trump said -- he didn't rule it out. he just said make me believe. i think that's something he now does. the 1.0 was different. i think at that point, what mr. trump's message during media and those things, it was an important role as 1% here and there to win certain states. it wasn't the overarching thing driving the campaign in version 1. in version 2, the significant thing, digital operation brought the turn key digital fundraising in a few days. that partnership came with the relationship with the rnc, individuals out here who made me look really smart. the people from the rnc stepped in to help us build this fundraising opportunity. we ended up raising over $260 million online. i think that was an important step of that.

then 3.0 things changed again. natalie: one thing you guys did -- you brought a lot of people together, like you said, in a very short time. how did so many different minds come together, work well together in such a short time? a lot of different people. campaigns bring different egos. what worked best in such a short time? what strategy -- who brought what to the table? brad: well, i think all things take different types of leaders. i had a great leader above me, donald trump. who obviously doesn't have a lot of room for error. then you have the second one, kushner and myself. i think we -- all of those leaders are people who let talented people do their work. there was a lot of things i had heard about previous campaigns when i would come in. i had no preconceived notion how things were supposed to operate. i would ask a lot of questions. why are you doing this? why do you think i should do this? one thing i heard was, to get an

email out the door, get content approved, there was 14 people in the last campaign had to approve it. our campaign, there was just one, myself. for most of the content. i could approve content that was going to go out the door. mr. trump and jared kushner entrusted me to do so. i didn't need to have every single piece of content if it was within the means of what our campaign goals are. so i think simplifying that approval process is one example of how we streamlined operations so we could move forward. by the end of the campaign, i had dictated other people. i said you have the ability to approve this now. don't mess it up. natalie: you faced -- i sat in a forum not like this but similar to this a few months before the campaign. i think it was august. they were criticizing the trump campaign. it was a republican-based forum. they were worried that they were going to lose. there was criticism of the trump

campaign. they were worried targeting was going wrong. they were worried there was a lot that wasn't being done right in the digital forum to have the republican candidate win. how do you think -- how have you interacted with your peers now and how do you see politics that you have changed republican politics for the future? brad: the good thing i didn't have peers in political digital. i didn't know everybody thought i wasn't doing a good job until i read it in the newspaper. to the entire campaign, i made zero initiative to make any of the marketing about myself until i think jared in the bloomberg article that came out -- it was a couple weeks before. that was the first time i had officially talked to the press, other than you. it was a month before, right? we gave away little bits. people didn't know what we had running. it wasn't until the last week,

until the end understood that heck, we had a huge operation. there was a lot of things we did -- can you hear me? significantly different. the entire campaign for the last couple months ran around digital and data. meaning, where mr. trump went on the ground, where we bought our media, how we bought our shows, how we bought -- how we made our tv commercials, the rnc -- i was the rnc liaison as well. i met and became the center point of how the ground game was going to operate from a budgetary standpoint. i tried to explain this on tv. you only have 90 seconds to explain it. if you look at the campaign previously with a flat hierarchy above it, and this time, the campaign that ran a circle that was around the data. by doing so, our universes and our people didn't have to double

work. we had a third of the money or half the money that hillary clinton did. so we didn't want to do the same work twice. i would sit there with the political director and say, we're doing this here, we're doing this here. what money do we need to spend? how are we going to make these phone calls? i can't imagine many campaigns in history where the digital director was making the budget decisions. that was a significant difference. i knew how much data we had. the data i was showing was how much money we needed. i didn't perfectly eyeball that. we got pretty dang close. we ended the last day with just a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank. that maximize our stuff including that two-minute , commercial we produced. getting that in the right social media spots to try to get last persuadable targets over. if you look at that and that central point of view, that was a significant change. the other thing i stated multiple times is we spent 50% on digital. over $100 million on digital. that's a big change. at harvard, the dnc was happy to

tell me that they didn't think they needed to spend more money on digital. they spent plenty. if i would have done it, i would have spent even more on digital. i think all the data shows clearly that mr. trump had a huge impact with digital social media and advertising. but you cannot not spend on tv. you couldn't just -- that would have on every newspaper, brad messes everything up, he spends all money on digital and we lost. all of us wouldn't be happy if i had done that. you had to have a balance. natalie: it's easy to play the hindsight game. we're going to play it. when you look back, can you say, we won because of data? or did we win because of the message? how do you -- natalie: >> it's easy to say why we won. it's donald trump.

