They may not be household names, but next to every creative genius stands an equally skilled media buyer. This month’s group boasts wins in each of the last five presidential elections.
Kyle Osterhout is partner at Media Strategies and Research, a Democratic media buying shop.
Will Feltus focuses on voter targeting for National Media, a Republican firm. He placed George W. Bush’s ads in ‘04.
Cathie Herrick is a principal at Buying Time, a Democratic firm. She handled media
buying for Bill Clinton’s ‘96 campaign.
Brad Perseke is a partner at GMMB, a Democratic firm that worked for President Obama’s ‘08 campaign.
Kyle Roberts is the president of the Smart Media Group. He was the media buyer for John McCain’s ‘08 campaign.
C&E: You all have been doing this for a long time, how different is the whole process of media planning and placement now than when you started?
Kyle Osterhout: In the ‘90s it was just about throwing ads on the air. There was TV, cable was fairly weak, and there was some radio. But now the buy is much more tactical and strategic. When people come up to me, for example, and say, “I want to place some ads on the Internet,” well that’s not how you go about using the Internet. The utilization
of online and how you structure the buy is every bit as creative as the actual creative and it’s a key component in the success of a campaign.
Cathie Herrick: Media has become so fractionated and there are so many different vehicles to get your message out now. It’s hard to quantify the social networking aspect. In online advertising it’s tough to figure out who you’re actually reaching and how effective it really is. It’s a new vehicle that we’re all trying to explore and figure out how it best suits our campaigns.
Brad Perseke: From my perspective and GMMB’s perspective, the digital channel has grown and continues to grow, but we as an industry have not yet figured out how to do one bucket of it. When I think of the Obama effort, we used it for recruitment and fundraising; we deepened the support of those who liked him, we got people to rallies and we did all sorts of engagement in that campaign. I’m not sure what percentage of the population was persuaded, though. I don’t think we’ve figured out as an industry, especially from the creative side and also on the buy side, how to convince voters to vote a different way using the digital channel.
Osterhout: Part of the problem that you run into with the Internet is that it’s tough to throw a blanket over it without leaving huge gaping holes in your reach. There’s no one place to go to cover a market. With TV, you can go to the five or six stations and buy
them all and you feel pretty confident that you’ve plugged all the holes. With the Internet, you can’t just go to The Washington Post or the TV station sites. By the time you cobble together the CNN’s and the Facebook’s and create what you feel is a whole cloth of reach from a persuasion standpoint, you end up with a $130,000 a week Internet buy. Then it’s not affordable.
Will Feltus: The other issue is geographically targeting the Internet, which can be done even though it’s never clean. Broadcast media isn’t clean either, but the issue is that the campaign has an ad budget, so how much of that goes to Internet? I think it’s important for campaigns to not let the Internet get so fractured that it has too many bosses. At our firm we want to do the Internet advertising. We don’t want it wandering off to some 22-year-old.
C&E: Has the new media aspect taken away any control from you all?
Feltus: Well, not really. We hire the 22-year-olds.
Perseke: I don’t get the sense from campaigns that there’s a control issue. It’s a bucket that we need to figure out how to work with and every campaign is different. And I also don’t want to leave your readers with the impression that this digital bucket is huge and/or takes up most of our time or money, because it does not. I think the biggest thing we do differently now than when I started 20 years ago is that it’s not just the buying anymore. The technology and the research that’s available today didn’t exist back then. In 1992 when we did Bill Clinton’s campaign, the best research I could get was national data that looked at, and I do remember “L.A. Law” was on the air then, but I could see how that show did against a Clinton-type voter. The sort of stuff that’s available now is dramatically different. That’s where I think we spend most of our money and most of our time.
C&E: So the richness of the research, is that the biggest difference?
Perseke: Yes, I think that’s the one major thing I’ve seen that drives both planning and buying. You now have these tools to do the analysis that you never had before. Another thing that’s different in my shop and I assume with all of my competitors, is the competitive analysis. Twenty years ago we could basically tell the candidate we worked for what the other guy was kind of doing in terms of spending. He’s up. He’s on the air. That was about it.
Kyle Roberts: Now we tell them what kind of underwear he wears.
