This issue's Shoptalkers: Rob Aho, partner at the Republican media frm Brabender Cox; JJ Balaban, partner at the Campaign Group; Shannon Chatlos, digital director at Strategic Partners & Media; Jon Vogel, partner at MVAR Media.
C&E: When you look back at 2014, what was the biggest change you all saw on the media consulting side?
Jon Vogel: Everyone is beginning to integrate digital more. In our shop we started off by bringing digital in-house so you’re not fighting with another firm over who’s going to supply it. This allows us to just come up with one communications package. That’s a big change.
JJ Balaban: We didn’t have digital in-house in 2009 and we did Bill Thompson’s race for mayor in New York City against Michael Bloomberg that year. He ended up outspending us 11 to 1. We were very conscious of not attacking him at the wrong time. If we pushed him too much and went negative at the wrong time, we knew he could just burn us. We opened up the New York Times one day, months before Election Day, and it said “Thompson launches negative ad on Bloomberg.”
Turns out it was some web video. The campaign had a separate digital team and they did a web video with some people on the street saying negative things about Bloomberg. To the New York Times, there was zero difference between something on YouTube that had gotten 100 views and an ad that we were putting hundreds of thousands of dollars behind. From that experience we very quickly said, “We better bring digital in-house.” Also it’s one of my pet peeves about journalism—if I were dictator, I would rule by fat that there could be no writing about a political ad unless someone would reveal how much money was going to be put underneath it. I’m sure we’ve all been on both sides of it. But I always say, “I’m not responding to a web video.”
Shannon Chatlos: One of the things we saw in 2014, and it’s definitely going to continue, is that all the members of your team have to be good strategists and operatives. Just because you know digital or just because you can make ads doesn’t mean you’re good at it. Everyone that’s touching your campaign must be communicating and needs to be good at what they do. You saw that in 2014—the coordination of all media. I actually don’t even like the word digital anymore, because I feel like almost everything will have a digital aspect.
Balaban: But what do you think about the media covering ads for a candidate that aren’t aimed for millions of people?
Rob Aho: Well, we never comment on media spends. Sometimes you’re on the winning side of that answer; sometimes you’re on the losing side of it. I do think this cycle more than the 2012 cycle we saw the news media get smarter about asking the right questions on this. They see a well-produced video, but they might not cover it unless they get some sort of verification of where it’s running.
Vogel: Yes. They’ve caught onto the gimmickry of this stuff.
Balaban: You think that’s as true for local?
Vogel: The problem with local is that you have less and less political reporting. It’s so hard to get them to do anything.
Balaban: Talk about big trends—I heard a talk many years ago about the biggest mistakes in investing and one of them was thinking that a stock was so high it couldn’t get any higher, or that a stock was so low it couldn’t get any lower. And I thought about that phrase a lot with the idea that the political coverage couldn’t get any worse. There are so few political reporters now, even in major metropolitan areas, with the experience to cover these races.
Aho: If you look at the 2014 cycle, the successful campaigns on both sides were the ones willing to take risks. In some cases I’m sure there was a reporter who might have dropped the ball or just didn’t invest enough time or make enough phone calls on a story. But we control such a small piece of the puzzle. The earned media element is important, but you have to be hyper-focused on the paid media, especially in a race that isn’t going to get a lot of earned media.
Balaban: And I don’t mean to be critical of local reporters. A lot of papers now have only one political reporter responsible for covering all races at all levels. And that reporter may also cover the courthouse. The reporters are in a situation where they are trying the best they can with what’s thrust upon them. I was a press secretary on the Hill in the 90s and I didn’t have a cellphone. My boss didn’t want me to have a cellphone. I think there was one time in the years I was there that a reporter needed to reach me at 8:30 at night. The reporters in his district were working 9am to 6pm.
So much has changed in terms of the speed. Now you have this combination of not just fewer media outlets and less political coverage, but fewer people reading these papers. If a press secretary sees their job now the same way I saw my job in the 90s, they’d need to be fired immediately. This isn’t necessarily new to 2014, but it’s certainly a huge change from even 10 years ago.
Chatlos: For press secretaries on your campaigns, are they overseeing official media as well now?
Vogel: It depends on the race. In a smaller race they certainly are.
Chatlos: In 2012, the folks doing social media on a lot of races were volunteers or it was just the youngest person on the staff who you assume knows social media. This cycle, you saw higher quality people in that role to drive the message, because we found that was critical to actually staying on message.
Aho: At what point in the House races in 2014 did you know Republicans were making gains?
