It may feel like a long time ago, but it’s worth remembering what a huge impact Donald Trump’s first presidential term made on the American political landscape, inspiring what NPR called a wave of “unprecedented grassroots activism” in 2017.
Among those efforts was the creation of Tech for Campaigns (TFC), a nonprofit organization that’s now intent on dragging Democratic candidates kicking and screaming into the digital marketing age.
“We started to hear murmurs that Trump wiped the floor with us on digital marketing in 2016, and it turns out that’s very true,” founder Jessica Alter told AdExchanger. “It was true back then, and it’s still true that the political world severely underinvests in digital marketing and data, and the numbers are pretty staggering.”
According to TFC’s own 2022 impact report, only 28% of political ad spend went to digital marketing that year, the rest going predominantly to TV and direct mail.
And although programmatic CTV is becoming increasingly popular among political advertisers (mostly because of its similarity to linear TV, Alter said), it’s nowhere near a priority for most campaigns.
“Imagine if you’re [running] a startup and you’re told, ‘Do mail and TV first, and if you have stuff left over, do digital,’” Alter said. “That’s a mindset we have to combat.”
Big Meta Spenders
Tech for Campaigns has two main offerings: digital campaign services and a digital voter turnout program.
The campaign services arm essentially acts as a scaled digital agency for around 200 strategically important state legislative races. Some of these political campaigns only consist of a few people. Tech for Campaigns matches them up with expert marketing volunteers to plan and execute digital strategies.
The digital voter turnout program, meanwhile, was developed in 2020 as a way to promote early vote-by-mail efforts.
Whereas some political organizers rely on CTV as the focal point of their digital marketing campaigns, TFC’s voter turnout program uses channels that work best for direct response, such as Meta (including content from paid micro-influencers), SMS text messages and email, in order of importance.
According to Alter, TFC is currently either the No. 1 or No. 2 spender on Meta for voter mobilization, depending on the day. (Its biggest competition for that top spot is America PAC, the organization Elon Musk founded in July 2024 to reelect Trump.)
TFC’s strategy is to own the entire funnel, for lack of a less commercially driven term – meaning it doesn’t just organize voter sign-ups; it also follows up (or “chases”) to confirm that those people are actually voting.
Most other political groups only do one or the other, said Alter, which she compared to a company generating a lead, then handing it off to a completely different company to facilitate a sale.
“That [idea] never crossed our minds,” she said. “And we didn’t know it was weird until people in the political world were like, ‘Oh, you’re doing the whole thing.’”
Data-Driven Decisions
Despite only representing roughly a quarter of political ad spend, digital advertising is starting to get more attention because it’s so much more measurable than other forms of advertising. (“If there was a repository for mailers, people would be horrified,” Alter noted.)
Digital allows TFC to supply political campaigns with much-needed data about which messages work best in which medium.
Messaging about abortion rights, for example, would feel like a no-brainer after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. But TFC’s data suggests the topic made surprisingly little impact among low-propensity Democratic voters during that midterm election cycle, with the exception of those in Michigan, where abortion rights were actually on the ballot.
In fact, TFC’s most impactful work happens on a state-by-state basis. Highly effective ads in Pennsylvania, for example, don’t automatically work in Nevada, and vice versa.
Nor is there a single hot-button issue that’s guaranteed to convert nonvoters beyond simply lowering the barriers to entry.
“If you look at the biggest reason people don’t vote, it’s because it’s inconvenient,” said Alter. “What better way to solve that than with digital, which makes things work on the internet [and] which makes things more accessible?”
So, why don’t political campaigns spend more on digital marketing campaigns?
Good question. Ask your congressperson. Volunteering aside, even just asking politicians about how much money they put into digital marketing can help move that needle, according to Alter.
“If a thousand more people ask that question, or 10 thousand more people ask that question of campaigns, then maybe they would start to perk up,” she said
