Kudos to Kennedy
Doomscroll 5.5.2024
Helloooooo and welcome back to another edition of Doomscroll! And also: Feliz Cinco de Mayo! And thus ends the extent of my Spanish skills. If you’re NOT 8 months pregnant - enjoy a margarita for me!
This issue of Doomscroll is sponsored by RumbleUp! Keep scrolling for a Q & A with CEO Thomas Peters!
One Question
Thanks to everyone who answered last week’s One Question about where you’re seeing the best results for online fundraising. I’m a little surprised by the spiciness of some of the comments, but loooove it. Give me all the spice. Ok, so 57% of you said you raise the most small dollars from p2p texting. Email, Facebook, and Search were - not joking - evenly split for second place.
Again - 57% of respondents said Facebook is NOT dead when it comes to fundraising. Still, the comments on this question were a little split. Here’s a couple of them:
Meta is dogshit for the returns. Seeing better results with X, and that site is honestly as trash as it gets
FB is about the same as last cycle - not ROI positive but brings in donors at a low acquisition cost
Been dead now for 2 cycles
All of my clients are raising crazy money on Facebook.
Some of you are very, very passionate about fundraising on Facebook. I got several comments along the lines of “Facebook is amazing for netting dollars and it isn’t complicated.” I’m not going to print all of them…but you know who you are! My general takeaway is this: Most of us still see a lot of value in fundraising on Facebook, even if it’s evolved over the last couple of cycles. But in terms of the overall advertising landscape, texting is king (at least for now, anyway). Which is interesting given all the complaints we hear from “the people” about all the “annoying” political texts the get….
Let’s keep this week’s One Question in a similar vein and talk for a second about lead generation. If Republicans need to desperately expand the voter pool - and there’s no question that we do - where are you seeing the best results for that? I know it’s hard to beat Facebook prices when it comes to acquisition, so is it the best platform for getting new donors? Me? I’m not so sure. So where are you guys going? Email rentals? Search? Programmatic (gulp)? Let’s hear it!
Who’s Doing What
—Sold to the spoiler on the left!
I haven’t talked much about Robert Kennedy Jr. in Doomscroll for obvious reasons (i.e. he’s not a Republican), but this week I have to. His campaign did something I haven’t seen before and think is pretty freaking cool (h/t John Hall): They did an auction in honor of Earth Day.
Ok, have you guys seen a campaign do an auction before? I have not, so color me impressed. And jealous. And now I want to do one for every single one of my clients. Some items up for grabs: a phone call from RFK, virtual meeting with VP candidate Nicole Shanahan and other campaign figures, an unopened farewell issue of Bobby Kennedy’s George Magazine (the political nerd in me loves this), and more. Some things weren’t bid on at all (no one wanted the pen RFK used to sign the ballot petition in New York), but that’s ok. I love seeing the transparency. I love that they put at the top how much the auction raised and whether they met their goal (they didn’t, but again - who cares). Technically-speaking, I want to know how they pulled this off, what, if anything, they would do differently, and if there any significant legal hurdles they had to jump through. Still, I really like this approach to fundraising. It gamifies the experience for donors - especially if it creates an environment in which they have to keep going back and checking on their bid. Talk about making sure a voter is invested. Overall, cool stuff.
—No forgiveness
The NRSC released new ads this week targeting several battleground Democrats (Tester, Casey, Baldwin, to name a few), tying them to their party’s plan to use taxpayer dollars to forgive student loans for pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protestors. And boy am I glad they did. IMO, this was well executed, and is a great way to co-op the student loan forgiveness issue. Love it. Bravo.
—More ad intrigue
Not to be outdone, the Trump campaign also dropped a spectacular ad this week, targeting minorities. The ad depicts a Biden campaign worker calling a prospective voter and getting totally rejected. Watch it here. Unfortunately for them, several people flagged late Friday that the ad had been removed from the Google ad library for policy violations (probably because you can’t target race?). Anyway, it’s a great ad.
—Still besties?
If any of you were worried that the rumors hinting at a feud between Trump World and Lake Land were actually true…well, they’re not true enough that the two camps are not still sending out fundraising emails together! The Lake campaign sent out a fundraising email on Friday signed by Don Jr. So for now, my friends, we can all relax. Mom and Dad are still chill. For now.
