• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, January 16, 2020

Tim Lim, a digital consultant and partner with the political firm NewCo Strategies (far right), is not holding his breath.

Asked what is missing from today's political campaigns, he said that, "metric-wise, they are so archaic. The way we look at the impact of a program. Using clicks, CTR doesn't makes sense. Engagement doesn't equal sentiment. We have to be putting emphasis on reach, frequency, and sentiment shift. We should be doing entiment surveys on everything we're running. That's how the brand side does it. If they're not getting you the ROI in terms of that movement, they'll use something else. I'm not holding my breath."

Lim spoke on a panel, "The New TV - Buying Into Screen Agnostic Stories," at MediaPost's Marketing Politics conference in Washington, D.C. 

"It is astounding the lack of real, comprehensive media planning in the campaigns today," Lim said. Large firms like WPP and  Havas are "horrified at what we do, the way we plan. And I agree with them. Media is media. If you get it on your phone, iPad, TV screen, it's media. Over the next 10 years, the largest base of consumers, voters, that's how they're looking at it. The more backwards we are, in terms of siloing, the less impactful are our media programs."

Too much siloing, he said, "results in bland creative or monolithic creative but with time constraints you're just putting it up anyways."

Lim said there is a lot of money in political campaigns so money is not the program. Poor planning is the problem. "We're still talking about creative testing today and not being able to successfully implement it across the industry. No one knows the turnaround times. There's no universal consensus on how to do it. We're judging a campaign's success is based on old metrics."

Others on the panel were moderator Robert Aho, Partner, BrabenderCox; Jaime Bowers, Senior VP, National Media, and Amanda Elliott, Digital Director, RGA.