Washington DC - January 18, 2024
New rules for digital advertising. A shrinking TV footprint. Distrust in social media and changing dynamics for political posts. One-hour news cycles. Digital clutter and in-box fatigue. Campaign 2018 has challenged political marketing with a fluid media environment where the rules of engagement remain unclear and untested. For the sixth year, MediaPost’s annual Marketing Politics will be the first post-mortem on what was learned in Campaign 2018 and the first preamble to how those lessons will be applied to Campaign 2020.
Digital marketing has never been more central to political campaign success, nor has it ever been under such public scrutiny. Even as political marketers struggle to process the mixed lessons of 2016 and 2017, the key channels of online campaign spending are being investigated, perhaps even regulated as candidates gear up for the 2018 cycle.
MediaPost’s 5th annual Marketing:Politics conference leans into the complexity and controversy of digital campaigning this year. We bring together campaign strategists and media leaders from across parties to explore how, where and how much they will be allocating to digital this cycle.
Campaign 2016 surely upended all common understanding of who we are as a nation. But what will marketers learn from the hits and misses that can inform future analytics, messaging and targeting methods for politics and all sorts of other consumer marketing? Polling was often scandalously off. Data-driven ground games and massive TV buys delivered questionable returns. And our data-driven understanding of who and how many are "purchasing" our product proved murky at best.At Marketing Politics we will explore how the campaigns of 2016 raise questions and offer lessons for marketers in and out of political circles. Was there a failure of data or its practitioners? Should the election make all data-driven marketers re-think the accuracy and value of the “laser-like targeting” ad-tech promises?We ask:Was there a failure of ad/analytics technologies and approaches or just a reminder of their limitations?Was Campaign -16 a meltdown of data-driven consumer profiling?What did we learn from campaigns leveraging hyper-targeted and programmatic video and TV inventory?What can all marketers learn from the campaign about the rising power of earned over paid media?Are the new wave of social platforms tools effective in moving behaviors, attitudes, action?What did digital media teams learn about internal organization for responding to rapidly changing circumstances?The fourth annual MediaPost Marketing Politics event will be the first draft of history for the takeaways from an historic election cycle.