Narrowing Targets, Amplifying Impact: The Evolution of Political Advertising

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Bryan Miller, president of Neptune Ops, widely recognized for deploying the latest in bleeding edge political technology in public affairs, candidate, and ballot measurement campaigns. Bryan has served two U.S. presidents and has over 25 years of experience in public affairs. He began his political career on President Clinton's reelection campaign. He later served in the Obama Administration as senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Energy. One of the country's leading political journalists wrote that under Bryan's leadership, the industry's mastery of public relations and guerilla tactics is awe-inspiring. Bryan, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Bryan Miller: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. David McBee: I'm so grateful you're here. Now, I'd like to call out a line from your bio that I thought was pretty interesting. You're recognized for deploying the latest in bleeding edge political technology. That sounds amazing, but what exactly does that mean? Bryan Miller: Well, it's a series of tools. It's not one thing, and it's probably best to start at kind of the high level of what makes political advertising different than some of the commercially focused advertising that a lot of the listeners might be more familiar with. And the way I was trying to keep it straight in my head is, in commercial advertising, most of what we're doing we're targeting who I would call replaceable targets. If I'm trying to target somebody in my demographic, there's a lot of people like me and my demographic. And as an advertiser, you'll only spend so much resources trying to reach that person. And if it doesn't work, you move on to the next target. When we're dealing with political advertising, that is often not the case, particularly when we're in the public affairs aspect of it. And what we mean by public affairs is when we're trying to reach particular policy makers like legislators, members of congress, governors. Those people are irreplaceable. We have to reach them essentially at all costs. And so, really what the tools that we focus on the most are ones that are designed to be as narrowly targeted and specific as possible, where we can reach those truly irreplaceable targets and reach them as many times as possible. David McBee: So, digital's ability to target a really niche audience is key for political campaigns. Is that what I'm hearing? Bryan Miller: Exactly. David McBee: So, how is digital advertising changing public policy and election outcomes overall? Bryan Miller: I think of public affairs advocacy as having gone through essentially three stages. In the beginning everything was one-on-one, everything was handshakes, it was traditional lobbying in the halls. And over time that was supplemented by what I would call really selective paid media and insider publications. And then at some point before COVID and then it was rapidly accelerated by COVID, we entered into the stage we're in now, where policymakers are surrounded by messages all day long digitally. So, when the lobbyist leaves or when the client leaves the meeting, those policymakers continue to get an echo of those messages. And that has a huge impact on policy outcomes. It really changes the nature of the winners and losers. It really levels the playing field, actually, in a lot of ways, because people can suddenly communicate at broader scale with policymakers and do it at much higher frequency than they were able to do before. So, it's the people who are deploying those tactics the most who are really getting the edge in public advocacy. David McBee: So, it's all that noise. What are the best tactics to get through? Bryan Miller: Yeah, it's noise, but it's delivering that noise in the most surgically targeted way, where you're reaching just your targets and their influencers and not wasting those critical ad dollars on people who are not necessarily in your target audience. David McBee: So, what are the best tactics to use in? Bryan Miller: Yeah. So, Simpli.fi's tools are a key part of that for us. We certainly spend a lot of time with the latest in geo-fencing, which you guys excel at for sure. And that is one of the core blocking and tackling tools. If I'm trying to talk to, let's just say, Gavin Newsom, there's only one Gavin Newsom, and I want to make sure that I've surrounded him in the most surgical way possible as well as his influencers. And we use a combination of different programmatic tools to do that. It often starts with geo-fencing. It also gets into some of the cookie-less solutions. But it also gets into some of the things that I would call supplementary. Programmatic audio is an interesting tool to talk to policymakers and influencers. And some of the PMPs, the private marketplace deals that you all enable to let us really be in insider publications at a really efficient way, have a huge impact on that. Identity resolution is a big part of this, too. When we're talking to, again, that irreplaceable target, we've got to make sure we're reaching them on all the screens whenever they happen to be online. We can't take it for granted that we're just going to reach them on mobile or CTV or whatever it is. We've got to make sure we're reaching them anytime they're online. And so, having really good identity resolution coupled with the geo-fencing and the full suite of programmatic offerings, that to us is the heart of it. David McBee: What about targeting at the individual address level? Does