The Hardest KPI In Advertising

Summary

AdExchanger Talks: “The Hardest KPI In Advertising” (July 28, 2026) – Episode Summary

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Overview

On this episode of AdExchanger Talks, Editor-in-Chief Allison Schiff interviews Mark Jablonowski, CEO of DSPolitical, a demand-side platform dedicated to Democratic campaigns and progressive causes. The episode dives into the unique—and uniquely difficult—challenges of political advertising: selling a secret-ballot choice in a hyper-polarized, high-velocity environment. The conversation touches on the evolution of political ad tech, lessons brand marketers can learn from political campaigns, the rise of connected TV (CTV), the intensifying threat of AI-generated disinformation, and the art and science of persuading voters. Jablonowski shares both war stories from his career and insights into how data, technology, and creativity intersect in modern campaigning.

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Guest Introduction & Personal Background

• Mark Jablonowski is CEO of DSPolitical, previously serving as CTO and President.
• Political tech career started in high school, inspired by witnessing nepotism in Alaska politics and driven by a passion for social change.
• Early work on the Obama campaign led to pivotal technical roles, eventually running national tech programs and setting the foundation for his move into political ad tech.

Notable Quote

"What it really means is we are optimizing for potentially the most difficult to measure KPI on the planet and that’s a secret ballot every other year." – Mark Jablonowski [08:03]

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Political Advertising: The Ultimate KPI

• The “hardest KPI” is persuading a voter to cast a secret ballot—a decision even more personal and opaque than any purchase.
• Campaigns must optimize for motivating a very high-stakes, binary outcome, in a finite time frame.

Quote

"You either convince someone, you persuade them to take an action...It's, it is quite different. You live in a very, very high pressure environment in a very short period of time." – Allison Schiff [12:23]

2. The Data-Driven Engine of Campaigns

• Political campaigns have had "platinum-level CRM" data on nearly every voter for decades, enabling highly sophisticated modeling, targeting, and campaign optimization [09:45].
• Specialized meta DSPs like DSPolitical are built to translate rich offline voter data into omnichannel digital engagement at speed and scale.

Quote

"They are unbelievably data driven because they have access to so much more information than a general corporation would." – Mark Jablonowski [09:45]

• Unique focus on time as the one irrecoverable resource: “You have to be willing to work hard at really any hour and get things done faster than you ever have before…” [13:00]

3. Polarization and Political Ad Spend

• Anticipated $11.6 billion in midterm spending—more than the 2024 presidential—reflects intensifying polarization and high stakes driven by Supreme Court rulings (e.g., Citizens United), super PACs, and changing fundraising rules [15:25–16:13].
• Modern media environment (24-hour news cycle) exacerbates audience segmentation and incentivizes ever-more specialized, extreme messaging (the CNN “June 1, 1980” theory).

Quote

"You just, you get these two, two groups that are marching further apart from each other." – Mark Jablonowski [18:41]

4. Disinformation and AI Deepfakes

• The episode explores recent alarming examples of AI-fueled “deepfake” political ads and the challenge of fighting both their spread and the larger, more insidious organic disinformation ecosystem empowered by social algorithms.
• Regulatory efforts lag as platforms cut back on trust and safety teams; lack of standardized rules for transparency and accountability creates vulnerabilities [21:31–24:00].

Quote

"There’s just nothing to be done...it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once a message is out there that was, you know, created through nefarious means." – Mark Jablonowski [23:11]

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The CTV Explosion and Media Strategy (25:45–30:15)

• CTV now draws $2.7B in political spending, driven by the ease of transacting, better data, and the struggle to reach elusive voters sidelined by traditional linear TV [25:45].
• However, many campaigns are still using CTV like linear TV—as “broadcast memes”—without leveraging its full targeting or frequency-optimization potential.

Quote

"No political consultant has ever gotten fired for saying, let’s buy a thousand points of TV...that is still very much the tried and true playbook." – Mark Jablonowski [28:14]

• Barriers to spending more on digital include culture, measurement limitations, and lack of transparency in digital buying versus linear TV, leading to persistent channel inertia [29:10–30:15].

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Lessons for Brands from Political Campaigns (31:29–42:44)

1. Audience-First, Then Channels ([33:22–35:59])

• Campaigns start by defining, scoring, and understanding individual voters (via voter files and modeling), then select channels.
• Brands default to channel-based planning and often miss the deeper efficiency and effectiveness of true “audience-first” thinking—but shouldn’t become myopic in modeling either.

Quote

"Thinking about it with an audience lens as your first stop...is important. But you can’t be too focused, too myopic...if you over focus, over analyze, you’re going to have your blinders on." – Mark Jablonowski [34:51]

2. Sophisticated Exclusion Logic ([36:09–39:05])

• Political advertisers obsessively suppress segments not persuadable or already converted, maximizing media efficiency.
• Brand marketers rarely do exclusion at this level—often due to data silos, measurement limitations, or institutional inertia.

