You know that song you hear everywhere? It’s on the radio during your commute. Your friends are humming it at dinner. It’s the “it-song” on social media. Before long, you know every word, and you’re singing along without even thinking about it.
That same sensation is possible with your advocacy or brand message — if the right people are talking about it.
That’s where Tunnl Halo comes in. Halo is the next generation of influential targeting: a solution for reaching the actual people who shape outcomes. Whether you’re trying to influence policymakers, defend a reputation, or break through with a critical community, Halo helps you identify and connect with the individuals who can make your message inescapable.
What is Tunnl Halo?
Halo is built around spheres of influence — the networks surrounding the stakeholders who matter most to your campaign. Each Halo audience is structured as a unit of influence:
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The core stakeholder (a policymaker, executive, investor, or other decision-maker)
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Their staff and close advisors
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Former colleagues and professional ties
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Recognized voices in their field
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Community leaders and activists who shape narratives from the ground up
This layered approach connects your message to the ecosystem around real-world decision-makers — not just demographics or lookalikes, but the actual networks that sway opinion and drive outcomes.
How Halo Compares to Social Graphing Approaches
You may be familiar with products like Applecart, which rely on relationship mapping and social pressure to target small, tightly connected webs of people. That method could be useful when you need to put intense pressure on a very specific policymaker.
But Halo takes a broader — and more flexible — approach:
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Scale without dilution: Instead of being confined to a handful of relationships, Halo builds influence-based audiences that let you scale up to hundreds of thousands or millions when you need it, without sacrificing tactical precision.
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Breadth of application: Beyond legislative pressure, Halo audiences can be used for reputation management, brand campaigns, regulatory influence, investor relations, and more.
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Data-driven insights: Halo provides deep intelligence on where these audiences consume media, how they engage with issues, and how to reach them most efficiently.
What are the benefits of Applecart?
Applecart maintains a respectable share of the audience intelligence market for a reason. Their methodology is clever and unique, relying on the well-known political impact of social pressure.
“Applecart has really defined the Opinion Maker targeting space,” says Brian Rose, Tunnl’s Vice President of Account Management. “They do a great job of figuring out interpersonal networks and connecting their activities to online actions - but they have a very different approach than we do.”
Social pressure, also known as community pressure, has been shown to increase voter turnout by capitalizing on the fear of missing out or the fear of peer judgment for not being an active participant in politics when all your neighbors, friends, or colleagues are. Peer pressure works, for better or worse.
Applecart provides a unique product and opportunity through their delivery of a strategically defined, researched, and narrowed web of contacts with access to your main target. Get to them, and you’ll get to your goal.
What are Applecart’s drawbacks?
There’s one significant element to note about Applecart’s social graphic strategy: Applecart only provides a tiny group of people for you to target, jeopardizing your deliverability and limiting the scale of your campaign. There is an ideal audience size that ensures you make an impact - not too big, not too small. You’ll need to determine your ideal audience size based on your campaign goals before selecting an audience intelligence tool - and decide if you trust a small collective of people in a social network to do the persuading for you.
Come prepared to pay, too. Since Applecart’s social mapping technique is very detailed, it can take time to curate your audience, and it may be costly to access. The service promises to reduce your ad spend by only targeting influential people and increasing how often your ad gets delivered, but calculating your potential savings is a little tricky. You’ll need to talk to sales to figure out if they fit within your budget.
If you want to see pricing for Halo, head over here to see how Tunnl thinks about pricing.
While you have them on a call, ask Applecart about their user interface as well. If you’re looking forward to analyzing audience insights in a navigable platform before you activate them in your ads, Applecart may not be the audience intelligence solution for you. Their main deliverable is a social graph that tells you who you can reach with ads to influence your key targets, but you may have limited information about who those people are, where and when they consume media, and thus how best to resonate with them.
The Advantages of Halo
With Halo, you get:
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Immediate access to ready-made influential audiences across policy, healthcare, and finance industry opinion makers.
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The ability to customize audiences by curating the spheres around the stakeholders that matter to you.
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Scalable reach to millions of influential individuals, refreshed regularly to reflect evolving networks and community engagement.
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Insights that guide strategy from preferred TV networks and digital platforms to sentiment trends in earned and paid media.
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Opportunities fore insights when you add survey questions to the Opinion Maker survey to forecast insights among Policy Opinion Makers.
Halo is designed for organizations that need both precision and scale, whether your campaign is focused on one issue or an ongoing reputation strategy.
Is Halo Right for You?
If your goal is to force a single stakeholder into action and:
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Elevate your message among Washington insiders,
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Reach activists and community leaders driving grassroots narratives,
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Engage executives, investors, or boards who move markets,
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Or build influence across multiple spheres simultaneously —
...then Halo is the solution built for you.
The Bottom Line
Influence today isn’t just about who knows whom. It’s about the ecosystems of trust, authority, and visibility that shape decisions at scale.
Tunnl Halo helps you see those ecosystems clearly — and reach into them with precision. If your campaign needs to resonate like a chart-topping song, Halo gives you the playbook to make your message unforgettable.