Vogel: It was very different than 2010. That year you knew for a long time. You never knew the scope or how deep it was going to go—a lot of different things contribute to that. But certainly by August you had a pretty clear picture of what range the losses were going to be. This cycle was a little bit different in that it felt like the last two weeks really came together on the Republican side. I always feel the party on the side of the wave picks it up in their polling earlier, because they’re more optimistic in what they’re looking for. The losing side always tends to go by their model for a lot longer. But the last two weeks is when it finally came together from my perspective. Also, we didn’t expect to see Pryor lose by 17 points in Arkansas and drag down the rest of the ticket there.
Balaban: So did Republicans see it earlier?
Aho: I think we probably saw it earlier than two weeks out. We knew it was going to be pretty good. But you’re not far removed from the 2012 cycle where there was a surprise on the Republican side with one race in particular. So I think people are exercising more caution. We saw that trend starting earlier than two weeks out.
Vogel: Well, it wasn’t that we didn’t see the trend. You just didn’t know how big it was going to be until a bit closer to Election Day. I also think 2014 was a bit state-by-state. For example, in New York we had a million less people turning out in 2014, which had a huge impact on the congressional races there. I felt like California, for example, was a place where Democrats were a bit more stable with turnout.
C&E: The polling irregularities that we’ve seen over the past couple of cycles—do they impact your view of how your creative is working during the cycle? Are you as trusting of polling that suggests your creative is having an impact?
Aho: I have always been inherently skeptical of all data that comes back. The good news is telephone survey research is now far from the only set of data that you’re looking at when you’re making decisions. Now you can have 10 or 20 different types of input that are helping you make a decision. Telephone surveys are still very important, but I think in any form of survey work there’s going to be problems. I’ve never taken one set of data as gospel.
Chatlos: When we put things online in conjunction with putting it on TV, there are hard metrics. There are completion rates. There might be a clickthrough rate if you have some sort of ask or engagement in the ad. I don’t know that it’s the best metric for a video, but at least there are hard metrics to look at. We saw the ads that performed best at the end of this past cycle were the same ads that actually moved the numbers. And once we could really show that was the case, we started to look very closely at how ads were performing online. The social listening around an ad is also important. Once you post it, you basically have a small focus group right there to evaluate the ad.
Aho: When you go into a campaign you understand that it’s not just throwing out 1,000 gross rating points, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. A campaign starts with audience-specific messages. So when you get polling data back there is already a set of data to compare it to. That makes the decision process a lot easier, frankly. But it does put a large amount of pressure on content. Campaigns that aren’t ready for developing content and delivering content to a specific audience are going to be left in the dust.
Balaban: One of the frustrating things is that the coverage—the Nate Silver sort of stuff—basically exalts public polling over private polling. But really it’s the opposite. I’ve never paid any attention in the slightest to any public polling. Private polling is conducted with vastly more care and I consider it vastly more accurate. I understand from a journalism perspective that most private polls aren’t released, but I do feel like I almost never see it reported anywhere that private polling is much more expensive and much more theoretically accurate—it just may not be the private polls that are released to the public that are more accurate.
C&E: Looking over the past two presidential cycles, how drastically have things changed from a media standpoint?
Vogel: Well, we’d need to separate presidential years from everything else, because presidential cycles are such a different beast. The one thing that’s certainly changed drastically is just the technology. From a production standpoint that’s an enormous change. My wife used to work for David Doak, and they used to do Gray Davis’ races. They would shoot a spot, produce it, then they would get the Beta tape and she would drive to Dulles to get it on a plane to get to the Los Angeles stations. Now we can go to a shoot, upload the footage from the shoot and have the editor get right to work. We can have a spot out to stations within four hours.
That also changes the expectation the client has from a deliverability standpoint. There’s no excuse for not putting a candidate to camera quickly to respond to an attack if that’s what you decide to do. There’s just a variety of things the speed really does impact day-to-day.
Balaban: I tend to see some of the negative of what you’re talking about. There’s an expectation of immediacy as opposed to getting it right. There’s a whole generation that grew up watching “The War Room.” I assume it’s the same on the Republican side, but I’m not sure.
Aho: I agree, because this idea of speed is becoming more important. The point you’re making, I think, is that there are a lot of operatives out there who don’t appreciate the quality that the American audience expects in television, radio, print, and digital. It’s those little nuances that separate good from great.
Chatlos: In [Larry] Hogan’s campaign for governor [in Maryland] we were being attacked for being “anti-woman.” The opposition was saying that he would try to reverse abortion laws if elected. It was very frustrating for us, because our candidate was very clearly pro-choice. We held press conferences about it. So we knew we had to shoot an ad to respond, and we wanted the candidate direct-to-camera to say our opponent wasn’t telling the truth. So we shot it three different ways: we shot it candidate-to-camera, we shot more of an interview style ad, and then we had his daughter Jaymi make a personal appeal and talk about her father.