Quote

"Suppressing already registered voters. Like, just talk to people that you know are not registered. It sounds basic, but sometimes you really have to hold the hands of folks..." – Mark Jablonowski [37:26]

3. Experimentation and Maximizing First-Party Data ([40:31–41:54])

• Campaigns use predictive modeling and randomized controlled trials—testing not just messaging but movement on actual outcomes.
• Brands talk about first-party data but under-use it due to vendor dependencies, lack of analytical culture, and risk aversion.
• AI, once mature, can lower barriers for brands to run these models.

Quote

"If they were to spend the time and really unlock what they have in their CRM...and go out and actually start doing those predictive models and validation of those models, I think you’d start to see, you know, a lot more efficacy out there..." – Mark Jablonowski [41:05]

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Big-Picture Reflections

Is Political Advertising Good for Democracy? ([42:48–44:36])

• Jablonowski argues that while information overload is a problem, providing direct, transparent, factual messaging to voters between news institutions and social platforms is ultimately positive—a “cornerstone of how campaigns can get their message out.”

Quote

"Any way that you can encourage [more factual information] to me is a good thing for democracy and it’s a good thing for the country." – Mark Jablonowski [44:32]

The Power of Creative & Emotional Connection ([44:36–46:40])

• Data and tech are crucial, but unforgettable creative can anchor movements.
• Most memorable for Jablonowski: The “Yes We Can” video from the Obama 2008 campaign—a moment of emotional and artistic resonance that galvanized voters at scale.

Quote

"It was a very, very meaningful emotional battle cry...that deep artistic, emotional connection with the campaign." – Mark Jablonowski [46:24]

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Optimizing for potentially the most difficult to measure KPI on the planet...a secret ballot every other year.” – Jablonowski [08:03]
• “There’s no question this is going to be an unbelievably consequential election and expensive election.” – Jablonowski [15:25]
• “All of a sudden you go from information to infotainment and you have to start embellishing things and sensationalizing things in order to fill that long void...” – Jablonowski [17:40]
• “There’s just nothing to be done. The platforms have unfortunately taken away a huge amount of their trust and safety teams...It’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.” – Jablonowski [23:11]
• “When your resources are truly limited, like they are in a campaign, again, you have to push the efficiency and push the innovation.” – Jablonowski [37:26]
• "We want to have voters have more information, more factual information, rather than less information or not factual information." – Jablonowski [44:17]

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Segment Highlights

• Mark’s Origin Story & Alaska Political Awakening: [03:33 – 05:09]
• Secret Ballots and Measurement Challenges: [08:03 – 09:45]
• The Economics of Political Polarization: [15:25 – 19:23]
• AI Deepfakes vs. Organic Disinformation: [21:31 – 24:00]
• CTV & Shifting Media Spend: [25:45 – 30:15]
• Brand Lessons: Audience First, Exclusion, Experimentation: [33:22 – 42:44]
• Is Political Ad Good for Democracy?: [42:48 – 44:36]
• Creative that Resonates: ‘Yes We Can’: [45:23 – 46:34]

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Tone and Style

The conversation was candid, witty, but deeply serious about the stakes and responsibilities of political advertising, blending nerdy technical details with big-picture social impact.

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Final Takeaways

Political campaigns—operating under extreme time pressure, with unprecedented data, and in hyper-polarized conditions—offer lessons for every marketer about data-driven audience modeling, strategic media allocation, creative risk-taking, and the dangers/possibilities of emerging technology. While the democratization of targeting and measurement tools is on the horizon (via AI), Jablonowski maintains that nothing will ever truly replace the human need for real, emotional connection in a democracy.

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For more resources or to connect with Mark Jablonowski on campaign targeting strategies, his DMs are open! [35:59]

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. Alison I'm Allison Schiff, Editor in Chief of Ad Exchanger, and my guest this week is Mark Jablonowski, CEO of the very appropriately named DSPolitical, which is a DSP and ad platform for political campaigns specifically for Democratic candidates and progressive causes. Mark went from running tech for the Obama campaign to building a meta DSP that's optimized to try and meet what might be the toughest KPI in marketing a secret ballot every other year. If you think selling consumer products is hard, just try selling a candidate in a hyper polarized 24 hour news cycle environment where outrage never sleeps. We'll talk about why political campaigns have basically been living in a post cookie world for years. What lessons brands can learn from political targeting and measurement, the explosion of CTV and political advertising, and also the uncomfortable but very important stuff like AI deepfakes and the spread of disinformation. But before we dive in, programmatic I.O. new York is coming up on September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquee in Times Square. It's time to unleash growth across the open web. And to do that, we've got a seriously good agenda lined up for you with excellent speakers including Chris Kane and folks from Horizon Media, pmg. Hey dude, Dentsu X, Razorfish, Goodway Group and more. Podcast listeners get 10% off with the promo code POD10. So what you waiting for? Get your ticket and see you there. Hey Mark, welcome to the podcast.

[A]

Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

[B]

So what is one thing about you that not a lot of other people what they wouldn't already know and feel free to get weird with it.

