It’s a firm 15 years in the making. That’s how long it took Robbie Dodson and Ben Nuckels to hang their new shingle: Nuckels Media Partners.
The veteran practitioners, who met at the now legendary shop Joe Slade White & Company, are looking to carve out their own practice that focuses on “high impact creative advertising delivered through the most high tech targeting available.”
“We’re a screen-agnostic firm,” Nuckels told C&E. “We produce content across all screens: TV, digital radio, outdoor — wherever you can put an ad — because we want to put our advertising where it’ll work best to persuade voters.”
Nuckels said that media firms often specialize in either targeting or content, “but they don’t do both.”
“I think you need both great storytelling and great targeting to win,” he said, noting that the firm plans to be selective in taking on clients in order to maintain its level of service.
Meanwhile, Dodson characterizes their partnership as a true collaboration. “Ben and I are truly partners in every part of the campaign,” she said. “As soon as we get a client, we go through the entire campaign, go through polling, plan out the entire thing, start to develop concepts, and then go through our creative process. Sometimes that starts with writing in the script. Sometimes it’s the opposite.
She continued: “We don’t just cram a poll question into an ad. We think about the message that we’re trying to deliver. We may come up with a concept and work backwards where we know what we want to film, and then we’ve got to find the lines that resonate with people to fill in the script.”
When it comes to lessons for media consultants from 2024, Nuckels said it’s about rediscovering how voters actually talk to one another.
“We’ve got to get back to striking a responsive cord. Our party generally needs to be better at responding to attacks, defining debate, defining the narrative,” he said. “And so there’s a lot of lessons learned coming out of 2024, but also there’s a lot of good things that did happen down ballot that should be noted.”
Previously, Nuckels had been a partner at Strother Nuckels Strategies, and said he’ll remain “good friends” with Dane Strother, his former partner.
“We may even join forces again for the right opportunity in the future,” Nuckels wrote in an email announcing his new firm.
