Measuring The Competitive Paid Media Landscape – Adam Wise (National Media)

Adam Wise:

Comscore will tell you you're wrong about your October media. By on Thanksgiving, Nielsen will tell you that you were wrong. Next year. We needed something that gave us the speed to know if we were right or wrong last week.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech Innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Adam Wise. Joining us today is a senior Vice president at National Media Research Planning and Placement, where he helps clients develop and execute paid advertising campaigns. In this episode, we dig into the challenge of measuring digital, political ad spending, how to build media plans in a fragmented landscape, and what campaigns can do to better integrate their paid campaign into other efforts. Adam, we've heard from guests on previous episodes about advances in digital ad measurement tech, like automated content recognition, a c r and software to monitor ad libraries on Facebook. So why don't we yet have a comprehensive, reliable picture of digital ad spending in the political space?

Adam Wise:

That's a great question. You know, I've been very fortunate to lead competitive media on three presidential campaigns and over a half dozen I at N R S C and N R ccc. And that's really been a major question for the past, you know, nine years of my existence. And I mean, really to get it, there's, there's two ways in which we can do competitive media tracking in both the linear and the digital space. The first is the traditional, like human intel. We have reps that tell us information. You know, that's how we get most of linear spending is, you know, a rep from a group like TEGNA or Cats will say, Hey Adam, you know, your opponent just bought, you know, a hundred AK 47 s, would you like to buy 101? You know, and that kind of arms race mentality leads us to create databases.

And, you know, we really haven't seen that enter the digital space just yet. I think mostly because of digital campaign practitioners not wanting that level of transparency, you know, so that there hasn't been a business incentive for all of these digital vendors to start posting and distributing, you know, orders the same way we've seen it in broadcast cable and, and, and radio. In that that could change. I mean, it, it is a very fast way to get your digital budget allocation increase to see that somebody else is spinning more. I mean, the second is a little bit more complicated. It's, you know, signal based intelligence. National media, well before I was at it actually in, in the nineties took, you know technology from essentially sonars that was used for tracking songs playing on the radio so that Michael Jackson, everybody else could figure out how many times their songs played.

You know, we were able to repurpose that to track digital ads in the nineties and the early odds, you know, today that's become a lot more, more complicated. But digital is a lot different than tv. You know, tv you have five broadcast stations in a market and you have 200 plus markets. It's really easy for cantar or I can add impact to bring in a raw feed of all content playing on five broadcast stations and 200 plus markets. You know, that's pretty easy. But as soon as you even jump from broadcast TV to cable, where you have 70 plus cable networks that are locally insertable and over a hundred cable systems inside of a lot of these major DMAs, even cable, let alone digital, where you have so many different permutations of targeting becomes really difficult to track. And there's really kind of two ways that we've tried to do it over the last, you know, four to five years. And they're all imperfect. You know, we've started to play around with crawlers, right? And that's kinda the first approach, creating search engines that would index websites multiple times per day, but those servers don't have.

Eric Wilson:

And so you would see what ads are are serving.

Adam Wise:

Yeah, cuz Google actually gets rid of ads when they're doing their crawling. So we created search engines that would do the opposite. But that gets you some display ads, it gets you some pre-roll ads, but the servers don't have a primary vote history. They don't have an age and income or a gender. So it really misses out on, on a lot and it misses out on those premium, you know, big screen TV environments. So really the new thing that we've started to see, and it's gonna be interesting to see where it goes over the next couple years with like Cantar buying numerator you know, bi science, creating some new panels, we're starting to see this evolution of, of panels, right? Where somebody opts in, kind of like they do for a Nielsen personal people meter panel, but everything that they do gets tracked.

You know, when they go somewhere on Chrome boom, all those ads are captured, you know, when they watch Hulu, all those ads are captured based upon, you know, technology that sits on their tv. So that panel based approach allows you to get more creative discovery, but still not perfect. And really where we've been this year, the last two years is that at National Media, we built out our own 50 million household TV panel. We kind of coined it the power panel, and that allows us to take our ad library of every broadcast and cable ad on you know, house and send in gubernatorial races. And whenever that ad plays on one of those TVs, whether it's Hulu, YouTube, peacock, you know history channel app, any of those apps, we can actually see the household in the panel where that ad played. And that's giving us some sense of volume and reach and frequency across broadcast and cable. But there's just so many permutations, right, of content and targeting. It's, you know, it it's gonna be a while. I think the big area where we'll really get a lot more transparency is gonna be, you know, digital practitioners saying, I want to see orders the same way the linear buyer sees it for broadcast cable and radio. I think that's really gonna, or it's gonna change. And sorry, you started off with one of my favorite topics, so sorry to <laugh> go so far into that one. Well,