[A]

Well, I think one thing you can find out is I'm kind of a data nerd and really like to to track things and optimize things but I've been keeping track of every flight I've been on since 2008 and I am about to cross the 1000 flight marker sometime in the next couple of months.

[B]

That's crazy. Where's the farthest place you've been?

[A]

Oh, that's a great question. I and now I have to think like analytically what is actually the furthest away. But I just took a very nice trip with my wife for our honeymoon where we went to Australia and New Zealand amongst many other far fledged places like South Africa and so we definitely spent a lot of time as far away as possible that is a version

[B]

of the quantified life. People often track their body metrics, but you've been tracking your flights, so that's interesting. And then something I think a lot of people would know about you, because it's very obvious, is that you're a politics junkie and you've been at the intersection of tech and democratic politics for pretty much your whole career. What got you interested, like way back when? I know you studied political science in college, but I'm sure the passion goes way back further than that.

[A]

Yeah, it's funny, I studied political science very briefly and I'm sure we'll get to it. But I did end up dropping out of college after one year. So my interest in politics started back when I was in high school growing up in Alaska. And Senator Frank Murkowski resigned his Senate seat to run for governor and appointed his daughter to fill out the remainder of his term. And I felt like this was just the most flagrant form of nepotism you could possibly imagine.

[B]

It feels monarchic.

[A]

Yeah. Regardless of what side of the political aisle you're on, this is just a terrible, terrible thing for democracy and for the country and for the state. And so I wanted to have a little bit of help trying to change that course and ended up going into Tony Knowles. He was a two term mayor of Anchorage, two term governor of Alaska, and ran to unseat Lisa Murkowski in 2004, which was the first year she was up for proper election. And I was just sophomore in high school but wanted to see if I could help out. So they ended up finding out that I had some technical capabilities and offered me a job helping to run the tech there and ended up going from school from 7:30 in the morning to 2:00pm and then sort of working on the campaign from 2:30 to 10:00pm but that's where I got interested in how you can use tech to affect social change. We didn't win the race obviously, but it's where I figured out that, you know, you can use these skills for shaping the world around you.

[B]

What did you do after the first year of college?

[A]

I took some time off to go be an intern on the Obama campaign. So I started off in New Hampshire back when Obama was just like, funny dude, weird last name. No one really knew who he was. I said, I like you. I believe in the message that you're, you're sharing. And so first started like with the Colby students for Obama chapter and went on to, as I was saying, New Hampshire to knock on doors and make phone calls do the field work that's so important, the direct voter contact. And I was really inspired by it. And similar story to what happened in Alaska. They found out I had a technical capability or skill set and offered me a job to run the IT systems for the New Hampshire primary. And I'm fortunate. I had a professor who said mark, take the time off. You're going to learn so much more than we're going to teach you here, but you got to promise to come back. I said great, of course, yeah, I'll do that. Totally went through New Hampshire and ended up not being done with the campaign and the campaign wasn't done with me. So bounced around the country, did the same thing in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana. Ended up in Chicago where I helped to run the national tech program for the the general election and was just inspired constantly by what we were building and what we were able to do and obviously that race we did win and that opened up a lot of other doors for me.

[B]

So you were off to the races literally.

[A]

Exactly. That's a great way to put it. And just never was able to go back to school after that. And running technology and Data for the inauguration 2009 there was just figured I could carry on with where I was

[B]

at and so I'll do a quick resume rewind from that point on. To bring us to today. There was a rogue Global Solutions, which kind of sounds like a consultancy group in a spy thriller, but it's actually the name of a tech strategy firm that you founded in 09 for helping governments and campaigns and nonprofits with their strategy and implementing solutions, managing software development, all of that stuff. And then we'll fast forward a bit and get to 2014. That's when you joined DS Political, which is a political ad platform specifically for Democrats. You were the CTO and then you became the president and the CTO and now you're just the good old CEO. So I guess they, they like you over there. But for listeners who live in more of the brand focused ad tech world who might not be as familiar with DSPolitical, what do you, what do you got in there? Because you guys describe yourselves as a meta DSP for political campaigns, but that is rather jargony. So what does that mean exactly?

[A]

It's so jargony. What it really means is we are optimizing for potentially the most difficult to measure KPI on the planet and that's a secret ballot every other year. And everything we do is how do we use data and technology to get important message in front of the right people in order to affect their vote, which is a very personal, very high stakes decision. And so we're optimized entirely around what is that outcome of a very high stakes decision.

[B]

It's amazing how personal the decision is because some couples don't even tell each other who they're voting for. You might not tell your friends because what you believe politically in your heart is not what you say out loud with your mouth over drinks or in the coffee shop.

[A]

That's so true. I mean, you saw this in 2016. That was one of the reasons why so many of the polls got it wrong about who was going to win the races. People didn't want to admit that they were voting for Trump when it was in a social setting, but they definitely wanted to vote for him when it was private in the ballot box. And that just goes to show you that sometimes it's difficult to take people at face value when they're trying to put on a public Persona, even when it's on a one on one conversation.

