Optimizing Political Campaigns to Drive Voter Engagement | Lasana Smith

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Lasana Smith, CEO of GAROI Media. Lasana is an acclaimed expert in marketing, sales, and digital media, who has had key roles at companies like Columbia Records, MTV Networks, and the Miami Herald. She has been featured in the Huffington Post, MSNBC.com and Yahoo. This year, GAROI Media won the digital marketing campaign of the Year award from the American Marketing Association. Lasana has also been recognized as one of Legacy Media's 40 under 40, and most influential and powerful Black business leaders. Lasana, welcome back to Simpli.fi TV. Lasana Smith: Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here. David McBee: I am so grateful that you made time for us in this... You're a political agency, and there's 30 days left until the election, and you took the time to sit down with me, so thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. Lasana Smith: Absolutely. It's my pleasure to be here to talk with you about what is happening right now in this crazy election cycle, very eventful election cycle, let's put it that way. David McBee: Yes, and we're going to get to some of that, but, first, I think people would like to maybe understand the name of your business. Tell us what GAROI Media stands for. Lasana Smith: Yes. I get that question all the time, if you could believe that. GAROI is actually an acronym. It stands for Get A Return On Investment, and that is one of the main tenets of our agency. We want to make sure that when a client works with us, that we give them a return on their investment. So, whether that's through any type of goals or objectives that they have, we want to make sure that they feel like they got their money's worth. And in this particular case for political, they want to make sure they got a winning campaign. So, that's what we want to do. We want to make sure that we get their message out to as many voters as possible, and that they have a campaign that gets people to the polls and helps them to win. David McBee: Yeah. That's the return on investment for political, obviously. Lasana Smith: Absolutely. David McBee: All right. So, let's talk about this political environment. It's a little crazy this year. What would you say is the single most important piece of advice you'd give to a media director looking to optimize a paid digital campaign to maximize that voter engagement? Lasana Smith: Absolutely. The thing about election seasons and election cycles is that everything moves so quickly. And with the programmatic inventory, they tend to be a lot of inventory, but as we get closer and closer to the actual election, that inventory, especially the positive premium inventory, tends to get very high in demand, and it becomes very challenging to get your placement there. So, what's most important is campaign optimization. You are not able, as a media buyer, to just set it, and forget it and think that you're going to get your message at the right place, at the right time to the right voter. You really have to make sure that you're constantly in there optimizing your campaigns, optimizing your strategy, even maybe changing your budgets from one media tactic to another, because, if not, you may end up getting left with a lot of advertising and impressions that were not able to be garnered or given to the right voters. David McBee: All right. So, what are some of the most effective ways to use programmatic or in paid social media to have a successful political campaign? Lasana Smith: There's so many different ways, and it really just depends again on the objectives of the organization or the political candidate, what they're looking to do, but basically we have to determine where they're trying to get in front of and who their audience is. And that's, again, through audience segmentation. Certain audiences between certain ages groups, in particular 18 to 35, even now 35 to 55, are very big on social media. So, sometimes you really want to make sure that you're on social media. However, social media can't be the only place that you're on, because if you're only on social media, what ends up happening is you can only get in front of that voter when they're on the platform. The great thing about programmatic is that it's an omnichannel approach. Anytime they're online, whether it's their tablet, whether it's their computer, their laptop, their cell phone, anytime, we can get IDs, so that we can make sure that that message gets directly to them wherever they are. And now, I mean, with CTV and OTT, we can do streaming television, digital audio, all of these ways that you can make sure that you're getting your message directly to that voter. David McBee: Yeah. There's nowhere they can hide. There really isn't. Lasana Smith: No. There's no way they can hide. David McBee: If they're looking at a screen, we're going to find them, right? Lasana Smith: Yes. Absolutely. David McBee: All right. Tell me about a time when GAROI Media actually shifted the trajectory of a political campaign. Lasana Smith: Yes. So, we had a client that was a city organization and they wanted to make sure that their city council members were able to get paid a fair wage. At the time, the city council members were only earning about $35,000 a year. Now, you and I both know, David, that you cannot feed a family of four these days on $35,000. So, what was important was to get this message out to their electorate and let them know, so that they could vote for this referendum for the city council members to be able to set a higher wage. The only problem is, they were not able to tell the electorate which way to vote. All they could do was educate them. So, one of the things that I believe makes GAROI Media so special is that in addition to the amazing media partners that we work with and the media tactics that we're able to use, we also take an approach beyond research with psychology. I infuse neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, in all of our advertising campaigns. So, in this particular way, one of the ways we were able to do that is through their website. So, we made sure that as we're driving traffic to that website, at the end of the website, for example, there was a Q&A section. In