions or holding ridealong interviews with political content material creators like Link Lauren. Instead of cable information hits and newspaper interviews, the Ramaswamy marketing campaign invited a slate of widespread right-wing personalities and influencers, like Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and Isabel Brown to hitch them alongside the marketing campaign path as an alternative.