We had to create all three ads within 24 hours. We didn’t have time to poll. We just had to figure out which one would work. When we sat around the table, there was something really magical about Jaymi. But the point is that the quality had to still be there in these ads even though they were produced so quickly.
Aho: The point is a good one—quality and speed are important. It’s not one or the other. The best campaigns and the best clients out there are the ones that understand that.
Vogel: And the new technology allows you to shoot all three, edit all three, and get it all done with your different options in front of you in enough time.
Balaban: Everyone wants speed and quality. Everyone wants to eat everything they want and not gain any weight. Since I’ve gotten into the business, I’m sometimes a little more reluctant to play armchair consultant on a race I’m not working on, but I can’t help myself sometimes. And I guess I feel like I often see mistakes made by campaigns and I say, “They just should have stopped for a minute. They just didn’t think this through well enough.”
Maybe they thought they needed to respond in six hours, but they probably didn’t have to respond in six hours. In a lot of races you’re not clocked out in one day. So to figure out what the right thing is might take a little bit of time. There is some element of the creative process missing when you can’t step back and think. So I do worry about that being squeezed.
Chatlos: It’s the strategic process that’s so important, too.
Balaban: Yes, that’s a better way of thinking about it—the strategic process. We so often see political operatives obsessed with tactics, but they’re unable to step back and think about the strategy. The tactics are often what the press covers so you see this focus on tactics, which creates a feedback loop where people start thinking a campaign is only about tactics. In my experience, campaigns are very rarely won on tactics.
Chatlos: And that’s what we’ve seen in the press so far for this cycle. I read an article recently about the tactic of Google searches against opponent, and I was sitting there reading it and getting angry. It wasn’t that I was angry about the subject, I was just wondering why an operative would provide details on their strategic playbook at the very beginning of the game. If I was the candidate, I would want to know why someone was giving our playbook away. I think because we are a culture obsessed with our narcissistic genius as political operatives we feel like we need to tell everyone everything we do. I think it’s great to talk about overall strategy, but you need to be careful with the tactics.
Balaban: I want to ask a question about a totally different subject: addressability. This is something I’m very intrigued with and I had a chance to toy around with this in some races in 2013, because Cablevision does have addressability in the New York, northern New Jersey area. Comcast says they’re going to have addressability in the 2016 cycle. But there are so many unanswered questions. Dish TV and DirecTV did do addressability, but they did it in a way that wasn’t really useful for a lot of candidates.
It’s easy to say, “Addressable TV is here.” It’s really not. Maybe it will come in 2016, but it might take longer. I do expect that it will mean a massive change in what we do, because it will mean producing significantly more content.
So the way I used addressability in 2013 was for an IE in an assembly and state Senate race in northern New Jersey. It was basically a one-ad campaign. The targeters found several thousand households that were rock-ribbed Democrats. We knew there was no chance they were voting for a Republican, so we didn’t need to tell them that Republicans were terrible. We were really scared they weren’t going to vote, so we had to motivate them to come out. We did some focus groups and it turns out what motivated them was the gun issue. So we did an ad on the gun issue that just went to Democratic households.
Chatlos: Another one of the new things coming down the pike is the bridging of devices. AT&T and Verizon recently announced a deal to bring their data together. That’s the majority of mobile devices in the country. I’m fascinated by the technology of the mobile device when you bring it into a household—it can ID with your home Internet and then bridge that device to your home address. That changes addressability for digital. Now you’re not just relying on the cookie.
Vogel: I’ve seen both the addressable cable and our ability to do addressable targeting as a way to enhance our reach. I have yet to be able to do it where I’ve successfully seen people really picking up on it on the ground. Even cable takes forever to really drive anything through. Cable works great when it’s associated with broadcast, though. I think a lot of campaigns want a magic answer. They want you tell them about some super cheap way to communicate that no one else knows about.
Aho: It’s funny to hear this from the other side, because you do get the sense there are a group of operatives who think there is the perfect medium. There never will be. Of course, addressability might be a great solution for a lot of campaigns. But it might not be a good one for your campaign. If we start audience-specific and look at the tools that are available for that target universe this becomes an easier battle.
Vogel: Well, the other thing to remember with addressability is that it’s all based on a model that you’re building in the first place. You don’t have every single persuadable voter in that model. Are you going to put all your eggs in that basket?
Balaban: When you’re pitching clients do they want you to tell them what the magic bullet is?
Aho: When we’re pitching to clients we just beat the crap out of Barack Obama.
Vogel: You just turn on Fox News for an hour and let it play?
Aho: But seriously, that’s an interesting question. For me every pitch is different. I think at a certain level there is a very finite universe of campaigns and IEs and committees that understand what we do. I feel like once you get into that group, the conversations are a lot smarter. Someone’s not asking you, “Should I do TV or digital?” You don’t get the dumb questions.