In order to feed the internet’s insatiable appetite for content, campaigns and committees should be ready to transform their digital content teams into publishing operations. That was one takeaway from 2022 for Patrick Stevenson, chief mobilization officer at the Democratic National Committee.
Speaking at C&E’s CampaignTech Innovation Summit in DC, Stevenson said that investment in staff to produce content for the DNC’s digital channels was the biggest change cycle over cycle from 2020.
“We had about 25 people dedicated to content and creative on my team at the DNC, which is just insane compared to past iterations of the [committee],” he said Nov. 17.
“We basically treated it like a media company. And I think [that] in the future … you’re going to see campaigns who realize they’re running a publishing and media company in-house in the name of their candidate or their committee.”
He singled out vertical video production as a crucial investment and praised his colleague Shelby Cole for launching the committee’s TikTok account.
“I think our TikTok account’s pretty good because we hired some culturally competent 21-year-olds who just live on the platform and we really give them a leash,” he said. “And I give our approvers and everyone involved in the DNC a lot of credit for just letting them cook a little bit, and it works. It really breaks through.”
Republican practitioners agreed that more digital budget is shifting into content creation, albeit still with a paid rather than organic focus.
“We like to think about it as a newsroom,” said Reid Vineis, a VP of digital at Majority Strategies. “Your campaign or your candidate has to be putting out content all the time, every single day.
“You think about how our media consumption habits have changed over the past 10 years or so — where it first started out, you had thousands of cable channels. Now, you have thousands of social media channels, websites, apps, social networks, et cetera, and you have to reach people on all of those platforms, which is why you need so much more content.”
In addition to producing more short-form video content, campaigns also need to be better structured to develop content in multiple languages, said Vineis: “This was a record-setting year for our team and producing video content.”
Amanda Carey Elliott, digital director at the Republican Governors Association, said that on the right, campaign investment in digital content didn’t go far enough in some places, encouraging more attention to platforms like Snapchat and TikTok.
“I think the committees are kind of getting that,” she said. “I think campaigns — it’s harder for them to understand why that’s so important.”
Even though those are key channels to reach young voters, Vineis said it often remains a challenge to convince campaign leadership to invest. But on campaigns where there was buy-in, it was effective, particularly an investment in Snapchat.
“We did the Nevada [governor’s] race and we were on Snap and that race was determined by 15,000 votes. We weren’t going to cede those voters to the Democrats,” he said. “Now, I wish I could say that for all of the races that we had campaigns who bought into that mentality.”
It wasn’t just experimental digital outreach channels that Republican campaigns pulled back from this cycle. Facebook was also de-prioritized, according to Vineis.
“If you look at the ad library details, you’ll see that it’s about 2-to-1 Democrats outspend[ing] Republicans,” he said, noting the platform has lost some effectiveness when it comes to persuasion.
“It was a stark change to see if you look back in 2016 when Facebook was the end all, be all,” he said. “But this year on our side, there was a big pullback.”
Meredith Leon, senior paid media strategist at Wavelength Strategy, said Democrats also looked at Facebook a bit differently than in previous cycles.
“I think we were more intentional about how we were on the platform,” said Leon. “So maybe that’s leaning more into static rather than video content as just one example. But I do think it’s still an effective platform.”
Looking ahead, Carey Elliott predicted that Facebook would remain part of political marketers’ digital toolkits: “So this isn’t going away, but I would feel like the top spenders probably ran mostly fundraising and lead gen and direct-response ads. A lot less persuasion. So I definitely see that continuing.”