that play a part in political advertising? Bryan Miller: I think a lot of people in this space think in terms of geo-fencing capital buildings or geo-fencing downtown areas around capitals. And there's a role for that for sure, but there's a lot of waste when you're doing that as well. If you just ... I spend a lot of time in Sacramento, our capital here in California, and I can tell you on any given day, there's a lot of middle schoolers on field trips there. It's been in this major construction project going on for years at this point in the capital. So, it's a lot of construction workers. Just a ton of people who are not necessarily in our target audience. So, we do think there's a role for that. I'm happy to discuss what that role is, but we think it's more important actually to get to the home-by-home level as you're just alluding to with those policy makers and then maybe supplement that with some of the commercial and government buildings. David McBee: What about speed? Is it important for a political campaign to have a quick response time from the campaign managers? Bryan Miller: Yeah. I spend a lot of time apologizing to your team for how everything is urgent and last-minute, despite everything I try to do to make that a little bit more manageable, and it just doesn't seem to work. There's a lot of reasons for that that I'm not sure are particularly important to dwell on. But with the nature of politics, it's very much a wait, wait, wait, and then it's always an emergency. It's driven by external deadlines. It's driven by different incentives in the commercial space. Often votes are happening in a capital that we get essentially no notice on, and things have to be done very urgently, or something changes very quickly on a bill that we were watching and everything was fine, and then all of a sudden a last-minute amendment comes in, and it's going to be voted on tomorrow. So, speed has a different meaning, I think, in the political space than it does in the commercial space. Everything is essentially turbocharged. And of course you guys excel at that. And I'd call out specific members of your team, but I don't want to embarrass them. David McBee: I love that. I guess if you're selling macaroni and cheese, speed is not the most important part of a campaign. But when there's a vote happening tomorrow, it definitely is. Bryan Miller: No insult to macaroni and cheese. If you're really hungry, and you've got a hankering for macaroni and cheese, I get the importance of it. It's just there's maybe something besides macaroni and cheese you can eat, too. You could eat spaghetti and meatballs, and we just don't have that luxury in politics. So, yeah. Everything tends to be urgent and irreplaceable targets, which makes for a sort of harrowing combination at times. David McBee: What are some of the other best practices or maybe just some advice you have for other political advertisers that are unfamiliar with programmatic and the role that it plays in campaigns? Bryan Miller: I think one of the interesting things about politics is, and certainly the gap we try to fill, innovation and the things that you all work on every day and you talk about on the show. That innovation is actually really slow to come to politics, and there's a few reasons for that. I think about this issue a lot. I think there's certainly cultural reasons for it. I also think we have some distorted incentives in the political space. But one analogy I like to think about is, if you think about a typical commercial sales cycle, it's actually pretty quick, and you get really rapid feedback. I mean, you deal with big box retailers who make intraday changes to their advertising strategy based on foot traffic they're seeing. So it's just a very rapid feedback where there's different levels of that along with the space in the commercial sector. Compare that to a political sales cycle, if you will, in quotes. And that might be every four years for a candidate, or every six years if you're a United States senator. And at the end of it, if you won, you don't tend to do a lot of introspection as to what worked. And if you lost, you may be out of the business entirely, and you also don't tend to do a lot of introspection. So, you don't get that feedback loop that we get in the commercial space, and it's one of the reasons I think it's so valuable to focus on the lessons from the commercial sector, because I think you get that feedback loop and therefore the innovation much faster, and you can go a lot better in the political space when we kind of take the lessons from the commercial space and bring them over. David McBee: All right. This might be a bit of a reach, but are you saying that a DSP that deals with commercial entities as well as political might have a bit of a value add as opposed to a DMP that only does political? Bryan Miller: Not an overreach at all. I think it's absolutely crucial. And personally, I'm much more interested in what happens in the commercial space than what happens in the political space, because I really do think that's where the innovation comes from. I live and work in Silicon Valley, and just the way we came to the space is I was actually out here running the solar industry's advocacy, and I found myself completely outgunned fighting much bigger opponents that could outspend us in the political process wherever there's a magnitude. And I was looking for ways to stretch advocacy dollars, and I saw my solar company at the time doing these amazing things with ad tech that I had never heard before in the political space and started to wonder if we could