[B]

And when you're a brand trying to collect information because you sell toilet paper or whatever, that's one thing. But when we're talking about the nation and our future for the next four years, it's something else entirely. To not have really good data.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely the case. And data is the foundation of all of political campaigning for the better part of 40 years. We have really. I talk about a sort of a platinum level CRM on every voting age adult in the country. And it's not just for digital advertising or just for online campaigning. This is how campaigns run their decision process, whether it's on, you know, in the field, on phone calls, campaign strategy. They are unbelievably data driven because they have access to so much more information than a general corporation would.

[B]

Well, is that why political campaigns need specialized DSPs? Like, why can't they just use a general purpose DSP? Like, yeah, you're selling a person and like their point of view and not like the aforementioned toilet paper, but still. Right. Like a DS is a dsp, a dsp a DSP or not really.

[A]

You know, you can certainly check the box and get, get by with something that's off the shelf and there's plenty of good technology out there. But when you have such a high stakes outcome, having something that's so finely tuned for that outcome is really important. And we look at it in a couple of fashions. We say we're a meta onboarder and meta dsp. We take this really great offline data and bring it online in as many ways as we possibly can, as long as it's privacy compliant and we're reviewing all of the possible settings and everything, we try and use every possible channel and then we go and ship it off to multiple bidders and we run three different bidders on every campaign that we run in order to get so much more reach into that offline data audience. And then we bring it all back together in a central reporting platform. So this is a huge amount of infrastructure that is wildly expensive to build and maintain and it just isn't necessary. If you're trying to sell an incremental bottle of Coca Cola, you don't have to go to these lengths to find a target in that potential audience. But when you are trying to reach a persuadable voter, when maybe they're not searching for that information but the campaign knows you need to hear it or thinks you need to hear it, you have to cut through the noise in a really busy, really complex media environment. And what we've built is a way to do that. We're optimized for this one thing and really that's what we focus on.

[B]

And it's so high stress because the, there's always another day when you can sell an incremental Coke. But I mean, a race is only a certain period of time and it's very binary. You either convince someone, you persuade them to take an action, you nudge them at the right time, get them to do what they were going to do anyway, because getting somebody off the sofa is not always easy, despite the fact that they might have a candidate in mind and actually want to vote. It's, it is quite different. You live in a very, very high pressure environment in a very short period of time.

[A]

I, I couldn't have said it better myself. And you think about the largest spend in the digital advertising corporate world. It's around Black Friday. And even if Black Friday is, you know, your, your sale is, your advertising is missing the specific sale, your brand exists beyond those windows or Cyber Monday or whatever the big marquee event is, you're a durable entity. And in politics you're not, as you said, if you don't have, you know, if you don't win the race, your entity essentially disappears entirely. So it does no good to have something running past the election deadline. It does no good to have misallocated resources. And that's why time ultimately is the most crucial factor for just about any campaign. You get more money, you can get more Volunteers, you can get more resources of anything but time. So in politics, this is one thing that we talk about all the time for other ad tech platforms or partners that tried to get into the political world. It's like you have to be really cognizant of the campaign's time because you have to be willing to work hard at really any hour and get things done faster than you ever have before, because that's the speed that politics moves at.

[B]

And there are a lot of lessons that brands can learn, even though they operate in different environments. And we're going to talk about that in a bit. But first, I want to get into this political cycle because the numbers are crazy. So I'm just going to cite some numbers for you from Ad Impact that I came across. So spending during the midterms is set to surpass the record, which was set in 2022. So basically, we're talking about $11.6 billion in spending this year, and that's compared to 8.9 billion during midterms and even more than the 11.2 billion that was spent during the 2024 presidential cycle. It's just wild. And, I mean, there are different figures out there. But regardless of where you get your numbers, it looks like this is going to be the most expensive election cycle in history. What's spending? I'm sorry, what's driving that level of spending? And I don't want to be cynical, but it kind of sounds like polarization is, like, good for business. Right. Because that's what feels like might be driving some of this intensity in terms of spending.

[A]

Yeah. There's. There's no question this is going to be an unbelievably consequential election and expensive election. There's no. No way around it that there's more and more money in politics every single year. And that's something that, you know, I don't see slowing down at any point. The fact that we are surpassing a presidential election with a midterm, you know, it boggles my mind. And when I look at the growth of our company and the growth of the industry, I just. I'm almost speechless thinking about how. How much just goes into it.

[B]

Well, what's. What's making. I don't know what's making the money just, like, poor from wallets. What's driving it.

[A]

Yeah. Ultimately becomes the stakes and what is potentially on the table for all of these interests that have, you know, business with the government or dealings with the government. Obviously, Citizens United was a turning point for how campaign finance is viewed from the PAC world and essentially allowing unlimited corporate donations through super PACs. We now have a new ruling with this Supreme Court that is going to allow essentially unlimited funding from party committees to hard side campaigns. It's gonna be really interesting to see what that does to super PACs, if that makes them less relevant in the future because you can now coordinate so much more spend. But at the end of the day, your point on polarization I think really is salient. And I, I sort of have a theory that a lot of this started on June 1, 1980.