2024 Roundup
This is where I make note of a few other things that caught my eye this week.
West Virginia Senate candidate Alex Mooney released a new ad featuring..Babydog. Kind of. Watch it here.
Elsewhere in West Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Moore Capito is running an ad featuring Sen. Shelly Moore Capito. Wonder how he made that happen. Watch it here.
In Indiana, American Advancement PAC is running an ad attacking Mike Braun for not adequately supporting the border wall. Watch it here.
Nevada congressional candidate Marty O’Donnell is out with an ad with an interesting angle on the immigration issue: attacking corporate America for employing cheap labor. Watch it here.
Who’s Spending Where
From April 24 -30, the top conservative spender on Facebook ads was…drumroll…if you guessed Americans for Prosperity, you would be correct! The group spent just over $168,000 on ads this past week on a bunch of lead gen and a new 30-second spot about high energy costs and permitting reform. AFP Action spent $97,000 on ads supporting several conservative candidates around the country, including Jeff Crank in Colorado, Brad Knott in North Carolina, and Gabe Evans in Washington. Third place goes to the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism Inc ($69,000), while fourth place goes to I Love my Freedom at $54,000. Rounding out the top five this week is Judicial Watch, which spent about $44,000.
The top spender on Google ads during that same time frame was Trump National Committee JFC, at a cool $246,000. Make America Great Again Inc spent $126,000 on that new ad with the Biden campaign staffer and a spot about Biden’s border crisis. AFP Action came in third place at $77,000 in ad spend, while AFP spent $60,000. Rounding out the top 5 is Jefferson Shreve, a Republican running in Indiana’s 6th Congressional District. New this list, Shreve apparently decided to pull out all the stops leading up to the May 7 primary by plopping down $42,000 on 38 different ads in the last 7 days. Talking about throwing everything against the wall…
P2P
Industry Watch
Finally - some good news for those of us frustrated by the Instagram algorithm? According to TechCrunch:
Instagram is introducing a few new changes to its ranking systems to better highlight content from smaller, original creators across the social network. The Meta-owned platform says that historically, creators with large followings and accounts that share reposted content have gotten the most reach on the platform. So now it’s seeking to give all creators an equal footing in terms of reach with a set of new changes that will be implemented over the next few months.
The change comes after months of criticism from creators’ who said their reach has been negatively impacted by the algorithm, leading to Instagram head Adam Mosseri fielding complaints on Threads nearly as often as he promoted new features.
The platform is introducing a ranking change that will give smaller creators more distribution, replacing reposts with original content in recommendations, adding labels to reposted content and removing content aggregators from recommendations.
This is true equity, my friends. Let’s hear for the little guys!
Also: this Wired piece about Sidechat was an interesting read. My hot take? As long as there are social media platforms, there’s going to be opportunity for people to foment division and do, well, bad things. But asking college students to moderate the platform themselves seems like an absurdly bad idea. I mean, have you SEEN the state of college campuses these days? Just sayin’.
The Grapevine
I’ve been remiss in not giving a shout-out to everyone in the digital space who were awarded the AAPC’s 40 under 40 award this year. The full list is here, but special high-fives to Phil Bartel, Carlos Cruz, Jerrod Dobkin, Jose Durbin, Maggie Paulin, Rebecca Scheiber Brown, and Carrie Tucker!
Also, the C&E Digital Campaign Summit this week looks awesome. If you go and learn something cool, HMU!
Got a tip for The Grapevine? Job announcement? Job opening? Email ‘em to me at itsthedoomscroll@gmail.com
Q&A with RumbleUp’s Thomas Peters
1. What’s your name, and what do you do?
My name is Thomas Peters, and I am the Founder and CEO of RumbleUp.
2. For those who may have just woken up from a coma, explain what RumbleUp is and what you guys do!
RumbleUp is the market leader in Republican texting. We have worked with over 3,000 clients up-and-down the ballot and beyond since our launch in late 2017, including every major Republican Committee down to individual school board races. Our mission is simple: deliver the best texting experience for our clients and their audiences.