Eric Wilson:

So it sounds like the, the core of the problem is that our media diets as individuals are as unique as our fingerprints now, which is, you know, you and I could live next door to each other or even within the same household and, and we don't even consume the same digital media. And so, so much of, of what we did to measure in the past was based on the idea of like, okay, you have three broadcast channels, maybe 20 cable channels and, and a couple of newspapers. And now our habits are so unique to our identities that it, it's hard to monitor all of that

Adam Wise:

A hundred percent. I mean, Comcast, I, I think they made an intern do the math on this, so I feel bad for the intern, but it, it's one of my favorite stats. If you looked at scripted content, not even including sports and news, it would take a voter watching TV all day, every day for an entire year to watch 80% of what was produced last year. And again, that's not including sports and news, which is the bulk of what people consume on light tv. So if you think about that level of content that exists out there, and then the number of sellers, it becomes this really big problem to try and figure out all the places where you can insert it. And really, I, I think the true solution is gonna be, you know, not so much technology tracking everything, but it's gonna be the sell side having an impetus for making it more available. Because as soon as somebody sees, you know, we're already seeing it with Google Transparency report, you see that you're being out spent five to one on YouTube, you're gonna increase your YouTube allocation for better or for worse. And that's something that I think will really be the trend that drives competitive forward in the digital space.

Eric Wilson:

Do you think, Adam, that we might be hoping for something that doesn't really make sense in our digital media world, right? So we're trying to reverse engineer measurement from an analog world where we can say, oh, I know how many points, how many spots exactly what went up on broadcast tv, radio, cable, and we're trying to force that into a digital world? Or do you think it's attainable?

Adam Wise:

It's a tough one. You know, I think it's obtainable, but I, I honestly worry about what that world looks like, to be honest. You know, one of the first lessons I I I learned at at Engage from you RAP and rapini was that there's so many things that you can do in digital. If you're gonna do it, make sure you do it well. Don't do things for the sake of doing it. It has to make sense. And my biggest fear about digital competitive is that we'll see a lot of reactionary based decisions. We'll do something because somebody else was doing it. We'll have, you know, another mere cat election, if you will, right? <Laugh> as, as opposed to doing the things that make sense for the brand. Like we don't have a lack of data about what voters are consuming. Like I can take any R N C I D, match it up to a bazillion smart TVs and tell you everything that they watched and apps that they used last week. I, I, and I can do incredible targeting and real time tracking off of that. So I don't have a lack of knowledge about what voters are consuming. You know, what really, you know, could happen if we had data about what other people are doing is we're gonna ignore the data about what we need to be doing and do what somebody else is doing. And that's really my, my biggest fear in the long term about digital competitive.

Eric Wilson:

So let's back up maybe to where we should have started, which is what would having a more complete picture of digital ad spending enable campaigns to do?

Adam Wise:

One of the big things that we see IES do right, is fill gaps. You know, is somebody not up on this cable network or not up in this broadcast market on this week? You know, having better digital competitive would allow IES to do better blocking and tackling. It would allow sophisticated operators to really kind of see what smart sayings are being done by their opponent and, you know, inter intercept those and, and counteract them. So there is some some upside, but you know, again, I just kind of worry that it would become information overload and distract from the story about what we need to be doing and what we have to do to, to be successful.

Eric Wilson:

And so one of the things that, that sort of prompted this conversation is we did not have a good picture of of where digital spending went. Because obviously with Facebook and Google, we have their transparency databases, Roku has, has some good databases, but again, that's just a small sliver of advertising. So I'm curious, based on the media plans that you helped develop this cycle, where did you see political advertisers making that split between, you know, your traditional tv, so broadcasting cable and streaming services. Can you give us like a rough percent percentage breakdown? Was it 60 40, 70 30? How'd that split work out?

Adam Wise:

And you know, caveat on this is that it really depends, you know, a media plan in, you know, Connecticut's gonna be a lot different than a media plan in Arizona and California. You know, something in LA burbs is different than in Iowa. Everybody's different media habits there. There's a lot of different things to do. There's not a one size fits all for media allocation, right? Right.

Eric Wilson:

But why from geography to geography?