adapt those tools to the political space. And that's what we did. Did it with tremendous success across the country and ultimately started Neptune to build out those tools. And I continue to find that the innovation comes from what happens in the commercial ad tech space for some of the reasons we've discussed and some of the others. I don't want to call Washington and Sacramento stodgy, but I guess I just did. And so these things are just a harder thing sometimes to adapt or adopt, I should say, in those places. And so we just get a lot of really interesting conversations when we talk to people about those things because it's often tactics, strategies, tools that people haven't heard about before in the political space. David McBee: All right. Last topic. Streaming television, CTV. What role does it play in your world? Bryan Miller: I think it changes everything in politics, and I think this is rarely understood. I appreciate you asking that. So, when you think about it, let's just take a typical congressional district. The way a congressional district is drawn has zero correlation to how cable lines are laid out in a neighborhood. Okay? And so, you see some just stunning amounts of waste in traditional television advertising in the political space. There was one study done by a major national super PAC after the last cycle. They said 75 percent of spending in competitive congressional races went to voters outside of the districts. Think about that. 75 percent. Imagine you're a hardworking candidate, and you're on the rubber chicken circuit every night begging everyone for money, and you lose three out every four checks. That's the equivalent of that when you're advertising to people outside of your district. But that's what happens when you do traditional advertising, your traditional TV advertising, I should say. You're forced to do that because, again, those cable zones or those broadcast zones bring no correlation whatsoever to political boundaries. CTV means you don't have to do that anymore. You go home by home, voter by voter, also do differentiated messaging, talk to only people who you expect to vote, and talk to them in really tailored ways. And so, this is, I think, just now beginning to be adapted at scale in the political space. But still the vast majority of money in political advertising goes to traditional TV, and I just can't think of a more inefficient use of a campaign dollar. So, to me, I essentially see very little role for traditional television in the political space these days. And I'll also just give you another subset of that, when we talk about the public affairs issues, meaning targeting policymakers as opposed to voters. I mean, using traditional TV to that is essentially the height of madness, right? If I'm trying to talk to one particular legislator, and I'm going to buy broadcast TV or a cable zone, that means I'm advertising to millions of people not in my reach. But if I can do it on a home-by-home basis through CTV, completely changes the way I think about use of television advertising and public affairs. David McBee: Those are some fantastic insights, and I'm glad you brought that up, because I actually live in Kansas City. I'm on the Kansas side of the state line, but I'm constantly bombarded by those Missouri politicians and their ad dollars. So, maybe this will be good for the consumer as well. We'll have to see fewer ads if they're more targeted. Bryan Miller: Yeah, I love that example. I'll give you my favorite war story from this. So, there was a very expensive Los Angeles mayor's race a couple years ago. I won't name the candidates because I don't want to embarrass anybody. And we had a colleague who, to be clear, does not live in Los Angeles, so he was not meant to be in the target zone. And he happened to be in Guadalajara, Mexico, different country. So, just put a fine point on that. And got an ad in this Los Angeles mayor's race while he was in Guadalajara. And this is a voter from the Bay Area who was in another country, and it was on CNN Espanol in Guadalajara. And I just think to myself, my goodness. How do smart people waste dollars? I love your example. Your example happens all the time, of course, across the country. We hear this one in the D.C. area a lot or Virginia and Maryland. Candidates are seeing each other's ads, which is kind of nonsensical. But it even goes beyond country's borders, and that's not a good way to spend dollars for smart people. David McBee: Definitely not. Well, this has been very insightful. I'm so grateful that you were here. I do like to ask all of my guests before I let them go if they have a favorite podcast or a book that they feel has influenced their success in some way. Bryan Miller: I've got lots of favorite podcasts. I am a podcast mainliner. But let me take the book one, unless you want to give me two bites at the apple, and the book for me is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which is a very ancient philosophy book that I think holds true more today than ever before. And in the podcast space, I would say Simpli.fi TV. A great podcast. Everybody should listen to it. David McBee: I'll take it. I'll take it. All right. Bryan, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Bryan Miller: They can go to our website, which is neptuneops.com. And feel free to just email me anytime personally. It's miller@neptuneops.com. David McBee: Perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today. Bryan Miller: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. More information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.