[B]

What I, I, what happened on June

[A]

1, 1980, that is the, that's the day that Ted Turner flipped the switch on CNN and we went from having a segmented news ecosystem where you had a trusted news source that was on for a couple hours a day to having a 24 hour news cycle. And you know, I don't know about you, but no matter how I feel, there's just, there's not 24 hours of news in the day.

[B]

No.

[A]

So all of a sudden you go from information to infotainment and you have to start embellishing things and sensationalizing things in order to fill that long void and in order to fill that void with advertising dollars and, and then in order to attract more advertisers, you start to specialize your content a little bit. You start to have views that are maybe a little bit more on the right or a little bit on the left with Fox and MSNBC or Ms. Now as they're calling it. And that specialization just sort of keeps driving different cohorts a little bit further away because in order to try and attract more viewers, to attract more eyeballs, to attract more advertising dollars, to become a little bit more and a little bit more extreme with every iteration. And you just, you get these two, two groups that are marching further apart from each other. Then you Fast forward to 2008 ish and you start adding on algorithmic optimization of news delivery and creating these bubbles where again, in order to keep your eyeballs and making you feel comfortable, you're only exposed to the information on your social feeds that they think you want to see. Creating this really nice comfy environment for advertisers to spend money in and not upsetting the end viewer in order to show them a different viewpoint. And that just pours gas on this fire of creating people to move further and further away. But yeah, I think that plays a huge impact into why we're seeing so much money is you have to cut through the noise and attract the eyeballs of people that really are moving further from the center.

[B]

And as hot as people get under the collar about politics, as angry as they get, there's also a sort of self soothing that people go through when they listen to the 24 hour news cycle because there's so much repetition and you have your viewpoints reiterated over and over and over again. And I think there's some comfort to that, regardless of where you are on the spectrum. I want to get into something a little spicy, I guess before we hit the break. There have been some kind of alarming examples of AI being weaponized in political ads this cycle, like more than before, just because the technology is more developed. There was that fake Maura Healey radio spot that was made by one of her opponents and posted on Instagram. It uses generative AI to make it sound like she was saying something she never said. They're the deep fakes of James Talarico in Texas. That one from the pro Trump PAC called Citizens for Sanity, it shows him like singing a parody of My Favorite Things from the Sound of Music and it's mocking his support for gender affirming care. And it's like kind of like messed up stuff. But you just published an op ed in Newsweek pretty recently arguing that this whole, I don't know, like moral panic about AI deepfakes in paid political ads, it's warranted. Like, it's something to be concerned about. But it's also distracting from what you could say is the scarier problem, which is the organic disinformation ecosystem. Because, like, no one in their right mind is going to think that James Hellerica was really wearing a dirndl, like singing about girls dusted with hormones until they grow mustaches. Like, it's just. That's not real, obviously. But there is a lot of insidious disinformation riding on the social platform algorithms. There are no disclosure agreements, no requirements, no archive. But yeah, I mean, you're the one who wrote the op ed, which I thought was super interesting, which is why I'm basically just monologuing right now. But unpack that all for me. Like, what really is the biggest threat here? And then how do you combat it?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, thank you. First, I think this is something that, you know, we need to continue focusing on. And in this regulatory environment, I don't see a lot changing with this administration, just to be very, very frank and blunt. But yeah, we need to think about how paid media is constructed and disclosed. And there at least are some safeguards in that Regard. There are a lot of ad archives, there are disclosure rules for if you're using generative content content in a number of states, it's not enough. We need more, we need more transparency and we need more understanding of who's behind it. But generally, I think most campaigns are going to act, you know, according to the law and with their constituents best interests at heart. You're always going to find bad examples without question, but on the whole, you're going to see better actors there than what you're going to see on just the, the sea of the, the social Internet where there's no repercussions for posting false or misleading information. And quite the opposite. There's actually a lot of incentives when creators or other people are able to gain notoriety by content that's algorithmically amplified to an audience that, you know, is susceptible to hearing about whatever the topic is. And, uh, there's just nothing to be done. The platforms have unfortunately taken away a huge amount of their trust and safety teams under the Trump administration. We saw some really good work from essentially every social platform during the COVID years of trying to tamp down and eliminate in disinformation and make it so you could actually trust what's on their platforms a little bit more. And now in order to appease the administration, they really have eliminated, fired, reduced, even tried to say, like we were wrong by doing it before entirely to appease who's sitting in the White House right now. And you know, I, I feel like we have to have a standard for truth. You know, there, there aren't multiple sides to, you know, what is factual and what isn't. But it's, it's definitely been tough, tough to watch just what's out there because it spreads so fast and it's almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once a message is out there that was, you know, created through nefarious means.