Adam Wise:

Oh, why from geography to geography? I, I guess it's more than just geography, it's also demographics, it's gender, it's income. There's a whole host of characteristics. It's, you really have to look at your target and see if your target exists on broadcast, if they exist on cable, if they exist on a radio, on Hulu, you know, you have to look at where your voter is and goes there. And every race in Canada is gonna have a different coalition. And you have to look at that first, you know, as,

Eric Wilson:

So just to to go into one example, right? Like so in, in Connecticut, yeah. Your option would be to have to buy like New York tv, right? So you might lean more on, on streaming, is that what you're saying here?

Adam Wise:

Yeah, but also if you look at inside of the Fairfield media market, or I guess the Fairfield County, which is the county in Connecticut that goes into the New York City market, you also have a lot of swing voters that are 25 to 54 that have a household income of over a hundred k. They have college degrees, they skew away from linear TV and they actually skew towards digital audio. They skew towards streaming. So you kinda have to look at those people and say, you know, who it is. You know, you might also get a pullback saying you need to go after people, you know you know, without a college degree that are white, that are in this income bracket. And then all of a sudden maybe, you know, New York City broadcast makes sense cuz that's where your voters are. And despite the heavy expense of it, it's what you have to do because it's not efficient, but it's effective.

So you, you really have to follow the voter and the consumption habits. But you know, overall as a, as a template, I'd really like to be at least 80 to 20 or 70 to 30 linear to digital. And that actually ignores the largest medium in, in the country, right? If you look at broadcast or connected TV or cable or radio, radio actually reaches more people 18 plus on a weekly basis than any of those mediums. The last Nielsen report, you know, is 88% weekly reached by radio. You have 80% weekly reached by TV and 50% weekly reached by connected tv. So, you know, we also have to think about audio from that perspective because as things have changed, you know, TV for the first time ever is actually skewing differently against the census. You know, historically it's been very in line, you know, just basically crosshairs straight along with census, but it's actually skewing lower income, you know, wider less education than census population. Meanwhile, radio is still right on target with, with census and is actually, quite frankly, higher reach. You know, same thing with, with digital audio in a lot of cases, which is something that we often see forgotten for. Media plants.

Eric Wilson:

Right. I want to ask you, we've been focused on the targeting and the placement. What role does creative play in that placement and targeting equation? How are you adjusting your plans based on the types of ads that you're being given by a, a campaign or a client?

Adam Wise:

Oh, it, it's a great question and it's one that I think is not asked enough. You know, I really view the media buyer as like the wide receiver and the creative person as, as the quarterback. If we get a really good throw, maybe, you know, half the people that see the ad are persuaded to our side, you know, maybe and not a great ad is, you know, 20%, you know, no matter how effective the creative is or how far that task goes down, down the field, it's our job to get it to the end zone. It's the media buyer's job to find enough people for that creative to work. And I think that question about reach, you know, to win an election is too often forgotten by media plans. And that's really kind of a, a fun question to think about. And part of that is looking at the creative and not just placing against swing voters or first party, you know, modeled voters is looking at the message and saying, who might this message work with?

You know, we had a candidate that actually had a background in forensic accounting met his wife actually as forensic accountants. And you know, one of the things that the team said was, well, dang, we should just go ahead and let's suppress all the Indi Bank Democrats, but take, you know, a little bit of a wider ballot score and let's go after everybody that's a C F O an auditor, you know, an actuary. Anybody that might appreciate having somebody running for office that's not a lawyer, you know, that's has this kind of similar background to them. You know, we had another one where a state actually governor raised the, the diesel tax. So instead of looking at party affiliation or ballot score, we actually yanked down everybody that owned a diesel car or a boat used diesel fuel or leased commercial equipment. You know, we kind of threw party affiliation aside and found people that were directly impacted by the message that we're speaking to, to see if we could move the needle a little bit more.

And that's something that I think has been somewhat forgotten in media buying. And it's one of the reasons why we've actually spent a lot of time at national media hiring people. You know, we hired the deputy data director from the R N c a couple voter file builders from Data Trust. And we actually are sitting on, you know, the credit union data. We're sitting on three voter files, four consumer files, you know, national care practitioner database, you know, business registries of where people work. And even you know, recently we very fortunate to get the campaign tech award for innovation digital advertising. A couple weeks ago we were actually taking a 4 million person panel and then raw data from two DSPs to look at what people are reading. So, you know, imagine, you know, my favorite, you know, topic that really popped up this year was, you know, you have somebody that's not sure if they want to vote for, you know, cost of living and inflation or Roe v Wade.

