As activists push for attention at DNC, ‘Crowds on Demand’ CEO weighs in on paid crowds

As Democrats gathered in Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, thousands of protesters rallied nearby, voicing frustration over the Biden Administration’s support for Israel and its handling of the Gaza conflict. The demonstrations, which drew over 200 activist groups focused on a range of progressive causes, underscored the growing divide within the Democratic Party between the pro-Israel mainstream and a vocal left-wing faction pushing for stronger support for the Palestinians. While most protests remained peaceful, some activists clashed with police near the convention site, leading to several arrests.

It’s not known if any of the protesters were paid to attend the march in Chicago. But the practice of paying individuals to publicly demonstrate support for a political cause has a long history. In ancient Athens, for instance, political leaders often provided financial incentives or public favors to secure the public backing of citizens for elections or political decisions, a practice that occasionally led to accusations of corruption or undue influence. Similarly, in Rome, politicians would frequently offer public entertainment, food, or even direct payments to gain popular support during elections and public votes. In the early American labor movements of the 19th century, organizers sometimes offered financial incentives to attract larger crowds.

In more recent times, this tactic has been used across the political spectrum, both in grassroots movements and by interest groups seeking to amplify their message.

Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, many of the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses have drawn attention for including participants who are neither students nor staff members. These protests, which often call for universities to cut ties with and divest from Israel, have seen the involvement of outside activists and organizers, some of whom may be financially compensated for their participation. This has sparked debates about the authenticity of such movements and the influence of external actors on campus politics.

One company that specializes in providing paid crowds for events ranging from political protests to corporate rallies is Crowds on Demand. Established in 2012, the California-based company has gained attention for offering participants to bolster the presence at demonstrations, creating an impression of public support or dissent.

In an interview with The Media Line’s Felice Friedson, Crowds on Demand founder and CEO Adam Swart discussed the ethical implications of his business model. He revealed that his company had received offers to help amplify both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate, but declined, stating, “We don’t see an opportunity to constructively engage and to convince people.”

[The Media Line]: This past year has seen college campuses filled with demonstrations, battle for narratives throughout the United States and the world, and much has been said about the fact that these young people that are demonstrating don’t necessarily know what they’re demonstrating for. Joining me today is Adam Swart, CEO of Crowds on Demand. Thanks for joining The Media Line.

[Adam Swart]: It’s my pleasure to join you. Thanks for having me.

[The Media Line]: Adam, hard to know where to begin here, but your company hires people for advocacy campaigns and movements, and a lot of people have been knocking on your door. You claim that you probably had 100 calls from what I’ve read. Who is coming to you and why?

[Adam Swart]: As you can imagine, we have seen a number of requests from both sides in the Middle East matter. As of yet, we are declining all requests because we don’t see an opportunity to constructively engage and to convince people. Everything that I do, the objective is to convince people and to bring people on board.

What I see right now is a lot of noise, but neither side is aiming to convince people in the middle to see it from their point of view, so that’s why we’ve stayed out of it. In regards to the people contacting us, you can imagine that they span an array of viewpoints, mostly, as you can imagine, from the United States, because there are people in the US on both sides of the issue, eager to draw large crowds, but again, it’s not something that we have entertained.

[The Media Line]: October 7 happened. Israel and the Hamas were at war, and all of a sudden, you see universities turning inside out. Are the majority of the people coming to you those representing the Palestinian perspective?

[Adam Swart]: I don’t want to break down the exact dynamic because we have gotten approached a lot by both sides, and I would say that we have gotten credible requests, including extremely lucrative ones, from both sides. To be clear, it’s not that we’re not open to engaging in some part on this issue. However, as of yet, we haven’t seen a path to engage constructively on it, so that’s why we’ve been declining basically every request thus far.

[The Media Line]: Don’t you feel that if you were to take on this kind of battle, if you will, because it seems to be turning into that, you are engaging and swaying one party one way or another if people are being hired literally for pay to come and demonstrate, and as I said, they may not know what the cause is?