[B]

Yeah, lies or disinformation travels around the world, you know, faster than the truth. Like what the truth, it's still putting on its shoes or its pants, whatever that phrase is. Well, on that note, which is a downer, but an important thing to call out, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we're going to dive like super deep into this column that you wrote for us around a year ago. It's crazy that it's been actually over a year about what political campaigns can teach brands after Google's latest cookie reversal. That's the headline and even the reference to the cookie reversal it's like a little quaint. Like I can't believe it's been two years since Google said yeah, it wouldn't deprecate third party cookies after all. Like what is time? It's just a flat surface circle. But anyway, stick with us. All right, we're back. And before talking about lessons for brands from political campaigns, I want to talk about ctv because CTV is going to grow like gangbusters this cycle. I think it's going to be the fastest growing media type for political advertising. It's going to generate like $2.7 billion, something like that. You guys like DS Political has a partnership with Free Will specifically related to CTV voter targeting. What would you say is driving all that spending on ctv? Although from a viewer's point of view, it is pretty relentless. I mean the frequency is. Oh my God.

[A]

Yeah, there is a lot of interesting things to unpack there. And first off, you know, CTV is growing because people have smart televisions and it easy to transact that way. Broadcast is an old system that is a little bit convoluted for how you can purchase and measure and transact. And who is actually watching those broadcast spots is also another thing that maybe isn't aligning with who the electorate is. And that's also where you're seeing a lot of the frequency saturation. When you have a smaller audience but you're still buying a thousand points on tv, it's going to be more and more to a small point. But you can now target very effortlessly on connected televisions. Something that ideas political we've been focused on now for eight years, all the way back to 2018 when you could barely use data, almost not at all. It was very rough. And see it sort of iterate every year up until 24 where it was by far the majority of our business. And I think one of the challenges or some of the things that people are still figuring out even though it's such ubiquitous technology at this point, is how to have a broadcast and streaming or CTV campaign running in in concert with each other, making sure that you're utilizing different segmentation tactics so you don't get that frequency flood that you're talking about. But something that we're seeing that's a little concerning is a lot of political advertisers are actually using CTV as a broadcast memes where you've got this rich data set and the ability to be a lot more calculated and efficient with your media dollars. We're seeing that folks are still thinking about it as well. Let's just Buy everyone in this congressional district just through CTV instead of through the broadcast airwaves.

[B]

See, that's interesting because even though CTV is growing, broadcast is still going to take nearly half of all political ad spending. During the midterms. All you hear about is how linear is dying this slow death. But that's not really the case for political campaigns. It seems like a mentality thing, right? They're like, oh, well, CTV exists, so we'll put some money in that too. But they have, they have like a linear mindset.

[A]

Yes, very much so. And you know, no political consultant has ever gotten fired for saying, let's buy a thousand points of tv. And you know, maybe they will soon. That's probably good at some point. But right now, you know, that is still very much the tried and true playbook. So it's thinking about how you can utilize each tool for its best use and being able to utilize the capabilities that are expanded when you're going through CTV or streaming, layering on really great first party data. And again, being more efficient with a scarce resource, campaigns care about, you know, making sure their dollars are going further because again, you've got this scarce time, scarce money, and just being as efficient as possible.

[B]

If that's the case though, what's keeping them from spending more of their money on digital? Because that comes off like every cycle. Like why digital isn't getting more money.

[A]

It's interesting. So first, I think Republicans generally have been a little bit further ahead than Democrats on this with their media mixes. And I don't know if that's lessons from the corporate world or their consultant class is a little bit, you know, more divorced from the traditional television model. But a couple interesting things. First, you know, you've got TV competitives and you know exactly how many points of television your competitor is buying as public information. And so there's a feeling if you're not matching them dollar for dollar, you're falling behind. Where, yes, we do have disclosures and some transparency in the political ad TV or streaming CTV market, but it's nowhere near as centralized or easy to access and complete of a data set. So you may not always see how much is being put on ctv. So you don't know how much you should be matching if you're just trying to go dollar for dollar with your opponent there. So I think that's one of those things that catches you in the backwards thinking.

[B]

Well, not really backwards thinking, but there are brands that operate a certain way because they've always operated a certain way or because they've never had to operate with the kind of constraints that a political campaign or advertisers in regulated industries have had to operate within. So that's my segue to your column, the piece that I teased before the break. And I'll just, I'll outline the argument just briefly and then we'll dig in. But basically, like in your review, political advertisers were already or always living in a post cookie world, regardless of anything Google or any browser did or didn't do. And that was out of necessity. Campaigns never really got to rely on third party data or take shortcuts, you know, like anyone trying to market something in a regulated industry. So I mean, not, not to be facetious, but like, was it kind of nice, like just not having whiplash every time Google said boo? Like, were you feeling a little bit smug? I mean, third party cookie deprecation was my life for a while. It's kind of sad to say, but yeah, I mean, if you didn't have to really deal with those vicissitudes, it probably felt pretty nice.

