The misfire of most polling in ’16 seems to have cast a shadow over all data-driven efforts during the election. But beneath the surface where did data-infused profiling and targeting really work and not work in this cycle? Did online voter profiling, ad targeting, GOTV and fundraising efforts hit or miss? Both parties built massive war chests of voter data points and crafted sophisticated behavioral/attitudinal/ideological models for advanced targeting. What worked, and what did this cycle teach all marketers about the limits of advanced consumer profiling/targeting?

Video story distribution, always the epicenter of campaign media spend, has changed radically since the last major campaign. And the eventual winner at the top of the ticket made late and spotty use of traditional TV advertising. So how did video and TV spend work up and down the ballot? What impact do new social video distribution platforms now have on both response times and messaging? Are creative styles of attack/issue/inspiration ads still effective and have multichannel inputs eroded TV and video’s capacity for moving the needle?

Was Donald J. Trump simply another insurgent brand, much like Uber, Spotify, Airbnb and Dollar Shave Club? He located a market need that the legacy brands neither knew about nor even understood when they saw it. And he leveraged alternative channels to reach these consumers. Is he a political harbinger of a new establishment in consumer marketing generally? Should Unilever and GM be as scared as Democratic and Republican parties of the new order of brand building?

This was the election cycle social media was supposed to own. Every platform rolled out new products aimed at fund-raising, persuasion and GOTV. Every campaign asset and moment had a social strategy. And of course POTUS-Elect conducted much of his messaging via 3 am Twitter blasts. But how did these channels really perform? Were they channels of persuasion and activation or more a bubble where like-minded constituencies simply recirculated established beliefs and energy and validated false information? Did their role and effectiveness change down-ballot? Did social prove its worth?

Data still matters. Despite disappointing poll accuracy in this cycle, data-driven mobilization and messaging still works. DNC strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon reflects on the lessons learned from hits and misses in the last campaign. She argues that the tools need to sharpen so that they find and engage voters’ sense of hope and coalesce around the issues that energize them to act and participate.

Small scale digital giving was a key driver of campaign funding in ’16. But it was also a primary source for data harvesting. We explore how digital channels drove both dollars and data. What channels delivered the best conversions on the front end. And how did campaigns use the data on the back end to inform further targeting, messaging, organizing and even campaign direction?

Political and consumer marketing have always been distinct in having very different timing, planning and optimization windows, and politics has always been weak on attribution. But under digital, always on, real-time media and their feedback loops, these two worlds are closer than ever. So how were marketing budgets up and down the ballot allocated this cycle, and how did they react to unfolding events and incoming data? How did digital teams fare in the battle for budget? How much optimizations occurred along the way. And have there been earnest attempts yet at attribution – to assess where dollars mattered? We follow the money.

A first draft of Campaign ’16 claims this was more a battle over free media than paid. Entire big media news cycles could become obsessed over a single tweet. Local rallies and online video releases became live prime time entertainment. As TV and online news outlets themselves become deeply entwined with social platforms, feed 24/7 programming and use digital media as a source, what arts and disciplines have emerged for managing earned media channels? Who won the war of multi-channel news, and how did campaigns use digital to feeding the always-on beast.