that Q&A section, they were asking questions about the referendum. I made sure every single answer in that Q&A section was yes. And not only was it yes, but it was the yes, the green checkbox. So, you have green, which means go, you have the word yes. And at the end, it was five questions and five yeses, and there's something about saying yes five times that makes you want to continue to say yes. So, that's what we ended up doing, and it was so exciting because the referendum passed by a decisive margin of over 65%. David McBee: You're programming, that's some Pavlov's dog stuff going on right there. That was brilliant. I love that story. Lasana Smith: I love that movie, Inception. So, it's always that idea of people think that it's their own thoughts that are making these decisions, but when you have had it planted in your mind along the way, you think it's your thought, but you don't know where that original thought was planted from. David McBee: I feel like my wife does that to me sometimes. Lasana Smith: I'm sure she does. Women, we could be good at that. David McBee: All right. Let's talk about diversity, how do you ensure messaging resonates at a multicultural and a cross-generational voter segment? Lasana Smith: It's important to look and sound like your audience. People, and voters in particular, want to know that you understand them and that you really get who they are and what's important to them. What do they value? So, it is extremely important to us to make sure that we are segmenting our audiences. So, for example, we had a campaign one time and it was a campaign that was targeting Latino voters. Well, the thing about it is, here in the state of Florida, we have a varied amount of Latino voters. So, in Central Florida, it's more Mexican, more Puerto Rican. In south Florida, it's more Cuban and South American. So, we went as far as to make sure that when we did ads, it was in every single different Latino or Spanish dialect that there is in the state of Florida. So, that each person, when we did our ads, knew that those ads were designated to them, because the last thing you want is that you have an ad that is going to Central Florida, it's a Cuban Spanish, but you're targeting Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. The Spanish is different, and a lot of people, they don't understand that. So, it is a combination of really understanding your audience and definitely doing audience segmentation even down on the media level. David McBee: So, what I'm hearing is that there's a really a combination of using good creative, relevant, specific creative and targeting the right audience with that creative. Lasana Smith: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And geotargeting plays a role in that as well, because as I mentioned, we might have voters in Central Florida, so they're going to get a different type of creative than the creative that will be given to the Latino voters in South Florida, for example. David McBee: All right. Well, let's talk about women. Lasana Smith: Yes. David McBee: Female voters are going to play a crucial role in this election, so what strategies are most effective for influencing them? Lasana Smith: I would say it's very similar because at the end of the day, it's all comes down to demographics. With women at this point, you have the same gender, but what's different is the age demographics. So, for example, women who are over the age of 55, their children have already graduated from college. Many of them, maybe their children are coming back home, maybe they've been married before. Their values, their goals, their psychological drivers are very different. Their behaviors are very different. So, even when we get into doing contextual targeting, when you have a better idea of a voter's hobbies and what's important to them, it's easier to make sure that you get the right message to that voter. On the other hand, let's say a young voters, and voter between the ages of 18 and 35, they have very different priorities. Maybe they're just starting their first job, they're dating, they're trying to get married, starting a family. Those values are extremely different. So, you want to make sure that the messaging to a woman between the ages of 18 and 35 is very different than the messaging that you would serve to a woman who is over the age of 55. David McBee: All right. So, there's only about 30 days left for this big election coming up in 2024. Is it too late to implement some of these strategies? Lasana Smith: No. Not at all. We still have time. I still have clients reaching out to me, money in hand. I still have clients that are planning to spend money in this election that haven't spent the money yet. So ,the beautiful thing about programmatic is that we have inventory. So, even though we're getting close to that election time, there is still inventory that we can get your message out. Again, whether it is through digital audio, digital television, any of the platforms that we can do digitally, online video, online just display ads, there's still inventory for it. The only thing is the competition starts to get really fierce as we get closer and closer to the election. The CPM start to go up and it becomes harder to get the impression served. So, now is the time. If you are looking to get in and do advertising for this election, now is the time to get those dollars in to really make sure that your budget is where it needs to be, so that we can serve the best ads to the voters and get your message in front of the right voter at the right time. David McBee: Great message, great conversation. Thank you so much. Lasana, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Lasana Smith: Yes. So, you can go to our website, www.garoimedia.com. You can also reach out to us by email if you'd like, info@garoimedia.com. And we're on the socials, @garoimedia. David McBee: Awesome. Thank you so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Lasana Smith: Absolutely. It is such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, David. David McBee: And thank you, guys, for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, a share, a comment, a review, and be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. 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.