Digital Renaissance: Rethinking Political Advertising | John Padua

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 John Padua, vice president of Media Buying at Trilogy Interactive. A winner of the AAPC's 2023 40 under 40 award, John builds advertising campaigns that are about reaching people, not just buying impressions. He works continually to discover the perfect combination of media, message and technology that will have the greatest impact for Trilogy clients. John is an expert on media data and analytics who enjoys finding the story behind the numbers and delivering insights that clients can build upon campaign after campaign. John, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. John Padua: Thank you. Happy to be here today. David McBee: Happy to have you. So John, in preparation for today's interview, I learned that you work with political campaigns, and I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you why do political advertisers spend so much more on linear TV compared to other industries that have embraced digital? John Padua: I think this question here is quite complex, and for me, I've thought about it a lot over the years and really it comes down to a combination of legacy thinking and risk aversion. There's a lot of legacy thinking in the political space and that folks will still believe that the most reliable way to effectively reach a lot of people in a short amount of time is through linear television. And I think at this point we can all somewhat agree that that's wrong. The thing is, for all the thinking that goes on in a campaign, in the peak where 90% of a campaign's advertising dollars are spent, and it all comes down to the last six to eight weeks before election day, and to be honest, six to eight weeks is just not a lot of time to accumulate data and make the best decisions. Whereas the brands have the luxury of longer sales cycles. If somebody is not buying enough Coke this quarter, you can put more advertising into another medium and they can buy more Coke the next quarter. We don't have that luxury. If you're not voting on November 8th, then we lose you for two years. And because of that, the thinking doesn't get to evolve accordingly because we only get to practice this every couple of years. The other side of this equation is risk aversion. Elections have consequences, serious consequences, and there's a lot at stake. For agencies, it's a reputation. For senators and house members and their staffs, this is about their jobs and their livelihood. And most importantly for our country, it's literally the direction of political discourse. And we've seen over the last seven years the impact that elections have and what happens when you don't spend properly. And with all that at stake, it's hard for campaigns to take any risks, let alone significantly change how they've spent the majority of their campaign funds over the years. David McBee: So what's the answer? How do we get them to understand the value of targeting their ideal audience using data that could be their geography or even their political affiliation? John Padua: And I think this is, it's strange when it comes to digital because I think they both embrace part of the value of digital, but not the whole value of digital, right? I think campaigns have understood the power of digital for a long time and its ability to micro-target and reach so-called niche audiences. I think there's been a lot written about, hey, we wanted to reach suburban moms in Ohio for this particular election, and they went through X number of things. But what is the issue here is that political campaigns get too bogged down in the micro and they don't see the full macro power of digital. They put digital in too narrow of a role to play in an overall campaign. And what they don't understand is that it can play such a larger role in a campaign's overall reach, when the reality does set in that people are spending almost three hours more per day on average, consuming digital content than traditional content. The reality is that digital content is a new broadcast, and once campaigns embrace that, we're going to start seeing that swing. And eventually the tide will swing in the direction of digital. And I think geographic limits are going to be the tipping point that causes that. If we think about a congressional districts in Orange County, for instance, we are talking about districts that are completely consumed by the massive Los Angeles DMA. It's hyper massive. And if you spend dollar on one point in the LA DMA, you're wasting 80, 90 cents of that dollar just to reach someone in a congressional district in Orange County. It's not an efficient use of dollars. Whereas if you go on digital, you are looking at a place where you have zero waste if you place your campaign, you're saving money and you have significant amount of reach in very specific areas and geographies of the country. David McBee: I'm so glad you brought up that geography. I live on the Kansas side of the Kansas City DMA, so I get all the political ads from Missouri and Kansas, which no one should be forced to watch that many political ads. John Padua: It's maddening. And the thing is, it's such a burnout too. We are, if anything, overserving on certain mediums and underserving in others and that creates an entire frequency capping problem. David McBee: Do you have a client that you've reeled in that they were really focused on linear and you got them to try out digital and had great results? John Padua: Yeah, I think we had a client, this would've been the 2000 election. This person had actually, folks can guess along who the member of Congress would be, elected to member of Congress in 2018. But this person previously had spent a significant amount on television, but then when it came to campaign funds had to make some hard decisions in 2020 as far as where he was going to be spending overall. The realization and the tipping point came when, hey, you can be so much more efficient if you decided to spend, hey, just spend 90% of your dollars on digital as opposed to kind of the other way around. And it really created effective results. We won that campaign by a larger margin of victory than his previous campaign. And I think it really kind of proved that you can play in the space and have your message solely carried by the digital realm. David McBee: That's a great story. All right, so if you had one minute to convince these stubborn linear buyers to embrace digital, what would you say to them? John Padua: I would say, how do you consume content? How do you personally consume content? I've been to pitch meetings where I see a campaign manager playing on their phone as they're going through pitch and I go, hey, you're clearly not paying attention to the television, but you're clearly getting a whole lot of information on your phone. What if I just placed a bunch of ads in your phone? And I think that's the realization where we need to start understanding that in order to most effectively reach our audiences, we have to have media plans that mirror the ways that people are actually consuming content. And I think that's such a basic tenant of media planning that sometimes just kind of gets ignored because of how simple of an idea it is. So I'd say that, plus dollars and waste, as you mentioned, fundraising is a precious resource for a campaign. It is simply put the lifeblood of whether or not a campaign wins or loses, succeeds or fails. So let's not be wasteful with that money that people have entrusted us with, whether it's funders or whether it's a mom and pop who are donating to your campaign. We should respect that. We should respect those dollars. David McBee: Yeah. So we've been talking a lot about digital as a whole, but we didn't really explain what that is. Are we talking display ads? Are we talking CTV? Are we talking pre-roll? What do you usually find is the most successful digital piece of media? John Padua: When I say digital, I consider the entire kind of digital ecosystem. I'm talking video, pre-roll, native, as well as social and OTT. So basically any time content is distributed through a digital means or through an internet connection. Now, I think OTT has gotten so much more of the attention span these days and it really does play a big role in the political space because of one, completion rates, two, viewability and three, targetability, and all of those things have made OTT really grow quite fast in the political space and it's been embraced significantly faster than most other digital mediums. And that's great for us. But at the same time, let's not ignore the potential gains that are available in the other different types of mediums, especially if we are over-investing in OTT and continue to look at the rest of the digital marketplace. Because as much as we talk about OTT being lead and being strong, that still accounts for only a percentage of the total digital media consumption. So we want to make sure that we are backing up what we do on OTT with significant spends in the other different digital mediums available to us. David McBee: That is some solid advice. Thank you so much. All right, before I let you go, I'd like to ask all of my guests if they have a podcast or a book that they feel has been instrumental to their success that they'd like to share with our audience. John Padua: Yeah, hard to choose one, but my favorite one I like giving is Moneyball, and not just the movie, the full book. But as a Bay Area native and watching kind of the Oakland A's in their saga play out in front of me, and the subsequent book, talking about how data was being used more interestingly to disrupt a legacy industry, kind of gives me inspiration for what we can do in political. David McBee: I love that. And what is the best way for viewers to reach out to you directly? John Padua: Yeah, definitely visit our website at trilogyinteractive.com. We have a lot of information on our services as well as a contact us form. So if you have any questions or just want to chat about campaigns, feel free to reach out. David McBee: Perfect. John, thank you so much for being my guest today. John Padua: Thank 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 Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee, be awesome, and we'll see you next time.