3. There’s LOTS of p2p vendors that pop up in the marketplace…what makes you guys different?
Insane attention to detail and delivering value. We go the extra mile at every step of the process, from helping clients navigate The Campaign Registry (TCR), getting them up and running with best practices, making sure they have good, clean lists, monitoring their traffic in real-time, as well as rigorously advocating for our clients’ traffic to ensure it actually gets delivered and helps them achieve their goals. We also do more than any other platform to keep our clients compliant. Our client support and technical offering is best-in-class. We make the hardest types of texting easy.
4. Are there 1-2 things you see clients doing in the texting space that’s working really well, and you can share with Doomscroll readers?
Our most successful clients do two things: 1) They send really good texts. This means utilizing video-in-text, including engaging graphics (funny = memorable), writing copy that stands out (sometimes using our AI tool to write the first draft), smart microtargeting and engaging with people who reply and getting them onto customer journeys. The best clients coordinate their texting programs with the other channels they’re using to market to voters and we’ve built out a robust API for them to make that process seamless.
2) They are smart with their data. Nothing screams “I don’t care about you” more than texting people irrelevant information or ignoring replies and continuing to text them, which we have seen a lot of in the industry with fundraising texts in particular. We have the features needed for anyone to properly organize and segment large amounts of data with ease directly from our platform to get to the kind of hyper-targeted texting that moves the needle. If you don’t know how your messages are being received you won’t be able to improve. We can do a lot to help clients start with the right data and improve it with every message they send.
5. We’ve been talking a lot lately about bad actors in the fundraising space, which crosses over into texting. What role, if any, should P2P vendors like RumbleUp play in “policing” senders who maybe aren’t observing best practices when it comes to texting donors?
Ultimately the future of texting is up to the clients. Clients should be responsible when choosing a P2P vendor. Phone carriers will continue to crack down on bad actors and I broadly support their efforts because we need to keep this channel open. On RumbleUp, we have automated safeguards in place that flag problematic language and tactics for our team to intervene and help the client address the issue. We also ensure that all opt-outs are honored, which many vendors do not enforce. Over time, change in the fundraising space is happening as good actors outperform bad actors because of higher, more consistent delivery and better results over the long term. Clients who take shortcuts will pay the price eventually.
6. Anything new/exciting coming down the pike in 2024 that you can share with us?
We have consistently been trailblazers in this space and have some exciting platform improvements rolling out! We have done a lot of work with data integrations in the past year, and to keep the ball rolling, we're about to launch a partnership with i360 to expand our data offerings even further (we integrated with L2 last year). This means not only high-quality data but live AB/EV tags which will be critical in the fall. On the technical side, we're updating our TCR application to be more transparent and accurate and we’re integrating with Campaign Verify so we're fully a one-stop shop for all things TCR. We plan on a late-summer surprise (or two) that will give our clients an additional leg up on the competition.
Thank you, Thomas and thanks again to RumbleUp for sponsoring this edition of Doomscroll!
Last But Not Least
From the other side of the aisle:
The Biden campaign is spending 7 figures on a new 60-second spot about abortion. And I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this…but I find the ad completely underwhelming and am NOT looking forward to many more months of this. Le sigh.
From the other side of the tracks:
This headline grabbed my attention the other day: After years of caution, pharma advertisers are embracing influencer marketing.
Here’s a snippet, from Digiday:
“Health is a new frontier in influencer marketing,” said Rahul Titus, Ogilvy’s global head of influencer marketing. Titus declined to share figures relating to influencer spending by Ogilvy’s health clients, but told Digiday that its clients’ investments in the first quarter of 2024 were 60% higher than the same period last year.
He suggested that healthcare clients aim to meet demand among social platform users for wellness content and medical advice. A survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in April for Ogilvy by pollsters Big Village found that 70% report seeking out or learning about healthcare issues on social media; 93% of those that engage with that content report taking action like booking a doctor’s appointment afterwards.
This kind of makes sense, and I’m surprised I never noticed that health care companies were NOT going to influencers for ad campaigns. That said, I don’t know how I feel about teenagers opening Instagram Reels and seeing their favorite influencers pitching Ozempic. Woof. I pray these companies use caution. [insert eye roll]
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! Did you like it? Consider forwarding to your friends!