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CMO Confidential
Gary Briggs | Marketing Observations and Lessons Learned From the 2024 Presidential Election
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The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com Discover the future of AI powered digital experiences Adobe Summit is live in Las Vegas March 17th through the 20th. If you can't make it to the conference in person, join Summit online free from anywhere. Access inspirational talks from global brand leaders like Coca Cola, Unilever, Marriott and more in live streamed insightful keynotes and Adobe Sneaks co hosted by comedian Ken Zhang. Select from over 30 expert led sessions. Register for free at summit.adobe.com Cmoconfidential welcome.
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B
To CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Lind.
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A
Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, ebay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry. Com. I'm here today with my guest, Gary Briggs. Today's topic marketing observations and lessons learned from the 2024 presidential election. Gary started his career at Pepsi and McKinsey and went on to run marketing at PayPal, eBay, Motorola and Facebook. He is currently on the boards of Etsy and Petco, and recently worked on the latest presidential campaign. He's here today to talk about marketing observations and what we can all learn from this election. Full disclosure, we both work together at ebay, teach several classes at CMO Boot Camp, and are both CMO coaches. So we've known each other quite a while and this is Gary's second time in the show. Welcome back Gary. It is great to see you.
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B
Hey Mike, thanks. It's, you know, being a repeat guest, I guess I hit some threshold. So here we go.
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A
You are, you know, eventually we'll make mugs and send you a mug or something. But why, why don't we just offer the swag?
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B
As my wife says, I've collected fleets in Silicon Valley. That's basically been my career.
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A
Absolutely. I have massive amounts of. So we haven't got there yet. You know, we're just a little show. So when we just started. Gary, give us an overview of the marketing scope of this election. Money, PACs, advertising, PR news and more. Paint us a picture. And then after that you can tell us your responsibilities.
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B
Yeah, I mean, it is a kind of stunning scale. And what's fascinating about political campaigns is they start, you know, with several people and in the case of presidential campaigns, go to thousands over the course of months and then go to zero again, which is really stunning. And the amount of money, particularly specifically as it relates to presidential campaigns, the amount of money spent now, I think the estimations is that the 2024 presidential will likely hit north of 10 billion in spending, maybe 12 if you go, you know, across all the different hard side, soft side, meaning coordinated groups, independent groups. And what was spent, you know, a significant amount of that is spent on media. In rough math, I would estimate that across the various entities, there's probably four or five billion dollars spent in media. The Harris campaign, which I was on the Harris campaign and Biden Harris campaign, we spent about three quarters of a billion dollars. And what's notable about that, I'm happy, obviously we'll go into detail, is that is spent in about six months. And it's largely, except in some cases where you buy national ads in linear advertising. Digital is all much more targeted. You are spending that in about 18% of the country, which is the swing state profile now seven states, plus what's called Nebraska 2, which is Omaha, because Nebraska, much like Maine, splits its electoral votes, but you're spending an 18% of the country. So from our old language of NAR and national advertise rate, you know, take 750 million. Divide, divide that by, you know, divide that and. Or multiply that by two because it's six months for an annual rate. And then divide that by 0.18, which is the footprint. And you're, you're talking about a scale that's. No, no other company spends at that scale. And we'll get into this, I'm sure later, about growth rating points and diminished returns and things like that. But it is a stunning amount of money in a short amount of time.
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A
Yeah. So you're spinning up what is essentially a massive, I mean, marketing corporation, or marketing and PR corporation of a thousand.
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B
People and thousands of people.
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A
Yeah, thousands of people. And then you're spending billions of dollars, and it's really the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars if you were, if you were a real company. And then it all vaporizes as soon, or most of it vaporizes as soon as the campaign's over, which is an awful lot of that's an awful lot of just stuff going on in a really short period of time. Tell us your role in this because you mentioned 750 million or something. Tell us, tell us your role.
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B
Yeah, so I joined the Biden campaign in the middle of April of last year, so April 24, as Senior Adv for Paid Media. I worked for Jenna Mali Dhillon, who was the campaign chair, but really was responsible for coordinating the budgeting and the agency relationships and the trafficking of creative, particularly on the linear side, less so on the digital side, which I'm getting into across the campaign. I would tell you just to kind of cut to it. I wasn't as busy during Biden's run in part because Biden had his own, he's, he's a sitting president. He's his own comms team, partially of whom, you know, are advising him. And he had a, or, you know, Hannah has a comms director he had worked with for about 40 years named Mike Donnell. And so they didn't really need, you know, my help except on a coordinated basis. Once himrs became the candidate and there was a reorganization, you know, I got, I got tons busier, which I'm happy to.