Perseke: Exactly. Now you’re getting into what time did the spot start, what’s the content, how many points, how many markets? Did he buy cable? Did he buy radio? That’s how we end up adjusting our plans.
Roberts: Nielsen has a study out right now about brand recall. I’m not sure if you all saw it. It was pretty interesting. The thought that you can take some old creative and put it on the web and it still has a pretty good amount of recall and you can get additional impressions. Through all the broadcast and cable that we do, we all know there’s so much duplication. So when our point levels get to be so high, we start looking for additional avenues to go and deliver impressions elsewhere to expand our reach. And hopefully that makes us more effective in the dissemination of our message.
Osterhout: That all comes down to campaign funds, though. It’s like building a cake and the better financed your campaign is, the higher your cake gets to be. A couple of people at this table have run campaigns that have been in really good shape.
C&E: So Brad, how high was your cake in 2008?
Roberts: Put it this way, he had a birthday party at the office every day. [Laughter]
Perseke: Listen, I wish I could take credit for the Obama victory but I think everybody knows I had nothing to do with it. That was driven by one guy, and he’s now sitting in the oval office. We did have the ability to do things that previous presidential campaigns I’ve worked on did not have. The Kerry campaign did not do aggressive radio in rural ‘C’ and ‘D’ counties where my friend Will did and kicked our butts in those areas. We had to make hard choices about where we could spend the limited amount of resources and I stand by those choices because it was principally television in areas where the Kerry vote was most attainable. ‘C’ and ‘D’ counties in 2004 were not places John Kerry was running strong, so we ceded it and Will and his firm won that region fairly well. But money dictated that.
Feltus: Well, for 2004, we bought the Scarborough research because there was a feeling that the 2000 campaign was a little bit close, [laughter] and that maybe we should look at new ways of doing stuff. That was the lesson we learned by analyzing all this data. For one, Democrats who vote watch more TV than Republicans do and you can measure it. In 2000, Bush spent all his money on broadcast TV, so to find our voters we moved about 20 percent of the money out of broadcast and into radio and cable. A lot of campaigns think you have to fill up the broadcast TV bucket before you can do anything else. We argue you shouldn’t do that. Some of these people keep trying to run their last campaign over and over because they won, but it doesn’t always work. The way people use media has really changed. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again.
C&E: Well what about on your side of things in 2008, Kyle? Brad and the Obama campaign had tremendous resources, how did that impact your planning and buying strategy on the McCain campaign?
Roberts: Well, it’s true that in the presidential they had tremendous resources. We were tracking the competitive and he’s out-delivering us three to one.
Osterhout: You didn’t stop tracking it at any point?
Roberts: Well, we felt like we should have. But we were getting out-messaged three to one on a weekly basis. We also had the issue of the hybrid ads where we were getting half funded by the RNC and half funded by the campaign. From a messaging perspective, that was an issue. We didn’t have a ton of money for radio. We knew rural counties were a big deal, and we knew from our research that satellite homes in rural areas were mainly Republican. So our idea was to go out and buy some remnant inventory through the cable networks and reach all these rural homes with satellite TV. Remnant had really never been bought for political campaigns before. They didn’t even know who we were. So we got reach into these places but it was nowhere near as effective as it needed to be.
C&E: What is remnant inventory exactly?
Roberts: When the networks broadcast out all of their creative, the satellite homes that are not receiving a local cable television signal will basically get a blank feed. So we could insert a spot into all those rural satellite homes that didn’t take cable TV. It was just one way we felt that we had to reach out to these areas. But we had to be as creative as we could because we had a very restrictive amount of resources. We took public funding, you guys didn’t.
Perseke: I’ve been on both sides of that desk.
Roberts: Exactly. We’ve all been there. And we were in an environment with an incumbent president who was not terribly popular.
C&E: One thing we saw in 2008, and I’m wondering if we’ll see it again in 2012—the national network buys. That was something we hadn’t seen in a few presidential cycles, right?
Feltus: Well, we bought network cable on the Bush campaign. We basically looked at it and once you get past a certain tipping point, 40, 45 percent of the country, you can just buy the whole country for the same price. Of course, the spot cable guys didn’t like that. The Golf Channel did, though.
