What is the State of Political Advertising for the Midterm Election? An Interview with Grace Briscoe

The upcoming midterm election is proving to be highly impactful, not just in the results but also in the political advertising leading up to the actual count, according to Grace Briscoe is SVP of Client Development, Candidates + Causes at Centro. She sees that the political advertising arena is not only robust but remarkable.

Charlene Weisler: What do you think the state of political advertising is now in preparation for the midterms?

Grace Briscoe: We expect to see around 80% of the potential in digital spend to be transacted and served in the second half of 2022 in political ad spend. Based on the pace of spending so far, the industry may exceed forecasts. In Basis, our platform, spend is roughly 4x higher than in the same period in 2020. This is remarkable for a midterm election which typically wouldn’t exceed a presidential election year. 

Weisler: What, generally speaking, is the most effective platform for political advertising on the national level?

Briscoe: The adage that all politics is local may still hold true, though I think we’ve also increasingly seen the inverse, that much of local politics is now nationalized in some ways. Though I’m biased toward digital, from a media strategy and tactic perspective nationally, TV is still king- it’s an incredibly strong platform for both reach and persuasion. Looking at digital specifically, programmatic platforms are the most effective on national political ad campaigns. Programmatic provides a perfect blend of speed, scale, accuracy and flexibility that is vital for elections advertising. Social media channels are indisputably the most effective and efficient for fundraising, but less so for persuasion—short attention spans when scrolling through a feed make nuanced messaging almost impossible. I think the surge in investment we’re seeing in OTT/CTV ads speak to the effectiveness of that channel, CTV may be the perfect fusion of the compelling power of TV combined with greater targeting capabilities and flexibility in buying via programmatic platforms.     

Weisler: What about the local level?

Briscoe: Part of the appeal of programmatic platforms is that they work well on both national political ad campaigns and on local campaigns. The precision is a tremendous value for smaller campaigns that only need to reach local voters in a small area. And the adoption of programmatic advertising by buyers of all sizes has enabled even small down-ballot races to benefit from the sophisticated targeting and efficiencies that were only available at the federal level a few cycles ago.

Weisler: Can you talk about the most effective messaging nationally? and locally?

Briscoe: Political messaging is all about emotion—connecting with voters at a personal level, and motivating them to vote, especially in a mid-term year when you don’t have a presidential race at the top of the ticket. Taking the recent Kansas election as an example, abortion was confirmed as a key issue to potentially drive turnout this year. Inflation and economic concerns are top issues with voters, as well as rising concerns over gun violence and political extremism. Locally, some of these topics may resonate more than others. However, at the very local level, campaigns often don’t have the benefit of granular polling data that a national, statewide, or even congressional campaign relies on. It’s not easy to get the pulse of local voters, and messaging decisions may be guided by instinct or “gut” more than data.

Weisler: Does it vary by political party? Demographics?

Briscoe: The issues that are top of mind or may resonate most deeply with a voter varies greatly, and some inferences can be drawn based on demographics, party affiliation, and geography. But very few demographic groups are a monolith, and demographic characteristics are not at all determinant of ideology. Hispanic voters are an example – within those communities there can be broad differences, making simple assumptions that motivations are cohesive based solely on ethnicity could be a fatal mistake for a campaign.

Weisler: If you can talk about this - how does research impact decision-making?

Briscoe: Research for political campaigns is essential. Voter data, including polling, is what enables a campaign to know where they should focus their efforts to get people to vote. Even large campaigns have finite resources so there are always tough decisions on how to most effectively use funds to find and engage voters. Historical data shows that likely only 40% of potential voters will vote on Nov. 8. Therefore, a campaign will need data to understand how to reach that 40% who will actually vote, and perhaps the additional 10% who might be persuaded to turnout – and that’s on top of the challenge of finding the right issues to use when engaging with them.

Weisler: How strong a role does Social Media play in political advertising?

Briscoe: It is incredibly effective for fundraising and the broad audiences of social platforms can make them effective for reach. But the role of social media in digital campaigns has declined over the recent years.  There is a myriad of reasons for this, but a big one is the extra restrictions and rigidness of policies in some of the largest platforms. The limitations on targeting capabilities for political advertisers and cumbersome verification processes have created frustration. Those headaches, combined with the short attention span of social audiences have shifted political ad dollars to other channels. It’s very difficult to make an emotional connection with a potential voter in a 2-second view.

Weisler: What advice would you give political advertisers preparing for the 2024 election?

Briscoe: The easy answer is to ensure that they have a solid CTV strategy, combined with other supporting digital tactics. Consumer usage of CTV continues to increase, and political ads will be everywhere in this channel this Fall. The other advice is to prepare for longer vendor creative approval processes. We are seeing more and more publishers – especially in the CTV space- scrutinizing the creative from campaigns, and this could cause delays in launching ad campaigns. Even in the automated world of programmatic where transactions occur in milliseconds and speed is assumed, we’ve seen automated creative review processes implemented by some of the large ad exchanges create headaches. One example is falsely rejecting political ads as “online gambling” because of a phrase like “[candidate] wants to gamble with social security.” Machine review is very limited in understanding political messaging, and the appeals process to get a human to review an ad and remove the rejection can take multiple days. Until automated processes improve, campaigns need to plan ahead as much as possible to avoid missing out on conveying a timely message.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

NPR One Personalized Radio. Interview with Thomas Hjelm of NPR

Thomas Hjelm is a digital media veteran with 21 years of experience spanning such corporations as NBCU (both in their Entertainment group, where he was a founding members of the first interactive media team, and the Local News division), AOL, LivePlanet and New York Public Radio. 