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A
Yeah, tell us how you got busier, because that must have been crazy.
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B
I mean, look, I mean, I have all sorts of stories of, you know, Biden's debate night, the, the, the, you know, when the, the process of him dropping out and Harris, you know, scaling up. But the scale up with Harris was stunning. I mean, you know, we, we had no sense of how fast we were going to raise money, but in the first five days, you know, we were raising hundreds of millions of dollars very, very quickly. And, and, you know, notably around media, we had to make decisions. This, this changeover was happening in July. We had to make decisions in early August for buying Long Lead Media. We basically did television reservations and we'd already done digital reservations, so we were making television reservations off of the projection of what we would eventually raise in the campaign right off of days worth of fundraising and an unprecedented experience of, you know, changing over candidates with 107 days, you know, until the campaign ended. So we, we, we had, we, we placed, if I haven't remember the number correctly, about $300 million worth of, of television reservations in, in mid August off of really, you know, a couple of weeks of fundraising, projecting how much money we're going to raise through the end of the campaign. So it was, and then in terms of my own role, I had gotten, you know, really good working relationship with the principal deputy campaign managers, guy named Quentin Fultz. Quentin's really talented guy. He ran Pritzker's campaign and for the governor of Illinois, he ran both of Warnock's campaigns for the Senate in Georgia. You'd recognize Quentin, if you follow me, this. He's on TV a ton. All right, Great, talented guy. You know, he, he hadn't. I had a lot more marketing operations experience than he had, so I kind of ran that for him. And then really in the last two months, I was part of a nightly call, you know, that we had with Jan O'Malley, Dillon, which would be, you know, Quentin presenting with me, supporting him, along with Rob Flaherty, who was the digital director, you know, deputy campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who's a campaign manager, David Pluck, who was a senior Advisor, and Jan O'Malley or JOD as everybody called her.
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A
So this must have been super interesting, but also crazy because you're making bets like wild without any certainty and then you have to have a strategy behind those bets. How did you lay out the strategy and the media plans with everybody who.
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B
Where.
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You know, obviously you're way more experienced than an awful lot of people in that. How do you lay out the strategies and the media plans without knowing the exact budget? And you know, just, you're, you're kind of at speed doing work that companies of this size would take months to do. You're going to do it in a week or two. Tell us the up to the strategies.
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B
Well, I mean, I. Look, I mean I got to give tons of credit to the analytics team. We have a really stunning and very well experienced analytics team. The analytics team. You know, one of the things that's unique about political campaigns is you have a lot of first party data. You have the voter file and the voter file is essentially scored and you use other data sets to do that. Use, you know, Target Smart and Live Ramp and lots of first, you know, first party.
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A
Just help me with the voter file. So a voter file on me would show everything about me, how many times I. Where I live and everything else and how many times I voted.
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B
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know for whom you voted. I don't know. But I would know if you voted in the Republican or Democratic primary or if you were independent, depending on the state, if you voted in one primary or another. And essentially what political campaigns are, are extended probability treaties. It's you and people like you, your propensity to vote and the probability you'll vote for me and you run that math and you get to 51.6 and 48.4. That's essentially the way the math works. And so you're appending data to your record constantly based upon signals that we get. Do you donate? Do you respond to content? Do you follow certain interest? Do you go to an evangelical church? You know, these are all things that are signals about your propensity or your probability, particularly in the lottery probability of voting for X person or Y person.
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A
This is like a data tornado, just gathering up more and more data as you get more and more people.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And extending this probability tree as fast and deep as possible. Is that a way to think about it?
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B
Exactly right. And, and, and there's all sorts of nuance to that. But, but then to your question about media, you're then running game theory exercises. This is where the analytics team was, was really great. And you know, to kind of make, don't leave the, the punchline at the door. We knew we had a high risk of losing. I mean, and I can kind of get into that in more detail. But you know, it, it was, we were in a deep hole. Most of all of 24 climbed our way. You know, we thought almost fully out of it, particularly in the last couple weeks until the very end. We had become more optimistic. But it is essentially that. And then you're basically looking at media consumption and through this game theory, your path to 270. You know, the thing that the Lytics team makes very clear is you don't need to get to 350 delegates in the electoral College. You need to get to 270. It's 270 to win.
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A
Right.
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B
And if, and if we captured the states that were most likely, in our case Democratic, and we captured what is called the blue wall, which is Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and Nebraska two, which is Omaha.
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A
Not the state, just the two.