[Adam Swart]: I guess I question that assumption just a little bit in the sense of I think whether people are being directly compensated or not, most people have an incentive to be there. I think if you look at a lot of the student demonstrators on campus, many of them are not receiving direct cash compensation, but I would argue they’re being paid in different ways. For example, social media cred, a lot of them are posting it on Instagram, other social media networks to try to boost their cred and kind of pretend that they’re social justice activists, and I think that is driving a lot of it.

Of course, there are compensated activists, but I’m really of the opinion, Felice, that being compensated doesn’t mean that you don’t support an issue. Now, someone can be compensated and misguided or uncompensated and misguided, so I think I would separate the matter of being compensated from whether they are sincere in their support of you.

[The Media Line]: In this particular case, when you have pro-Israel, particularly pro-Palestinian movements, because that’s where most of this is coming from, who are coming to you, are they specifically asking for a specific university? Are they asking for a specific demonstration of a certain place, be it a house of worship? Is there anything that you can add to this conversation in terms of what are they looking for?

[Adam Swart]: Well, we’ve gotten a lot of requests, and as you can imagine, one of the biggest things that we are focused in regards to our work is making sure that everything that we do is legal, number one, so we would never do anything such as blocking a street, blocking a road or, of course, anything violent. Now, in regards to what the Palestine activists have sought, as you can probably guess what people on the Israel side or the Palestine side would want, just as a matter of business, we tend not to go into detail as to prospective engagements that we receive.

[The Media Line]: You’re coming up to a new semester, and many universities are very concerned as to what’s going to go down. Quite a number of university presidents have left, and this is really quite an outstanding year in terms of what’s happened where you’re seeing so many university presidents leave, leave universities as presidents, and the list is monumental, from the recent one, Manoush Shafiq in Columbia University. So what are you anticipating?

[Adam Swart]: I anticipate a lot more action. I think one thing that you’re going to see is a divide in regards to the pro-Palestine movement between the pragmatists, because you have to keep in mind they’re all on the liberal side, right? So they’re all probably aligned to some degree on the liberal side.

So you have pragmatists who say, hey, let’s wait till after the election. Let’s not do anything that might hurt the chance of Kamala Harris to rise to the White House. However, you also have people who are more hardcore activists, who I think would adopt a more hardline approach and who see Kamala and Trump as the same on the issue, and those people are probably not going to care.

So I think they’re going to be a little bit more sedate than they were last year, because I think you’re going to have a lot of progressive activists who are not going to want to do anything that they see would advantage Trump in the election, while you’re going to have a hardcore group that will probably be escalating their tactics because they’re going to have fewer numbers than they had before.

[The Media Line]: Adam, a lot of these people that you have said no to are going to go somewhere. So they might go to your competition. Where might they head?

[Adam Swart]: Well, I would put it this way. One tactic, without trying to speculate too profusely, what I would say is that if you look at what [George] Soros and others have been funding, you can see that the Open Societies Foundation and a lot of other groups have put money into smaller advocacy groups, which I assume are then purchasing the tents, purchasing the supplies and all of that. And I think actually a lot of it is being funneled through certain advocacy groups and administered probably by political consultants of some sort.

Again, that’s just conjecture and speculation. But I think the real thing that people should look into is, is there foreign money coming into any of this, right? There are a lot of ways where perhaps Iranian interests, for example, could be coming in through dummy LLCs or something through to the United States and actually funneling their money into certain types of action.

And that’s the concerning part, because I believe whether you like it or not, whether you agree with demonstrators or not, particularly on the Palestine side, they should have the right to demonstrate peacefully. But I think what should be looked at is if foreign countries are using this to undermine the United States or certainly if foreign countries are using this to conduct any kind of violent activity. And that’s something that should be looked at.

[The Media Line]: Adam, when you created your company, you didn’t dream, I’m sure, of being in a position like this where it was about hiring people for demonstrations. What was the initial goal?

[Adam Swart]: Well, when I started the company, that was it was something it was on my mind. We, of course, did start in 2012, 12 years ago, as a hired paparazzi company where we would have off-duty paparazzi follow people around in L.A. Then we expanded nationwide and to some extent internationally. Moreover, the demonstration aspect was always in the back of my mind because I’d worked in politics and I had seen the value of providing even a small number of demonstrators in regards to getting earned media coverage for a campaign, for a company, for a movement, for a cause.