Herrick: With the networks, though, you’re very limited with your programming and you don’t have as much reach with NBC or ABC as opposed to CNN or FOX where you have access to all of their programming.
Feltus: And they’re not exactly anxious to take political advertisements.
Roberts: They were in 2008.
Perseke: They were very much so in 2008.
Roberts: The “great recession” helped that.
Perseke: Well, I think two things. You’re right, Kyle, the “great recession” did help that. We had networks calling and begging us. At the time there was also this real sense of this guy with this movement. They were dying to get the Obama schedule and they did. NBC did get it and they made a lot of press about it. And I think the reason was that it hadn’t been done for a while and they wanted to send the message that network is alive and well and they were very aggressive on pricing.
Feltus: We did buy the network for the Olympics in 2004. That was the window where we were able to go ahead and start advertising before the Kerry campaign was able to.
Herrick: Now we have a situation where the broadcast networks are turning around and willing to work with our deadlines and are adapting to our parameters. Before, we would have to play their game. I worked with an issue advocacy campaign that turned around an ad in a day and that was just too quick for the networks. So you see them more willing to open up their standards and say this is becoming a formidable category and one that we want to be a part of.
Roberts: We found efficiencies in network, though. We would go through the local markets and get ripped off. If you added up those cost per points and converted to a network CPM (cost per impression), the networks were very competitive. So we bought “Nightly News” and the “Today Show.” We tried to do as much network cable as we could but we had some issues there. Scripps Howard wouldn’t sell to us. There were a lot of networks we wanted to buy that we had to go soft with.
Feltus: We had that problem with Country Music Television. So we just told them about how we were going to the local markets and they suddenly changed their mind.
Roberts: We couldn’t get them to do that but there were lots of stories afterward about how bad of a quarter Scripps Howard had, and we kept emailing those stories to them.
C&E: What do they say to you? They don’t want your money?
Roberts: They don’t have to take it. It’s another loophole in the FCC regulations where they do not have to take the business for a federal candidate. And Fox News, which we wanted to buy on a network basis, was priced outrageously so we had to pass on that. So again we had to be as creative as possible in our execution, but it’s difficult when you’re changing spots every ten minutes.
Osterhout: And that’s one thing network doesn’t want any part of. They’re not structured or built to be flexible and react quickly. That’s just not their corporate culture.
C&E:What are your relationships with the creative media folks like?
Herrick: It’s a relationship so there are challenges just by pure definition. We all get our roles, we’re hired because of our expertise and our knowledge and we’re all really just a spoke in a wheel.
Feltus: It depends on the campaign. In a lot of our big campaigns, we work directly for the campaign manager. The traditional model has been that you work for the creative guy. So in a big campaign it’s different than it is in a small campaign.
Herrick: And it all depends on the campaign and how it’s structured. Sometimes you have a consortium of a kitchen cabinet in a campaign and other times you have a small race and the wife of a candidate is also the finance director and the campaign manager…
Osterhout: And a former media buyer. [Laughter]
Perseke: One of the things that’s bizarre to me in the 20 years that I’ve been doing this is that not very many campaign managers or candidates take an interest or ask the questions about their media planning and buying they should be asking. I go to the meetings
and they often fall asleep during my presentation, which is probably on me. But they still don’t really get it. And I’m not sure we want them to get it, but we want them to recognize that at least 50 cents of every dollar they raise is going to be spent by people like us. So you better ask the right questions. Does our media planner on this campaign know what he or she is doing? Do they have the record? Do they have the team? All of those things are really important for anyone running a campaign like this. If I were a campaign manager or a candidate I would spend a lot more time on that.
Feltus: I think a lot of them are afraid to ask the questions because they don’t want to act like they don’t know what a rating point is.
Perseke: And I don’t want them to know that actually. I want them to ask the question, “Do you know what a rating point is? Do you have the team in place?” If a candidate is spending time looking at my buy, and this has happened, that is a colossal waste of his or her time. Even if the campaign manager is looking at it day in and day out or even week in and week out, I would argue that’s a waste of their time as well. They should be raising money, they should be directing the field. They should not be looking at the buy. They should be asking who you’ve worked for. They should be asking for your track record and references. Those are the questions that someone reading this needs to ask.
Roberts: I do, too. Considering how much we are responsible for, how much money runs through our companies.
