Creative Insights: Buying Challenges, Finding Underexposed Voters, and Constructing the Right Media Mix

One of the biggest mistakes Republican media strategist Adam Wise sees advertisers make when building a media mix: confusing efficiency with effectiveness.  

“There’s a big focus on ‘how do I be efficient with media spend,’ but really the question is effective,” Wise, told C&E. The VP of client strategy at National Media warned advertisers to not get so bogged down with finding efficiencies with your spend that you forget that all important metric: reach.  

As for ad platforms for the midterm cycle, Wise said both linear TV and CTV will play major roles this year. But it’s really about employing an “all of the above” approach when it comes to content platforms that can reach voters given that fragmentation has never been greater. 

“Comcast did a study of about a year and a half ago that I really like that said it would take a voter watching TV all day, all year round to watch [something like] 80 percent of scripted content that was produced. And that wasn’t factoring in sports and news,” said Wise. “So when you think about that plus you have multiple platforms to access the same content and then you have multiple people selling the same impressions from different vantage points, we’ve never lived in a more fragmented environment for media consumption. And really we have to use all of the above to reach people.”

We also spoke with Wise about identifying and messaging to underexposed voters and finding more effective ways to target. Watch the full highlights of our conversation above.