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B
Right. It's the one. It's one delegate for Omaha. Yeah. Nebraska two. Any two in all our decks. It was any two. Okay. And if you capture Omaha, you know, you, you get to 270, you don't need to be at 275. You just need 270. And, and you're looking at the probabilities of, of winning, you know, X or Y state. And then based upon that allocating and the voters in those states and then based upon that allocating dollars in media and then messages to that media based upon that game theory exercise.
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A
Let's talk about the media, then go to the messaging, because the media here then you say, look, all right, I gotta get to 2:70. I got the blue wall. I got Nebraska too. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go after this group of customers with as many messages as I can get to them. Or how do I decide how much media I even hit them with? Or is it everything I can buy?
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B
You know, money rules in a way that, that I wish it, it, you know, talk, make this somewhat. But money rules like our, our if you, if you fundraising is, is the lifeblood here and, and you know, I have all sorts of issues with it, but that is the game that is played.
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A
It is the game. Look, you can hate the game.
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B
That's right. Don't hate the player, as they say. Yeah, don't hate the player. So that is, that is the way it works. And so in our particular case, what happened when Harris came in was very quickly we started to see that what we thought at the time. Now obviously people watching this will make all sorts of starch comments, but you know, what it looked like was Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina were coming into play. In other words, they were kind of out of play in. We had, you know, these seven states, plus Nebraska too, who were in play. And you're looking at, you know, your profile of the voter, what types of media that they consume, the way to get to them. We set records in terms of digital spend, for example, we spent a lot on digital, an historic amount compared to any campaign that came before us and knew that, you know, the ability to reach people through and digital media was critical, both paid and organic. Now organic, by the way, is, you know, massively important. And we can get into talking later and I'll editorialize a little bit about the role of, you know, organic media, social media, and kind of where we are in the media landscape. We can come, come back to that. But suffice to say, as far as paid media, you're looking at, you know, I need to reach XYZ voter. Whether that is a black voter in a given state or a Latino voter in another state, or a suburban white woman in another. You're trying to reach those voters and drive again, the propensities and probabilities through. And then you sample and you look and you do lots of polling behind that to look at how you're doing. And our polling, as you might imagine, had a much bigger response number than the national or the state level polls because we can afford them. And we're using that constant learning to then drive, you know, your media allocations. And you know, granted, we were Putting very significant reservations in the reservations were aggressive. Certainly in many cases, we went above and beyond that based upon the fundraising we eventually saw. But you can also cancel reservations and move reservations and things like that. There's some not to get too much in the weeds. You benefit from the fact that as the candidate, you get a candidate rate versus if you're an outside party in terms of the media, you spend.
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Okay, you get, you get, you get less than rate card if you're the candidate, right?
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B
Yeah. You get a better, you get a better rate card. If you're the candidate, you get typically a better slot too. You can actually, because you're buying a lot and you don't see that in digital, but you see that, you see that in linear. And then the other thing you're dealing with is constantly trying to get a read on what the other side is doing. You know, what are their reservations? What is their. What can you discern from how they're spending on YouTube? You know, interestingly, the Trump campaign, for example, was using YouTube, essentially like television, where, which I think is a very interesting insight. They essentially were what's called negative targeting or basically exclusion targeting, where they would buy Pennsylvania, but they would exclude Philly and Pittsburgh. So they wouldn't necessarily. Those are obviously whatever the town, you know, city might be was heavily Democratic.
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A
They, their probability tree would say they have a very low probability of doing anything there. So they're taking their money out of.
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B
There to take their money out of there. And then they're using much more like television. And then, and then, and then targeting particular demographics in terms of age and demo, other demos within that media strategy. So we, we were constantly looking at kind of their media strategy to compare to ours. And then these, you know, these outside groups, these packs are massive. I mean, there was a lot and has been a lot written, a lot of ink spills, so to speak, of how much the terrorist campaign versus the Trump campaign spent. But in many cases, particularly in the last weeks, even with the main PAC aligned with the Biden, Harris and the Democrats, which is called Future Forward, with all the money that they were spending, we were still being outspent in some cases based upon really three very large PACs that were supporting Trump plus other groups. So, you know, you've got, in, in the case of Trump, three people, three organizations, but three people spent over $700 million supporting Trump. That's Elon Musk, Thomas Mellon, banking family, and Miriam Adelson, which is sans, which is a big Las Vegas gambling. So, you know, this is the money part of it and tracking that, getting a sense constantly of like how many GRPs are they buying, how many digital reservations are they placing, what can we discern about their again, their YouTube strategy or their, you know, etc.
- [19:39]
A
You have a massive analytics organization doing this but then you also have to have people trafficking all this stuff and running your own because you buy the media and then, and then you have it gotta cancel it. So I mean this is like a full on giant agency working and it's everything.