Perseke: And by the way it does run through, it doesn’t stay. [Laughter]
Roberts: Right, it doesn’t stay. It is amazing to me though how people just don’t ask questions.
Herrick: But they ask the wrong questions because, to Brad’s point, we’re the most tangible. They see millions of dollars going to one of our firms and so that’s the easiest thing to freak out about because it’s tangible. But they aren’t educated enough to ask the correct questions.
Feltus: How come I never see my ads?
Herrick: Right. “I watched Oprah for an hour and I didn’t see my ad.” [Laughter]
Perseke: My favorite is, “I’ve seen too many of my ads.” Well, if you’ve seen too many of your ads, you’re not doing what you should be doing, either. Go shake some hands.
C&E: What is the worst question you’ve been asked on a campaign?
Osterhout: Um…can you paint that side of the barn? [Laughter]
Perseke: You know, probably the worst one that I’ve been getting recently is, “Can you run our ad after his ad?”
Roberts: Which I just find amazing. Perseke: I’ve also heard this question, not from any of my clients, but again it’s a colossal waste of time. “Can you tell me when my ad starts and when my ad is going to run?” Like 5:28 P.M. or 6:15 P.M. Log times. I understand why that’s being asked, but that is not a good use of his or her time to be asking the question and it’s not a good use of time on the part of the people they’re paying, like us. And a true test of whether I have an effective buy or not is that someone shouldn’t have to be told to turn on the TV at 5:28. If they are in their state and watching TV as they do and they don’t see the ad, then that’s a problem I’ve got.
Feltus: We don’t buy it based on the candidate’s viewing habits. [Laughter] It’s not a bad idea, though.
Perseke: I once had a candidate who called me from the road. I will not mention his name, but he would call me and yell about why he was in his district and listening to the radio and he never heard his spot. So one day he called and said, “Brad, listen to this.” And he put the phone up to the radio and said, “Brad, is that my goddamn ad?” And I said, “No, Congressman, it’s not.” So he said, “Well, where the hell is my ad?” And so I asked him what channel he was listening to and he told me. I called the campaign manager and said we can do one or two things, I can buy every spot on the station for the remainder of the campaign and it’ll go away or we can keep getting these calls. So he told me to just go for it. I called the station and bought every spot they had available.
Roberts: Was that Obama? [Laughter]
Osterhout: I will say that this profession as a whole has gotten better over the past 20 years.
Feltus: It used to be that if you had a TV Guide, a telephone and a fax machine you could be a media buyer.
Herrick: Wow, you just really dated yourself. [Laughter]
Feltus: And the barriers to entry are not that much higher now frankly. You look at the local ad agency that’s run by the buddy of the candidate and they want to do the advertising.
Herrick: It’s interesting when you have people like us who are national and then you do have the local buyer who’s the friend of the cousin or friend of the wife. And that person thinks they can do better because they live in the market and understand it better than we do. But they don’t have the resources or the experience to buy on a political campaign.
Feltus: And they don’t really understand the market. Their perception of the market is biased depending on who they know. If my buddy works at channel 4, I’m going to spend a lot of money buying channel 4.
Herrick: That’s a battle we face often as well. “I had my local guy look over your buy.” Well, great thanks. [Laughter]
Roberts: It really becomes extremely subjective when you do these things and anybody can nitpick your work. The other thing we face is that all of our work goes in the public files. Everybody cansee at anytime what we’re doing. So we’re held to a very high level of scrutiny.
C&E: Speaking of the public file, why is it that to figure out the size of a campaign’s a media buy I have to go to a station and get a hard copy the records?
Herrick: It’s because the stations want to have the control.
Roberts: The DISCLOSE Act, which is sponsored by Sen. Schumer (R-N.Y.), is trying to address that right now. They want to give parties lowest unit rate if they get attacked.
Osterhout: Wow, and we just got the stations trained. It only took two decades. [Laughter]
Herrick: The thing about McCain-Feingold and now this new Schumer bill is that it’s all interpretation. There’s so much gray area that it’s left up to my firm, his firm, and it’s all interpreted differently. Even the stations interpret it differently. So you find yourself battling interpretation more often than actually getting anything accomplished.