So it was always in the back of my mind. I’ve always felt that demonstrators should be compensated morally in the sense of Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, other commentators, they are paid for doing what? For expressing their point of view.

They’re paid eight figures, nine figures sometimes, perhaps. Why should demonstrators not be paid a few hundred dollars to show up when in the rain, in the snow, it’s challenging to show up, get out of bed, hold a sign. That’s a job, even if you support the cause.

So it doesn’t undermine the cause to compensate people.

[The Media Line]: Is there a fine line between what is political and what isn’t when it comes to swaying people towards an agenda?

[Adam Swart]: I think the goal is always to convince people and to convince people in a way that I always try to make our events to the extent that we can to be really positive in the vibe of them because I feel like people are much more swayed by sugar than spice. People are much more swayed by emotion and sadness even than by anger. Anger tends to turn people off.

So I always tend to advise clients to make their protests convincing and think of someone, think of the target audience as somebody who might not know much about the cause, might’ve heard something on social media, but how do you really sway them to your point of view? So my advice for activists is to always try to think of how do you sway people to your point of view? If you look at the most, at least the United States, the two most successful instances of large-scale activism campaigns, the civil rights quest in the ’50s and ’60s and the LGBT rights movement in the 2000s, they were all focused on bringing more people into the fold.

What I’m seeing in this Middle East back and forth is it doesn’t feel like anyone’s being convinced. It’s a lot of name-calling and I think that there’s a lot of understandable anger, but what is lost is trying to really convince people to get on board with the cause and that it’s a challenge.

[The Media Line]: What would you suggest that would help to sort of reshape the civil discourse, which is part of the biggest problem that you’re seeing, that you’re seeing a lot of young people not willing to speak to each other and it really has become almost at certain points very violent.

[Adam Swart]: Well, I think as it pertains to the Israel movement, my big advice for the Israel movement is what you need to do is you need to separate the protection of the State of Israel from the political realities of the nasty kind of back and forth within Israeli politics, right? And Israeli politics is messy, it’s beautiful, and there’s disagreement, but you have to separate the kind of legitimate concerns. You can’t call everything anti-Israel because then that starts losing its meaning, if you see what I’m saying, right?

Criticism of the government’s policies isn’t anti-Israel and I think what happens is you end up turning people off in that quest, right? So my advice for the Israel movement is to try to be more inclusive. It’s the same thing, the Palestine movement has failed miserably in that task.

They’ve really turned a bunch of people off, but I think the Israel movement shouldn’t mirror those tactics. Instead, they should try to be as positive as possible and emphasize that you can disagree with the government, you can despise the prime minister and still believe strongly in Israel’s right to defend itself and in the legitimacy of Israel and the vibrancy of Israel. And I think that’s what’s missing sometimes from the Israel movement and I would advise the Israel movement they can create a much more positive image in that regard.

[The Media Line]: Do you ever feel that you need to report any of the parties that have come to you requesting your services?

[Adam Swart]: I think that that is thus far … I don’t think we’ve gotten anything that would rise to that level. I think that we are … I see my mission as making sure that we are effectively vetting all prospective customers and making sure that what we’re doing and the causes that we actually take on are advancing the discourse.

My role is to make sure that we only take on causes that really advance the discourse and move the agenda forward. I’m very open to taking on an Israel-Palestine related matter, but it has to be constructive and it can’t just be adding to the noise because a lot of money has been spent, a lot of heartbreak has been done, a lot of friendships have been lost on American college campuses, as I’m sure you’re aware, and that to me is tragic. If there’s something we can do to put together a campaign to mend those fences, and we’re very open to doing that, but we don’t want to add to the noise.

[The Media Line]: Adam Swartz, CEO of Crowds On Demand, thanks for your time and I’m sure we’ll be calling on you again.

[Adam Swart]: It is my absolute pleasure to speak with you, thank you.

[The Media Line]: Thank you!