[A]

Yeah, and it's more, at least for us at DSPolitical, we really work on building a robust technology platform that will survive regardless of what the whims of a company are. And so back in 2017, 2016, we had pivoted beyond the cookie and our company. We literally were the first folks to bring the national voter file and match it against online cookie identifiers. Our tagline when we launched in 2011 was home of the political cookie. So like we were all in on cookies. But in late 2016, where like we realized we had to pivot beyond that and find alternative durable solutions before this was even in the lexicon of deprecation. But realizing how you can expand and just use your resources again as effectively and efficiently as possible. And that means if everyone's using cookies, how do we find something else where maybe we've got more efficient path in or a better path in to find that voter in this case. So the sort of necessity to innovate is a constant in campaigns. And it's one of the things that I talk about all the time with companies is don't just be okay with what the status quo is. Go build the next status quo and then break that because you're, you know, for me it's how do we innovate? How do we deliver the product that's going to move the most hearts and minds? Yes, we want to run a good business, but we actually care about the outcome of our clients. You know, we're we're partisan, we're democratically aligned, and we are trying to build a tool that's going to be more effective than what our opponents are using. And that constant need for innovation and caring about the outcome really pushes us. And it's, I think, a very durable lesson.

[B]

Well, let's talk about some of the lessons that brands can learn from how political campaigns operate. So the first one being audience first, it sounds kind of fluffy. Campaigns start with people, not channels, but like for real. And I know if you asked a CMO what they care about, they're going to say people obviously. But then the way they spend, like their actions tell a different story the way they spend, they focus on channels. So what is being audience first look like inside of a political campaign? And how is it different from how most media gets planned? And what could brands do better? That's a three parter right there. Yeah.

[A]

And you know, in the political world we're very fortunate that we have access to so much, you know, protected, excuse me, protected data. And this is voter registration, publicly available information and election result information that can then be modeled back to who showed up to vote vote. And when you're using this data for political communications, you know, it's really, really powerful. And by having all of our mindset really go towards what does the data tell us, we're able to go back to being again, more efficient and look at how do we reach those specific people as opposed to, you know, the channels that they're after or what have you. That's not to say that you should always go audience first. I would never advocate that. You're only doing targeted media. You're going to miss out on a whole bunch of opportunities with expansion voting or unregistered voters or what have you. You have to make sure that you're using the correct media mix for the given circumstance. And data is just a huge tool. Audience makeup is a huge tool for that. And we could spend a whole hour talking about how this functions and why it's important. So I'm happy to go sort of as deep as you want, but thinking about it with an audience lens as your first stop, to be as efficient with the people that you have a strong conviction about is important. But then you also, you know, you can't be too focused, too myopic in that regard because you know, if you over focus, over analyze, you're going to have your blinders on and you're probably going to miss things that are just to your left or just to your right, which Is again, another thing that happened, I think, in 2016, where a lot of the democratic world was so hyper focused on an audience which just wasn't the correct one. So you have to make sure your assumptions are correct if you're going to be focused here.

[B]

I'm sure your proverbial DMs are open, so if anyone has more questions about targeting, they should definitely hit you up. I'm just tossing you out there.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

But the second lesson you have for brand marketers has to do with exclusion logic. So suppressing the people that you, you can't move because you were alluding to this before the break. There's no point in wasting impressions on someone who's not going to vote, for sure, not going to vote, like already voted, or they're so dug in that no ad is going to change their mind. That's just waste. And that also feels obvious when you say it out loud. But it's also, unfortunately not how most brand targeting and retargeting works, which is close to like one step before criminal stalking. And it's just like volume, volume, volume. I mean, like we were saying, I do, I do think political advertisers have a frequency problem like almost no other advertiser. But there is a reason for that, because you're trying to make sure someone who's gonna vote, like, just goes and actually does it. But my question is, what's the reason why so many brands don't actually, like, live that philosophy? Is it a measurement problem? Like, they don't know who's already converted? Is it like a culture problem? Because more is better? So just flood the zone with impressions like, what's, what's up with. What's up with that?

[A]

I think often it's a data silo issue and you don't always have systems that are speaking to each other. Or there's a really great idea to do it, but in order to plummet altogether, it's more complicated and more, more difficult than they maybe have the time to work on. And at the end of the day, it probably is not the end of the world for the brand. And so they just let it ride. And once you let one thing ride, it makes it easier to let the second thing and the third thing ride. But when your resources are truly limited, like they are in a campaign, again, you have to push the efficiency and push the innovation. So couple examples of if we're doing a voter registration campaign, this is like 101 stuff, but it's shocking when you talk to clients about it. They're like, oh yeah, like suppressing already registered voters. Like just talk to people that you know are not registered. It sounds basic, but sometimes you really have to hold the hands of folks to get them to where they need to be. Another example, which is something that we pioneered at DSPolitical, is automatically scrubbing people who have returned their absentee ballots or voted early from our target audiences as we come down the general election stretch. And so we have data feeds that are updated daily and basically anytime someone has, you know, we know that they voted, it flows through the system and we're not going to be proactively targeting them. We're going to make sure they're on an exclusion list. In order to make the campaign's dollars go further on the people that do

[B]

matter, you should target them with, I don't know, like an ad that looks like an I voted sticker or something.

