Unlike Business, Political Ad Mis-Targeting Actually Generates Votes for Competitors
Sasha Issenberg · Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns · Nov 2, 2024 · at 38:09
Author Sasha Issenberg explains to Shaan Puri why business marketing strategies fail when directly applied to political campaign mobilization and door-knocking operations.
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“There are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing, and one of them is that the cost of a, Of mis-targeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you are, if you have a consumer product and you're Coke and you put a Coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar, has diabetes or like whatever, okay, you wasted 10 cents for that person. Big deal. If you are the Trump campaign and you send a door knocker To do a get out the vote reminder to somebody who is, your data tells you is, should be a Trump supporter, but they're not. Or there's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind three other people, the three women living with that one Trump supporter, that it's election day on Tuesday too, and it makes them more likely to vote. Or your person's just kind of inefficient, you know, like lazy, and they knock on the wrong door in the apartment complex, and they end up going to the Harris supporter and reminding them. You've not only, you haven't just Wasted that interaction. You've created a vote for your opponent.”
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