Political Campaigns & the Power of CTV | Jeremiah Guappone

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 Jeremiah Guappone, Chief Strategy Officer and GM at Data Genomix. Jeremiah is an accomplished leader in digital marketing and public affairs boasting over a decade of experience, he spearheads an award-winning marketing technology company, focusing on targeting, analytics, and paid digital media for political advertising and various industries. Jeremiah has steered the firm to multiple triumphs, clinching several prestigious Gold Poly Awards. As a passionate and skilled strategist, Jeremiah enjoys helping his team work smarter and solve complex challenges for clients. Jeremiah, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Jeremiah Guappone: Thanks, David. It's a pleasure to be with you today. David McBee: I'm so grateful to have you. Your agency Data Genomix works with multiple kinds of media, and so I just want to ask you right out of the gate, how does your firm approach cross channel paid digital media? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah, that's a great question, David. So I think first and foremost, when it comes to digital paid media, you need to be working with an agency that can manage it all under one roof. We're talking so many different paid media channels these days, including a number of walled gardens, the social media platforms and whatnot, and you need a team of people who are accomplished at all of those channels and can understand how to navigate and make changes among those channels while paid media flights are occurring. When CPM spike on Meta, you need to be able to put money into your HLM5 banner ads or increase your connected TV or something like that. So that's why it's just really important that you have a team that's constantly monitoring and has expertise across all paid media channels. David McBee: And do you have one person who spearheads the campaign and brings in all the different teammates, or is it everyone working in silos? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah, great question. So the traditional model is sort of silos. You have people who are subject matter experts at Google SEM or Meta or whatever. We have our paid media team led by Megan Maroney, our director of paid media, and they're cross channel experts. So they have their certifications in Meta and Google and Simpli.fi, all those different places. And her team is responsible for managing at the project level rather than at the platform level. So that gives them a lot of insight into the project, the campaign, what the goals are, how that client needs to achieve results, and they're monitoring that across channels rather than just one single channel. And they work closely with our data science team as well to update targeting arrays and whatnot. David McBee: Yeah. One of the themes that I've definitely learned from my guests here on Simpli.fi TV is the importance of that communication between tactics, and it sounds like you guys are definitely doing that. So let me ask you this. Once a campaign is up and running, what are some of the keys to ensure that it performs? Jeremiah Guappone: A lot of the clients that we begin to work with, they did what I call the old way of digital paid media, and that's where you put X amount of dollars in a lockbox for 30, 60, 90 days, and you just let it go and see what happens at the end. So you put 10K into digital video and you put 10 K into digital display and 10K into Meta, Facebook, and Instagram, and then you look back at the end and see what happened. We don't do that. We don't believe in that. We think that the great part about digital is that it's real time and campaigns are alive. So we make changes as things are running and as we see results, and every campaign has different KPIs. Some clients want to increase the number of email submissions on their website, other people are just trying to maximize their frequency on that particular campaign. So we're looking to get as many impressions to our targeted universe as possible. So it's keeping the priorities of the client in mind and then managing that paid media accordingly. David McBee: You mentioned KPIs. Do you have a least favorite KPI that you have to hit and why? Jeremiah Guappone: So KPIs, key performance indicators, they can be beneficial or they can be challenging. I kind of think that KPIs in a general sense don't matter. Industry KPIs don't matter because for example, here at Data Genomix, our KPIs were typically four to 5X the industry standard because of our approach to paid media. So we could always just look at that and be like, oh look, we're doing four to five times better on the click-through rate than the standard in that industry. It's like, okay, well, that's not really measuring ourselves to be more successful in the future. That's just measuring ourselves about how other people do business. So we look at KPIs over time, on a specific client or account or project, you should be looking at doing better month in and month out rather than just comparing yourself to some sort of industry average. David McBee: Yeah, I agree. It's about establishing a baseline and improving on it over and over and over. Let's talk political campaigns. How do you approach them and what's the key to a successful political campaign? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah, the key is speed. Things happen really quickly in politics. So it's being ready for that 5:00 PM phone call when someone needs to get a campaign up and running by the next morning. So speed is the first thing, and that comes from ensuring that you have all of your backend setup done, that you can do the targeting arrays, that you can get your creative done, and that it meets all the requirements of that particular state. So there's a lot that goes into that that needs to happen rather quickly. And then being able to get the campaign in flight, and that's where the Simpli.fi team comes in because they can really get things moving when it comes to their programmatic ad buying. David McBee: What do you say to the advertiser or the political advertiser, I should say, who's really unfamiliar with the digital landscape? Jeremiah Guappone: So when people have not had the opportunity to really dive in and do sophisticated digital, the first thing that I like to tell them, David, is you're so used to doing direct mail and yard signs and all these traditional things, but you know what? You can't measure the amount of time between someone getting a postcard and then throwing it in the trash bin, right? There's no measurement there. There's no KPI. There's no ability to judge success. When you're doing digital ad flights, particularly digital video, you're able to tell how long your audience is watching that video, or even segments of your audience are watching your video content. And that's really powerful for a campaign because if you see that people tune out at 12 seconds, well, what did you say at 12 seconds that made them tune out or stop watching the video? What do you need to change in that video to get people to complete the full 30 seconds? So there's just so much more that you can do in digital than you can do in traditional tactics. And digital's more than banner ads and Facebook ads. That's what people try to lean on. They want to run their little digital display and they want to run a Meta ad or whatever. And those are all well and good and they're important, but they're not the totality of what you can do in digital. David McBee: Yeah. Let's talk CTV. What's your experience in that realm? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah. Connected TV is fantastic. I don't know which media market you're in, David, but for example, the media market where my office is located reaches over a million people. Buying traditional TV is a waste of money depending on what level of campaign you're running at. Traditional TV is expensive. It doesn't get you very far. When you're running Connected TV through Simpli.fi, you can reach just one house on a block and not reach the other homes if you don't need to, if they're not part of your target universe. So the ability to really focus in on your target audience with Connected TV is fantastic, and it is a fraction of a price compared to traditional television. My clients are often confused about targeting at the user level rather than targeting at the program or the channel level. They think they want to be on Channel 55, or they think that they want to be on this cable network or whatever, and it takes a lot of time and education to tell them, we don't really care where we're showing the ad. We want to show the ad to the voter where they're watching television, where they're spending time. So let's take channel and platform and network out of it and let's focus on the voter. David McBee: Yeah. I had to ask somebody the other day if they wanted to run an ad on Lego Masters Australia on Tubi, to which they said, "I've never heard of any of that, so obviously not." And then I said, "Well, that's my favorite thing to watch and I'm your target market, so let's look at it a different way." Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah. The other great thing about Simpli.fi for Connected TV is you do have that linear TV exclusion, so you're able to... If you're running traditional cable, you can choose not to show those homes your Connected TV content. We've used that a few times, but traditionally, again, if people in that home are watching Connected TV, just because they have a cable subscription doesn't necessarily mean that I don't want to show them the ad on Connected TV because I don't necessarily know that they're watching a linear television. David McBee: Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very good point about that. All right, well, we're nearly out of time, so I'd like to ask you if you have a favorite podcast or is there a book that you feel has been instrumental in your success? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah, so here at Data Genomix, we do a book club every week, so it's a lot of fun. We will switch between books on creative marketing and thinking differently, and then we'll do something that's more project management or agency growth focused. We just finished the 12 Week Year, which is sort of focusing on productivity and setting goals and getting them done. That was fantastic. We also are big fans of the Pink Goldfish Series, which talks about turning your weaknesses into actually your strengths and leaning on those harder. So those are a few of the books that we've read recently that we've really enjoyed here at Data Genomix. David McBee: I love those. Add them to my list. All right, so Jeremiah, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Jeremiah Guappone: Yeah, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. I try to put out content there at least once a week or so talking about best practices when it comes to digital marketing and advertising. So follow me on LinkedIn. David McBee: Perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today. I appreciate you. Jeremiah Guappone: It's been a real pleasure, David. Great to meet you. 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. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.