He joined NPR in April as the organization’s Chief Digital Officer –a role which draws on his background in digital strategy and operations, audience development and marketing, business and content development, writing and producing, product and technology.

I spoke with Hjelm about his new role at NPR, what he calls the ‘genius' of the public media system, innovation within the NPR network and NPR One, the personalized listening app which has seen +124% year on year growth in app users and is providing important insights into listener behavior.

Charlene Weisler: What is your current role at NPR?

Thomas Hjelm: I’m responsible for defining and executing NPR’s strategies for innovation and growth across current and emerging digital platforms. I also work with our many partners across public radio to develop collective, system wide strategies for building platforms, audiences and value. I manage a few different divisions at NPR that work toward these goals. In Washington, we have a large team of digital strategists, product managers, developers and technologists, producers, program managers and analysts who build and support the core platforms of NPR.org, NPR One and other properties, as well as cultivate partnerships with third-party platforms and distribution channels. In Boston, we have another unit supporting a suite of products and services that are made available to more than 200 NPR member stations. And then across NPR we have a number of other digital specialists in a variety of functions, starting with news, but also including social media, audience development, and revenue. Digital is a department, in other words, but more importantly it’s an organizational concern, one that’s central to every part of NPR and the public radio system as a whole.

Charlene Weisler: Public Radio is a collection of fairly independent stations. How do you help maximize collective efforts?

Thomas Hjelm: That’s true. As a system, public radio is quite decentralized, even diffuse. There are 264 NPR member stations out there, all of them under their own management and marching to their own strategic drum. And that is part of the genius of public radio. Stations in huge markets and small markets and in-between markets have their own voices and identities. As local institutions, they have a direct and intimate connection with their listeners, and they reflect those communities back to themselves in ways no other media organizations can.

Being a distributed network can also bring advantages in digital terms: when I visit stations (I’m talking to you from Madison, where I just spent a day meeting the team at Wisconsin Public Radio), I’m so impressed by the innovation and creativity of these shops, and the great work they do in digital journalism, audience engagement, even product design, and almost always on very lean budgets. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a collective network strategy. If everyone is doing their own digital thing, inevitably there’s redundancy, inefficiency and lost value, to say nothing of a fragmentation of the audience. So how do I handle that? Well, I’m still just a few months into the job, but in an effort to find common ground my first task has been to define and socialize a common value chain that links all of us across the system. It’s simple: we’re all in the business of growing the audience, knowing and understanding the audience, engaging the audience and ultimately monetizing the audience through membership and sponsorship. This narrative applies to NPR, it applies to New York Public Radio, to Vermont and Abilene, but above all it applies to the network as a whole. So if we can all get behind that, it begins to clarify our respective links in the big value chain, the roles we play in relation to  each other, the investments we make and the priorities we set. It’s a first step, and obviously those are very broad terms, but it’s critical if we’re going to, as you say, maximize our collective efforts. 

Charlene Weisler: How has digital evolved since you first started 21 years ago?

Thomas Hjelm: My career has been spent working for so-called legacy media companies that have decided, in one way or another, to transform themselves. When I started, no one knew just what digital media was or would become, but people who took a long view of things saw that it was worth experimenting with. I was at NBC at the time, and we were given permission to create an “online network” of original content. It was a lot of fun, though it certainly didn’t produce much money or many viewers. Today, it is a real business, with a real audience, and the technology has caught up with our creative ambitions. And digital departments are no longer just the guys in shorts sitting in the corner. Digital is woven through every modern media company. I often say my job is to make my job obsolete. We don’t have a Chief Radio Officer here, why a Chief Digital Officer? I’m still fighting that fight, but I’m getting there.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me about NPR One.

Tom Hjelm: NPR One is a smart phone app that delivers audio content from NPR and most member stations and public radio producers in a form that’s personalized, based on the user’s listening tastes, interests and location. It’s an experiment in making our content available in ways that map to the changing behaviors of listeners – especially younger listeners. Yet in other ways it builds on the standing model, format, even business model of public radio. It’s geo-targeted, so when you download the app, it will call up an instance of the local member station. So in New York, you get a WNYC-branded version of NPR One. You get content produced by WNYC alongside NPR content, and you can pledge your membership support to WNYC there, too. There’s also a mix of sponsorship inventory – some sold by NPR and some available to the member station’s local sales team. It’s like radio then – only using algorithms (plus some editorial controls) to tailor the audio experience to the individual. If you tend to skip certain content, over time it will deliver less of that; and if you like certain types of content, you’ll gradually get more of it. And the more successful we are in engaging the listener through this “personalized radio,” the more we learn about them so it becomes a powerful data and engagement tool.

