Politics and Digital Media

Politics and Digital Media

A recent article published by Florent Crivello (read it) touches on whether it’s more beneficial for a company to own the supply or the demand side.

This demand vs. supply subject does not end with corporate establishments such as Amazon, Google, Uber or Alibaba. The proliferation of digital media tools to target, identify, manufacture and tie users to existing data sets; some of which may have been gathered through offline avenues, let’s entities that previously were foreign to these concepts; to impact users beyond consumerism and attempt to control either supply or demand or both in terms of political votes.

Which leads me to political digital media. Everyone’s favorite subject. Yay!

This current Congressional cycle is projected to yield $5.2 billion in costs. Shattering previous spend cycles.

Why does any of this matter?

I quoted Florent’s article in the first paragraph because the idea of demand vs. supply is important in politics to understand, especially when it begins to control billions of dollars.

Demand comes from voters and their ideological values and the supply comes from candidates and their message which should either overlap or encompass the demand. If you have control of either and layer them - you can truly make an impact with a small ad spend budget for any political campaign.

Diving into OpenSecrets numbers - it’s very easy to see that the primary recipient of candidate donations are media agencies employed to tackle this. Other recipients associated to it happen to be call centers, party organizations, some individuals and of course - other media agencies.

Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (OpenSecrets expenditures)

56% of fundraising is dedicated on the books to media.

Ted Cruz of Texas (OpenSecrets expenditures)

47% of fundraising is dedicated on the books to media.

Beto O’rourke of Texas (OpenSecrets expenditures)

65% of fundraising is dedicated on the books to media.

Bill Nelson of Florida (OpenSecrets expenditures)

A whopping 81% dedicated to media!

(disclosure: Rick Scott does not have a expenditures tab, otherwise he would have filled this slot - which is incredibly disappointing as he raised over $60 million)

Regardless of what people think of Donald Trump - his team did a very good job at harvesting the demand side in terms of organic exposure - while at the same time leveraging digital media for supply side interactions with his loyal voters.

MediaQuant estimated Trump received as much as $4.9 billion in “free media”.

Which leads to what is occurring today. Many political candidates and organizations were woke from the amount of spend put into that presidential election cycle in terms of digital media in all forms that they are racing to play catch up, except they are ignoring the rule of marketing channel balance and are full throttled into media agencies. Similar to when you lose organic traction in web traffic so you turn to paid media to boost daily user count except you ignore the simple reality that people suffer from ad blindness if it’s too aggressive.

A vast majority of the candidates listed are receiving donations predominately out of state (which is an ethical debate for a different blog). Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and health systems have a vested wager on Democratic candidates the same way that Oil and Banking companies have a vested wager with Republican candidates.

The candidates shelve the donations to media agencies who run wild in terms of digital media spend, targeting and data harvesting. For the agencies it’s just another couple of million to send down the tube. The KPI’s are built around illogical statistics such as impressions, views and donations. They ignore voter base core values and attempt to blanket large stretches of land because they are ideologically blinded that whoever is paying them is the solution for everyone.

Kind of like Heidi.

Question: why are you letting ActBlue bid on your name in order to collect donations out of state from someone who has no vested interest in North Dakota or its constituency or you?

Because they can. Which is a bad reason to target anyone.

As politics increases the amount of money poured into these elections, the more likely that they are put in the hands of digital media agencies - it’s important to at the very least, question the amount of value being extracted from the amount being put in.