[A]

I love that if you know who

[B]

they are so they can feel good about themselves. Okay, so third, third lesson, which also sounds kind of obvious, but it's using first party data to full advantage because brands also have a lot of good first party data data. They have CRM data and they use it for things like retention, short term conversions. But political campaigns, again, like out of necessity, you need to build really strong predictive models that score not just who someone is, but how likely they are to change or stay. And you have just a certain amount of time to do it. And then you run these experiments, like randomized control trials to figure out what actually moves people, not just what gets someone to click on something like that's a totally useless metric for you. And I'd argue for a lot of people, even though the vanity, you know, is still, is still real. But so that culture of experimentation, I think it's changing. Brands are embracing it, but it's still absent from a lot of the brand world. And I just, I don't know why. Right, because the data is there and people love talking about first party data and what, and what they have and it doesn't seem like they're using it to full advantage.

[A]

Yeah, and you know, we, we do a lot of work with corporate advertisers in a totally non political way under different brands as well. And you know, when we've gone in there, we've really seen that they, they want to learn from the political world and take the lessons away that we've done with first party data. And so often we've seen that the corporate marketers are working with vendors that, you know, have their own Data solution. And you know, they've been sold that they've got audiences that they're targeting. But in actuality, it's not, not based on who that actual advertiser are. It's based on categories or constituencies. And if they were to spend the time and really unlock what they have in their CRM, what they have in their CDP in a more complex way and go out and actually start doing those predictive models and validation of those models, I think you'd start to see, you know, a lot more, a lot more efficacy out there, but it's just not the standard playbook. So there's a little bit of hesitancy for, for jumping into it for something that has a little bit of an upfront cost.

[B]

Yeah, that's true. It's hard to get the CFO to loosen the purse strings for something that might not be a sure thing or will require hiring or a lot of effort, but it's, it's worth the effort, I think.

[A]

And I think this is something that you're going to see. AI really help with this in the near future where you've got easier access to machine learning capabilities. And yes, there's definitely a ways to go before we're there and we can trust it and we're able to actually have something that is bomb proof coming out of a generative AI system. But creating more accessibility into custom audiences and custom scoring and reducing the barrier to entry is going to do great things for helping marketers really do more with their own data. We have to get to the point where you can for sure trust the outputs before you start putting a lot of dollars behind it.

[B]

Can I ask you a really heady question for the penultimate one?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. So you've spent your whole career making the political advertising targeting machine more effective. We've just spent 40 minutes talking about it. Voter modeling and suppression logic and the art and science of persuasion. But is political advertising good for democracy? Like, I don't know, wouldn't more town halls just be better or something? Not to be Pollyanna about it, but

[A]

still, the answer is yes and yes. Town halls are incredibly important person to person. Individual contact is so meaningful and so important. But paid political communication is a cornerstone of how campaigns can get their message out. And when you can't necessarily rely on social platforms to fairly distribute organic content and you're getting less of a trust in news institutions and you need to have a megaphone and you need to have a way to ultimately connect with the voter. And paid political messaging does that. It lets you directly represent the truth of your campaign to your constituency without any people in the middle and ultimately form, form that hopefully emotional connection with the voter to get them to be a participant in democracy. So, yes, I get the criticism that some people think that you've got too much information coming in and it's just an overload of political ads. But at the end of the day, we want to have voters have more information, more factual information, rather than less information or not factual information. And any way that you can encourage that to me is a good thing for democracy and it's a good thing for the country.

[B]

So, last question. And you just mentioned emotional connection, and it really does seem like voter persuasion. Although we've spent a lot of time talking about the data driven aspects, it really is an art and a science and the creative is really important. So there have been some really memorable examples of effective political advertising going back decades and decades. But what's one that you recall that made you feel something that wasn't just generic or just an attack ad? I'm thinking of like the LBJ ad from 64 with the little girl and the daisy about stopping nuclear winter. That was pretty good. That was effective. You don't really see stuff like that anymore.

[A]

You don't. You know, there are some masterful political ad makers out there that just do unbelievable work. But the thing that resonates with me when, when you ask me, like, what's one of those defining moments? It was the Will I Am, Yes we can video in early 2008. And, you know, it's particularly applicable to me. That was from the New Hampshire concession speech and took that and turned that into the music video. And I just remember that that was like a very, very meaningful emotional battle cry. And it was for so many people across the country, the connection to the campaign that drove them through the rest of the primary system was having that, you know, it was a campaign anthem almost. So that's less a political ad, but very much that deep artistic, emotional connection with, with the campaign.

[B]

I'm just gonna blow off the rest of the workday and watch West Wing. So it's been a pleasure, Mark.

[A]

I. I will join you in that.

[B]

It.