Charlene Weisler: What have the results been so far for NPR One?

Thomas Hjelm: The retention, satisfaction and demographic numbers are all very encouraging. Thirty percent of users come back to use it within a week. That rate is far greater than is typical for an app. The satisfaction score is 4 out of 5 based on our surveys. Best of all, the basic demographic skews younger than traditional radio, with18- to 34-year-olds making up a third of the audience -- and they’re as affluent and educated as our current NPR audience. It’s a big step toward taking the enduring value proposition of public radio and making it available in new ways for new listeners.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

From Digital to Broadcast Radio. iHeart Media’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

“Data is all about interpretation,” according to Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television. His efforts to progress the discussion and implementation of data in our industry have been a cornerstone of his Secret Society mission. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms. 

It was at that meeting that Brian Kaminsky, President Programmatic and Data Operations, iHeartMedia, revealed how they took digital data, mined it for insights and applied those insights to their broadcast radio viewers to expand knowledge of that group and use it for branding, marketing and sales purposes.

iHeart Media - Digital Data to Broadcast Radio

Kaminsky explained how his company added a digital DMP and ad serving system and used the insights gathered on digital uses to infer the behaviors of their broadcast radio viewers. “With over a quarter of a billion monthly listeners in the U.S. and over 85 million social followers, iHeartMedia has the largest reach of any radio or television outlet in America. It serves over 150 markets through 858 owned radio stations,” he explained. “By leveraging iHeartRadio user database associated with those digital extensions in combination with data from social platform APIs and other third party vendors, our data science team is able to express iHeartRadio terrestrial broadcast station’s audiences with the same type of data and insights normally associated with digital marketing,” he added.   

Kaminsky’s goal was to get people to use broadcast differently by using deeper level of consumer insights from digital. “We needed a DMP to make output actionable and make the consumer come to life,” he said. The result was the creation of data segmentations, the planning against those segments and then used the data to make radio optimizable on a market by market basis. “We also took data, matched it to social behavior, brought in third party data, normalized it and brought it into the iHeartRadio map. We intend to create a series of private marketplaces for iHeartRadio,” he concluded.

Radha Subramanyam, President of Insights, Research and Data Analytics for iHeartMedia, sees great opportunity with this initiative. She said, "It is incredibly exciting when you can deliver the deep insights and precision of digital media with the scale of broadcast media. Advertisers can optimize campaigns against their targets yet reach enough people to truly have an impact. Targeting at scale is the next big leap forward in the application of data."

Conclusion

For Oscar, the opportunity to showcase a range of data initiatives worked not only for the assembled attendees but also for the industry at large. The four presenters at this Secret Society meeting ranged from iHeartRadio (applying the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast) to Sinclair Broadcasting (using programmatic techniques for the delivery of the primary audience guarantee as well as the equally important secondary target)  to 4Cinsights (providing Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target) to Roku (demonstrating the value of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population). Future meetings will continue to explore the creative use of data for extraordinary targeting capabilities.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Q&A with Stacey Lynn Schulman - TVB

Stacey Lynn Schulman discovered research through college internships. In fact, she is a great proponent of internships as a way for students to explore different career opportunities and to make important contacts for employment after graduation. She launched her career at the rep firm Katz Television, followed by stints at CBS, ad agencies, Turner and ultimately at the TVB where she is CRO. Her responsibilities include supporting the marketing and sales efforts of member television stations across all of their platforms.

In this informative interview Schulman talks about her career, digital mobile, social media, national and local efforts, research trends, big data and what the future might look like for television stations and their multi-platform efforts. And she offers a way to view CBS (and other broadcast networks) that is not impacted by any MVPD contract negotiation.

The six videos of the interview are as follows:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background                                                        (7:03)

TVB                                                                   (10:07)

Digital Mobile                                                    (4:05)

Local Digital Efforts                                          (7:50)

Predictions                                                         (5:17)

Good Data vs More Data                                 (6:16)

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about her background in this 7:03 minute video:

 

Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about the TVB, its mission and projects in this 10:07 minute video:

 

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Digital Mobile and its ability to get over the air television anywhere in this 4:05 minute video:

 

CW: It sounds like Digital Mobile gives all Time Warner cable customers access to CBS whether or not it is available on our channel line-up.

SLS: Yes. The important piece about Digital Mobile TV is that consumers do not need to feel victimized by television delivery mechanisms like cable or satellite choices.  They can still receive over-the-air TV stations -- and all of their digital subchannels (some of which aren't being carried currently by cable or satellite providers) -- by purchasing a regular antenna at their local electronics store or by purchasing what we call a "dongle" (a mobile antenna) from Amazon.com.  The dongle connects easily to a cell phone or tablet computer and allows the consumer to view over-the-air television signals, for free, anywhere.  No WIFI required.

 
 

In this 7:50 minute video, Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about local digital efforts by the TVB:

 

Looking ahead in the media landscape, Stacey Lynn Schulman descibes possible new innovations and opportunities for stations. This interview video by Charlene Weisler is 5:15 minutes:

 

In this final video, Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Big Data and the conundrum of good data compared to more data in this 6:16 minute video: