It has now been over a year since the presidential election, and so much has changed in 2013. For Targeted Victory, it has been a year of new products, new hires, and new office space. Social media networks have also been busy rolling out new products and expanding existing platforms, constantly changing the digital landscape for advertisers. Targeted Victory Co-founder, Zac Moffatt, talked to Forbes magazine about changes in the past year, and what the future of digital campaigning looks like.
This article is excerpted from Forbes. Click here to read the full article online.
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While the Obama campaign rejoiced, the Romney campaign’s digital team was left to wonder what happened. And in silence for the most part. As the head of Romney’s digital effort, Zac Moffatt, told us, “If you win, you get to talk about it.” So, interested in what Moffatt had to say, we jumped on the line with him to try get a read on what the past year has been like.
Have you seen the Washington Post – ABC News poll that found that if the election was held now, Romney would win? How does that make you feel?
I think the more interesting thing is for people to look at what Mitt was saying last year, and it’s frustrating. The things he said would happen are exactly what is happening. The media needs to reflect on why it didn’t look at these things. Campaigns have become about decimating the opposition on a personal level as opposed to policy discussion. Now that people are realizing the impact of policies, they’re realizing not only that Obamacare doesn’t work, but maybe the way it works is problematic. Look, people’s premiums are going up. These are things that people who were probably low information voters who never really engaged didn’t think were a big deal. They’d rather talk about big bird or binders full of women as opposed to realizing that these elections have massive repercussions on people’s everyday lives.
As a digital guy, what do you make of the healthcare.gov debacle?
Communicators are taking advantage of the people’s lack of understanding of technology to gloss over what is a huge product problem that’s facing this country. We’re talking about one sixth of the United States’ economy. This is pretty amazing. The fact that this was not ready for a launch date when we all knew it was coming, that is not a Republican or a Democrat thing, that is bad for the country. This stuff should be expected to work.
It’s been twelve months since the election. What’s the past year been like for you?
This past year has been about taking the lessons from 2012, reflecting upon the things we learned and really trying to figure out how to solve for some of the problems that we were unable to solve for in ’12. Now that we have some time, we can take a step back and ask things like what would I build now that I wish I had built or had someone else build in 2012.
And what have you concluded?
I think some of the things we built this year like Targeted Engagement, which is our self serve ad platform. It really focuses on political geography and political affiliations to allow for higher targeting. It takes the best parts of digital and empowers more people to leverage them, versus my fear in the digital space that many people take the worst efforts of television and field and try to superimpose them on digital. That’s what we have to guard against.
So does digital’s potential in politics mostly apply to advertising?
For advertising, your targeting capabilities and your analytics capabilities are going to improve exponentially, especially now that you’re moving towards real time buying and audience buying which we were doing extensively in 2012. Many people wanted to buy IOs (insertion orders) and buy display but the marketplace is catching up.
Romney was running a data management platform in 2011 and now you’re seeing Fortune 500 companies move to it. So, I think it’s a testament to the ad-tech play we made two years before the election. The other thing people are solving for is that infrastructure for campaigns to be build upon — ways that you could be more successful at building your website or fundraising tools. These are things that everyday the barrier to entry gets lower because more companies are getting ahold of tools coming out.
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We’ve discussed advertising, but social media has changed a lot over the year as well. How do you think campaigns will adjust to a shifting social media landscape?
I think campaigns always adjust to where there’s audience. People want to put these brands on each election. 2008 was the Facebook election and 2012 was the Twitter election. Does that mean 2016 is the snapchat election? I don’t know. I think what you’re seeing is Twitter has become a far more powerful medium now that it can be used for direct response with the lead card and lead gen. On the flip side, Facebook has an audience side no one else can compete with. You can build hundred thousand person communities in a matter of days on Facebook, where nothing else has that type of platform capability at that scale. You look at Google Plus, it can change if you can suddenly start to advertise on it. For us, Google Plus had a value but it was organic and you could build out groups, but there are certain things that are more difficult if you don’t have the right advertising capabilities to go into it. FBX (Facebook’s ad exchange) is a huge component. The fact that you could bring in you data and create clusters and do targeting, if anything, they’ve become more efficient and more valuable. If Facebook and Twitter had the ad targeting they have today in 2012, we would have spent a lot more money with them because they’ve just become much more powerful.
This article is excerpted from Forbes. Click here to read the full article online.