So we, we created kind of what we call the, like RO deal seeker. It was a, you know, an Aldi shopping high income household, you know, reading about, you know, essentially the overturn of roe, but also very interested in, you know, using coupons and seeking out deals in their lives. And, you know, we tried to deliver them a message that basically said, you know, Hey, you need to focus on cost of living. And it was very aligned with that message. So it's, you know, it, as you can tell, it's something that I care a lot about and we spend a lot of time thinking about. But it's, it's something that I think has been forgotten cuz you have all these great creative practitioners, you know, like we get, we're very fortunate to work with, you know, Brad Todd, Chris Matola, Casey Phillips convergence of Mike Shelton, Rob Sims, like all these people give us their artwork, right? And, you know, us taking a second to say, who could this artwork apply to others than just swing voters, I think is a very important thing to think about.

Eric Wilson:

You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Adam Wise from national media about digital advertising, measurement and placement and plans and all things media today, Adam, our media landscape is highly fragmented. What are some strategies for media planning that overcomes that and make sure that you're hitting the right reach and frequency across platforms for your target audience?

Adam Wise:

My absolute favorite topic, I mean it's the traditional notion has been by a thousand GRPs, a 35 plus, you're good. You hit a hundred percent of people 10 times. In reality, it's not that, it's more like 30% reached 34 times. And you know, I, I'm very fortunate to be on the advisory board for a pretty cool company called Samba tv. And they did a, an interesting study last year looking at the top 10 corporate advertisers in America. And they looked at all of the impressions, you know, so we're talking Geico, Coke, Pepsi, McDonald's, et cetera, and 95% of their linear TV impressions went to 46% of the US population. That means half the country is getting over a hundred ads a day, the other half are getting seven <laugh>. So if you have this ability to reach more people than your opponent, have your creative convert more people to your side, media buying literally can make the difference.

But yet, you know, we, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. And something that we've been very fortunate to do this year for both of the major party IES and for some of the more competitive races was we actually devised an ACR panel 50 million households and we're tracking every broadcast cable and connected TV impression. And we can also layer on pixels to do things on mobile and digital audio. But what that allows us to do is, you know, comScore will tell you you're wrong in about your October media buy on Thanksgiving, Nielsen will tell you that you were wrong next year. We needed something that gave us the speed to know if we were right or wrong last week. So every week we could start to see, you know, the unique region frequency for every advertiser in the market, did our buys or changes, fix anything.

But then we could also create a new audience on who is missed. So we could say, okay, we reached 41% of swing voters in, you know, the Norfolk market, what is the other 60% consume? And we would see all the cable networks, the day parts, the app usage, the broadcast shows, and we could be smart. And we were actually able to, in a lot of cases, you know, in like the DC media market for instance, you know, we were outspent by a, you know, multi-year incumbent, you know, three to one, but we outreached her three to one with swing voters in the district cuz she was buying the DC market as a whole. So there really is an opportunity and that's, you know, I think directly at your question, number one, having technology that gives you a better sense of unique reach and frequency. And it's also a diversification of assets.

You know, it's marginal reach stops increasing efficiently on broadcast at about 500 points yet we routinely go ahead of that, you know, cable people are fixated, you know, at 65% of ampersand spending is on, which is the main local cable rep on the top five cable networks. They produce high ratings, but it's going beyond those top five and finding niche places where your voters exist. You know, cable and pay TV is decreasing, it's at the lowest level it's been since 1993. But there are people that have cable that all they watch are cable. You might have somebody that exists with 60%, 70% of their time spent on media each week on NFL network or on CN bbc. So how do we start to move away from, you know, efficient media buying optimization to effective, right? How do we find those cohorts that aren't exposed? You know, Billy Bean with, you know, when he kind of went beyond cricket math, right?

With, with baseball, one of the more simple metrics that he created was the selecting co-efficient. You know, like we used to treat hits all the same way, but a double was worth, well double. So why we don't think about reaching those lower to reach consumers as a double I really think is a place for a lot of progress. Like even moving away from our Nielsen data or from our ACR data to, to Nielsen. You know, if you look at the entire voting population in the United States in the, in the TER sales, like three groups, right? The, and you buy a thousand points, the top 30% of your audience, or 33% is getting 1500 points. The middle third is getting about 800. So pretty close to what you forecasted. And then the bottom third is getting 40 points a week. So rapid under acceleration. We have to spend a lot more effort isolating those segments and planning around those segments knowing that we're gonna deliver against the heavier consumers of media who are, you know, put it in the time spent, they're spending over 30 hours a week watching TV versus that bottom third, which is watching one to two hours a week.

Eric Wilson:

I think one of the other things that offers campaigns a real opportunity is to more comprehensively integrate their paid media campaigns into what they're actually doing as a campaign. Because I think you, you often notice this divorce, if you will, or a gulf between, here's what the campaign is talking about on the stump in earned media, what they're doing on social and at events, and then what's going on on the media campaign. It's almost like they're run by two different teams and sometimes they are. But what, what can campaigns do to better integrate those two sides and get them talking?

Adam Wise:

I put in two groups. The first one is how can media help with offline contact? And then how can media data help with, with offline contact. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, today is Georgia runoff day. So, you know, just doing a two year flashback to 2020 in that runoff, Democrats spent 12 million on linear media promoting ballot mechanic spots. By December 5th of the last runoff, there were 6% of voters that had voted in the runoff that hadn't voted in the general election, and the majority were non-white. So there was very clearly a concentrated effort by Democrats. And actually one of the firms that was hired by Warnock was actually Mike Fuse, who did a lot of the a p i targeting for Obama to go out and use media to turn people out to the polls to create social utility, a sense of urgency to get those low and mid propensity voters turned out to a special election.

You know, conversely, there were $0 spent on, on that same notion. And if you look back at the spending this year, you know, it, it's kind of the same thing. Every warnock spot, every dim spot ends with a call to action about, you know, we need you one more time. So I am a firm believer that paid media can do more than just persuade. It can also motivate and turn people out, and I'm very curious to see how that can work in the future. But the second is really we're talking about how fragmented media is, but everybody has an address. We have pretty good addresses in the, in the voter file and, you know, almost three quarters of the US population, we have high reliable cell phones. One of the things that I, I think is rarely promising, when you look at the, essentially the revolution we've had with embedded video text, I could put a 32nd HD video spot into a text message and send it out to a bunch of people.

You know, it's, it's not cheap, but if I know the right people that are missed by my TV campaign, it's a very effective way for me to find them. You know, if you look at the Phoenix media market, buying a thousand gross rating points, a 35 plus gets you, and also doing about 200 points of digital gets you to about 70% reach of swing voters in the Phoenix market to go from 70 to 71%. You know, and in media terminology, that's called a cost per reach point. The cost to go one more percent reach of a target is $35,000. You know, if I could find the people I needed to find with embedded video text, we're talking a couple hundred bucks to send them and it go from 70 to 71% reach. So one of the things we really used are, you know, our, our 15 million person panel for, we also ran 1.3 million survey responses over the past couple of years.

We've created 50 media scores for every voter in the country. So I can tell you essentially who is unreachable, and we've backed this up with validation on live callers and also matching it up to known data. So it's not just modeled, it's actually matched up in a lot of cases, the known data. So I can send a text message to the, you know, 20, 20% or 30% of my audience that is consuming one hour TV a day, and maybe that one hour is on Netflix, so I can't reach them. So how do we start to make, you know, embedded video texts, you know, door knocking, all of these tools work together, I think is looking at essentially a media voter file for somebody to say, cool. This is Eric Wilson. He consumes podcasts. He watches Hulu. I'm just guessing. I don't think I reached him last week. How can I find him? Well, I have a door knocker in the area.

Eric Wilson:

So, so sort of taking, yeah, taking those rifle shots where, where you've missed with your, your sort of broader targeting. And I think this brings out one of the really interesting, I I'll call it the curse of digital, which is that we can measure everything. And so digital marketing gets scrutinized so much more heavily than traditional media. But I think there are, there's some really interesting ways and you've already mentioned some of them that technology is helping us more accurately measure legacy media like TV and radio. Give us an overview of what you're using there. Right now

Adam Wise:

We spend so much time scrutinizing viewability and ad fraud for digital, yet for tv it's given completely the benefit of the doubt. You know, half of Republican media buying agencies don't have a Nielsen license. They take the ratings provided from the sell side. You know, and I think something that's really important to understand on this is that we don't walk into a TV station. What,

Eric Wilson:

So sorry, Adam, unpack that for us. What's the difference here? What, what's the sell side and what's Nielsen?

Adam Wise:

Yeah, so sell side would be like a TV station, okay. Right? And Nielsen would be a third party measurement provider of this TV show reached X number of people or this percent of people, you know. So when I walk into as a, as a linear media buyer to a TV station, I don't say give me a thousand gross rating points, which is kind of the, the goal, right? I say give me 500 spots that I, as a media buyer using Nielsen data or comScore data or ratings provided to me from the TV station, I am gonna create a projection that those 500 spots will be a thousand gross rating points. But sadly, half of media buying agencies on the Republican side of the aisle don't have a Nielsen license. They don't have a comm score license either. They take the ratings provided by the sell side, who is gonna tell the most advantageous story possible.

You know, I'm not accusing anything of of mal intent. It's just a person doing their job to advocate for their property by, you know, picking the best book during sweeps week, you know, and basically finding the most advantageous possible rating. Now, when we went back and looked at ratings provided to us from a TV station versus our own internal projections, the stations inflated their ratings by 27%. That means 27%, essentially the equivalent of digital ad fraud, right? So if you're going to buy a thousand rating points and you take a station rating without having your own Nielsen license, you could be getting 700 rating points instead of a thousand. And that's one of the most untalked about things in, in media buying cuz there's just no scrutiny. And, and

Eric Wilson:

That's just because they're, they're, they're looking at historical data rather than the more, more up to the minute

Adam Wise:

Data. It it, it's, it's how you choose to project your ratings, right? So most of the time internally it will take, you know, three months, we'll average it out. We'll use a little bit of our own you know, experience and expertise, right? We, we, we place a billion dollars every, you know, about two and a half years. So we have buyers that have been doing this for two plus decades. They have a pretty good sense what the ratings actually are, what Nielsen books to use that are pretty accurate. And then we go back and we post and we, and we check. But if you don't have your own Nielsen license to get your own ratings, to pick your own books, to create your own averages, to figure out what a spot accrues from reach, you're just taking essentially the sale site, the station saying, Hey, I'll charge you a hundred bucks for the spot. I think it's gonna do, you know, a five rating, maybe that spot isn't a five, it's actually a two or a three. So that becomes, you know, essentially it's distorting your reality of how many impressions you're actually getting.

Eric Wilson:

Well Adam, we obviously have a really big challenge around measurement and ad tracking and certainly there's a, a very big problem and, and a big solution o out there. But are there some more narrow opportunities that you'd like to see a startup tackle for, for some of our listeners who may be thinking about helping you out with, with some of these challenges?

Adam Wise:

I mean, honestly, I'm somewhat selfishly, I would love to see somebody create a tool for opting out of Act Blue. And when red you know, mo mostly, you know how to get out of a lot of the text messages cuz the saturation is getting so high and it seems like a silly thing to to say, but if you are house candidate and you're trying to fundraise using text messaging, meanwhile all your potential donors are getting 20 text messages a day from the former president of the United States or from some other, you know, packs, it's very hard for you to cut through. I, I think the ability to have people who have donated once or twice, you know, get less text messages, collect data at the same time you're doing it, Axium, one of the main consumer data warehouses actually create a website where you could go, you know, essentially fix all the erroneous data about you, right?

Oh good. And data would be collected and it would be for your own betterment. But I, I really do think some tool to help decrease the volume of unsolicited text messages so that more meaningful messages can cut through cuz SMS and PTP really is powerful. I think that could be a very interesting slightly untraditional opportunity. And, you know, I think the only other one that really comes to mind is I, I've been surprised that somebody hasn't created a polling co-op to consolidate polling responses. So we can create a bigger ac essentially a, a data trust, but for, for polling, those would be kind of the, the two ideas that come to mind, mind.

Eric Wilson:

Oh, interesting. So I hadn't thought about that before, but the fundraising communication, whether that's via email or or s m s is diminishing your ability to get a message through on the paid campaign side.

Adam Wise:

A hundred percent. And also too, we're seeing a massive candidate spending disparity. If you look at Cook Tossup races this year, the average democratic candidate media buy was double a Republican. You know, they leap practice in 2018 and it's continued to grow. And when you have a candidate with more money, that goes way further, right? So, you know, on average, you know, this year was less, it was about 26% candidate dollars went further than issue dollars on, on linear media, but normally it's been over 40%. So two X actually becomes, you know, a two and a half to three x advantage on impressions on linear media. And if we can do anything to cut the noise so that our candidates, especially at the house level can get their text messaging to cut through so that they can raise more small dollar donors, that's gonna help me with media budgets big time.

Eric Wilson:

Well, thanks to Adam Weiss for a great conversation. You can learn more about him in our show notes. If today's episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague and you look like a genius in the process. Remember to subscribe to The Business of Politics Show wherever you get your podcast, and that way you'll never miss an episode. You can also learn more and view past episodes at business of politics podcast.com. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

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