Top GOP shop hires from other side, managing campaign stress, how a lot of 2024 cash will be wasted, 2024 isn't about persuasion
Inside: GOP shop makes surprise hire in big role, distressing while in campaign mode, the 2024 advertising challenge, this is the year of field.
📱The 2024 Digital Campaign Summit is only two months away (and the DCS Pregame starts even sooner). Secure your ticket to the digital campaign event of year here.
1 - Top GOP ad buying shop hires from the other side
C&E’s editor Sean J. Miller reports on an interesting move by National Media Research, Planning and Placement: Hiring as their new Chief Revenue Officer someone who has spent decades working on the sell side with the E.W. Scripps Company.
Michael O’Brien told C&E that that experience will help give the firm a leg up this cycle, when ad buying efficiencies will be hard to come by amid a record deluge of political spending.
“I come from a unique position on the sales side, [but] I was doing a lot more than sales,” he said. “I was negotiating with the networks, I was doing all the distribution agreements with … the satellite companies, the CTV platforms, and had a very broad view of where viewership is going.”
Taken together, his 30 years of experience are a “strategic and competitive advantage” for the firm. “Somebody with that broad experience coming from the other side can be a pretty powerful point inside the agency,” O’Brien said.
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2 - 5 ways to bust campaign stress
Campaign operatives all know a thing or two about stress. And years like this take things to another level. But to perform at your best you need to feel your best. Mindset coach Frieda K. Edgette shares her tips tuning up your mental game.
Go outside and look up at the sky
It's spring. Take advantage of the seasonal affect and soak in those sunny rays for 5-15 minutes. We spend roughly 93 percent of our waking hours indoors. Being in nature boosts cognitive functioning, increases creativity and makes us feel part of something greater (because we are).Do something nice five times in one day.
This is a fast and sure fire way to boost that yummy oxytocin (the "feel good" hormone) in our brains and bodies: practicing a random act of kindness. Open the door for a stranger. Let someone in as you merge while driving. Make dinner for your partner. Say “thank you.” Donate to a cause you are passionate about. It’s important to do all five nice things in one day for optimal happiness and pro-social behavior effects.
3 - Avoiding the CTV/OTT inventory squeeze in ‘24
Spending on CTV/OTT advertising is going to be colossal in 2024. But the complex nature of the CTV/OTT marketplace will result in a lot of campaign cash being waster. Mark Jablonowski of progressive ad tech firm DSPolitical explains how to avoid that fate.
We live in a different world. Last year, there were nearly 600 scripted original television series, double the number from just a decade ago. This record-breaking figure was driven by the proliferation of native streaming players like Hulu and Netflix and more recent converts like FX and MAX.
This increasingly complicated advertising ecosystem has made it more difficult for campaigns to reach voters — and easier for dishonest ad sellers to waste precious campaign ad dollars to satiate their hunger for a piece of 2024’s expected $10 billion in political spending.
Unlike traditional display, native, and online video ad formats, where bidding on demand side platforms (DSPs) can secure low-cost inventory and instantly place the desired ad on a host of different sources and programming, most of the companies propelling the streaming television boom will not put their inventory on the open exchange because they want to maintain exclusivity over the sales and placement process.
While Connected TV and Over-the-Top (CTV/OTT) are game changers for campaigns up and down the ballot, enabling candidates from local school boards to the president of the United States to reach the exact voters they need to win, taking advantage of the totality of this opportunity is incredibly complex.
Spoiler: 2024 Will Be the Field Election
We are about to live through the most base election of the last two decades.
If you’re taking a strategy cue from the top of the ticket, don’t look for either of the major party candidates to attempt any form of persuasion this cycle. It will be about driving your side’s voters to polls. The small sliver of undecideds or so called swing voters can make up their own damn minds.
As a result, there’s no question that field will be one of the most important outreach tactics in 2024.
Now, to digital strategists that might sound like a city council talking up an order of stagecoaches for its public transit system. But consider this: ad saturation will be unprecedented this cycle. Email outreach is already under pressure from over-saturated recipients’ inboxes, while at the same time facing a growing number of road blocks from the big platform companies. Text is getting saturated, too, and your live events program could (read: will) be invaded by protesters. What does that leave? Field.
The challenge for campaigns will be figuring out how to keep volunteers and field staff engaged through what will be a slog of a general election campaign from now until November.
Consider a tactic that’s being championed by Swing Left’s affiliate organization Vote Forward: letter writing by volunteers to help drive turnout or voter registration. Vote Forward officially kicked off its effort -- dubbed "The Big Send" -- this week with the goal of sending 10 million letters to voters this cycle. [Some of these letters are non-partisan, produced under the group’s 501(c)(3) while others are more partisan produced under its 501(c)4).]
What’s novel about this first round of letter-writing events is that the envelopes aren’t actually going into the mail. They’re being saved for later in the calendar when releasing them will be more effective, according to organizers.
“We're starting early on general election letters now so people can start building that capacity and stockpiling the millions we're going to need to reach these key voters,” said Dan Kalik, Vote Forward’s head of politics and strategy.
When they’re released, the letters will be sent to voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group is focusing on what its calling surge voters, meaning voters that came out for the first time in 2018, 2020 or 2022.
“It’s a really fun, approachable low bar, but impact high tactic that people are drawn to,” he said. “We have folks that, every night, instead of watching TV, they'll write a dozen of these letters.”
He noted: “We've also recently seen the impact of this tactic and the ability to register voters. So something that we are going to take to scale for the first time in 2024 is campaigns targeted at non-registered, but likely to register voters and get letters to them so they can become part of the voting electorate.”
Editor’s picks
What does it mean to ‘suspend’ a presidential campaign? (AP)
Biden’s last campaign (The New Yorker)
How the Trump and Biden campaigns are preparing for a rematch (PBS)
Mexico will elect its first female president and the once dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party is on the verge of irrelevance (El País)
Organized crime attacks on local candidates raise fears Mexico may face its bloodiest elections ever (AP)
In campaigns ‘not my job’ is never an option
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This week NRCC Political Director Mike Thom shares two campaign badges that represent a moment all political operatives have in common: getting bitten by the political bug.
After one week on Pawlenty’s Presidential campaign, I quickly realized my previous “campaign” experience was laughable. I was part of the last Ames Straw Poll on Pawlenty’s race. After Pawlenty, I jumped to Rick Perry 1.0 campaign. Even though I was part of two losing efforts, I met some of my closest friends and was officially infected with the political bug.