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B
I mean surprisingly we had a look. I was the noob by the way. So I mean we had a number of people who had been on the 20 campaigns, 16 campaigns and 12 campaigns. You know, the people that had been through this. We worked particularly with a firm called Blue sky. That really phenomenal, really good firm, made creative, but also helped us through the trafficking along with a specialized linear media firm. On the digital side, we used a number of firms too, including Bully Pulpit and C K and a bunch of firms that you would not otherwise know but are really good, very experienced digital firms who you know, have the spreadsheets and the traffic trafficking.
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A
Do they ramp up for this like retail, like they are going to hire like three times the amount of people.
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B
What's stunning, what's stunning is, you know, you have these young people or people, you know, in their 20s and 30s who cycle into these things every, you know, every cycle, you know, come into this and then know very well that if they lose, they're out of a job. You know, I had this gentleman who you know, sat right to my right and we were in this, you know, camping headquarters are not very, very glamorous. And no, you don't get a big.
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A
Office in the window and no micro.
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B
Kitchens and you know, full food. But this guy Scott, who give us with Scott, who just sat to my side and another guy named Andrew and made high was my, you know, chief right hand too. She, she made anything who had all been through these things before. So I mean Scott was like encyclopedia group. Like you need to know something about rural radio in Michigan. Scott knows that like and you need to know something about, you know, how the, how the actual media reallocations are going to work in, in the outskirts of basically southern Georgia. Scott is going to know that, you know, and it's just I'm the talent goes against these quixotic experimental stunning because God knows these folks could be doing lots of other things.
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A
Yeah, we're going to talk about that later. Is this good for your career or not? But you have all these media plans that you're buying a lot of times before, you know, the messaging. Yeah, right. I mean, you got to go buy these because you can't. It's not like you go to the store and you buy. I'm buying this today. You got it. You got to buy it and own it. And there's probably some. I'll buy all I can to take these out of the game as well. How do you do the messaging now that you have media?
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B
Well, I mean, so you, you know, your audience, you know, your candidate mostly always, you know, there's surprises have come along the way, which we can kind of get into. Not to be pull punches, but, but, and absolutely, we knew that the economy was a massive issue for us. And we can go into this in much greater detail, but it'll take too much time. But the short of it is we knew we were in a whole lot of the economy. Essentially. If you asked people how they personally were doing, they were generally optimistic. If they asked how the country was doing, particularly, you know, right direction. Wrong direction, which is a very much of a, of a bellwether question. It was bad. I mean, and when you raise people's cost of living by 25% in three and a half years, they're mad. And so we knew the economy was a massive issue. So when you're looking at messaging, you're looking at things that are certainly broad scale, like the economy or in the case of this campaign, border and immigration, you know, border policy and immigration. And then you're also looking at issues that might be much more important to smaller subsets of voters. Now this is where you might get into what's called constituency media, which is, you know, Latino, Asian Americans, African Americans, you know, what are, what are issues that might be important? Suburban women, you know, or farmers or something like that.
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A
Any demographic or psychographic you can find, you're going to be able to take it, right?
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B
Yeah, because like, again, you're trying to get to 270 and you're trying to win the state by, by, you know, by one. And because it's winner take all. And you know, it's a very different game theory than typical, you know, market share in packaged goods or insurance or, you know, the industries that you and I were in. And so as a result, yeah, that's how you kind of break down the messaging is then, you know, how much are we looking at emphasis on particular messages and typically over what period of time and then, you know, day in, day out and in some cases hour in, hour out, you're reacting to what's going on in the news. I mean, you know what we've not talked about and we, we don't spend a lot of time on it. There is an entire industry that follows this industry and it's called cable news. And, and it has a lot of.
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A
24 hour channels in it.
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B
Yeah, nothing. I mean, yeah, Rust Never Sleeps I think is the way to go it. So, so that is an input as well as what are the candidates saying? What are obviously the talking head saying and what's the voter saying? What is the voter paying attention to in this? As we all know, this kind of drier on high setting of the last months of a political presidential campaign.
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A
Tune in next week for part two.
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Of our conversation with Gary Briggs as.
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A
We discuss more about the paid media.
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Strategy around the 2024 presidential campaign and.
- [25:48]
A
How it helped to shape the outcome of the election. Discover the future of AI Powered Digital Experiences Adobe Summit is live in Las Vegas, March 17th through the 20th. If you can't make it to the conference in person, join Summit online free from anywhere. Access inspirational talks from global brand leaders like Coca Cola, Unilever, Marriott and more in live streamed insightful keynotes and Adobe Sneaks co hosted by comedian Ken Jeong. Select from over 30 expert led sessions. Register for free at summit.adobe.com Cmoconfidential.