natalie: do you balance those things out now? do you say, two years from now if we look at the midterms, what do you advise future campaigns to do? what do you -- brad: what's funny is i didn't have any previous campaign experience, which either made me really good or just really bad at explaining this question. when i got into political advertising, this might go to -- i don't know how many digital people here and people have to get into creative. one thing that was different was i never looked at media in a way of being in the content being produced so line item the way political people looked at it. i always go back -- i was lucky enough to be in the dotcom boom in the late 1990's. i am older than i look. i remember one one thing that for all electronics did back then. you got two types of advertising. back then, everybody remembers the ipod came out. you had the zoom or whatever the other thing was from microsoft.

so they would advertise their products and have these line items. you would see line numbers. the fastest processor. what did apple do? apple showed a picture of a woman, a microphone, a silhouette with no color, dancing and said, if you buy this ipod, you will feel this way. we were like, greatest product ever. it didn't explain what was in it. anyone know what's in an ipod? apple is never going to tell us what was in there. we knew how it would make us feel. what i didn't understand about political advertising was, you try to sell candidates by the pros and cons of them instead of what you are going to feel like if you voted for them. if you look at our advertising, it was based off the emotional feel of what it meant if donald trump would win. how it would change your life. i believe that people vote like they purchase things. they vote with their emotions. i think that political marketing started to get in the same bad problems that other companies got into advertising, which was start to sell the pieces. we have this four pieces. you have three pieces.

you have three -- we're positive one. we win. unfortunately, humans don't think that way. think about that original ipod commercial. why was it so amazing? it was amazing because we just wanted to feel that happy. i believe voters wanted to feel that happy. if you watch the commercial or the change commercial or choice commercial, there was few times we went into the details. everyone is like, tell about the details. no, let's not tell about the details. mr. trump is going to bring change. he's going to make people feel better about being in america and make the country feel -- it's great again. i think that's important. that's how i think people think. that's how we make consumer decisions. why wouldn't we make our political decisions the same way? that was one of the most significant things i just didn't understand why it was a line item contest when no other great products sell that way.

that's a very consumer side view. you asked me what i brought over. natalie: true. in an election where we had a lot about twitter, a lot about -- a lot of content on the internet, did you ever wish that donald trump hadn't tweeted? about something in particular. or maybe distracted from the news day or distracted from the message you were trying to get out that day? natalie: no. i was never distracted by the message. do i wish, you know -- was my life ever complicated by things that happened on the campaign? yes. it's a very tough question. luckily, it's not my job to solve those communication problems. however, it was perfect and he is a genius because he won. if the goal was 270 and he won, then he won. i never played sports all those years and said i only won by one. i played bad.

natalie: hindsight, again, but you do a lot of things in campaigns. there's always things that don't work. you still win. what didn't work? you still won. but what are things out there that just -- brad: what didn't work? youtube worked beautifully. you know -- what didn't work? we didn't have enough money. wish we had more of it. natalie: what are things out there that looked like new and shiny toys but maybe aren't the newest and shiniest toys? brad: you know, i think what doesn't work in politics and my personal opinion is this, i think live calls don't work. i just think they're worthless. i think romney made 200 million live calls and we made 2 million. i couldn't understand that. i'm not in the political decision. that wasn't my decision to make those. i felt dollar for dollar, digital money went further. i feel like there's this thing, we have to do everything. we have to sprinkle money here

and there. let's double everything. no one starts a business and goes let's double everything because we have endless money. no. do this because it makes us the most money. let's not do this because it loses money. that's a consumer thing. let's spend money everywhere. why don't we spend money where it works? i pulled from phone budgets as much as i could and to other things. i think traditional mail has its place. i think however we spent less -- i think $50 million or $60 million less than romney there. i think -- i don't know if we spent more in digital. i'm sure we did. i think tv and digital and messaging and geo-tv were very important. it's hard for me to say with a didn't work because we won. we won almost every state we competed for but colorado. a mistake i made in colorado, i should have spent more money earlier. i didn't expect how many people were going to mail in their votes, like 44% in the first few

days. i thought people were naturally going to be lazier than that. colorado people really want to vote. i didn't expect that. that's a big enough the first week. i thought i had more time. i think it happens to me a couple days after a couple videos came out. it was like timing. natalie: let's talk about fake news. it's a buzzy topic. did it ever as you were going throughout the campaign -- brad: don't talk about the "washington post" like that. [laughter] natalie: did it ever -- did fake news help or hurt the candidate? was it something you guys talked about as it was being spread on different sites? brad: you know, i have some pretty harsh comments about this. i said at harvard and everybody at the dnc almost fell out of their chair, i think i spent most of my time fighting the largest super pac in the country, mainstream media. sorry to say that. i know you are at "the wall street journal," which i respect. i think that the media bias was

horrible through the campaign and i think i was called a racist, misogynist, anti-semite. there were a few things. i was a white supremacist because i was born in kansas. i did not know that being born in a state lumped you in with people. caller: caller: -- i think that it was pretty sad what the media did. i think fake news, it's not a hard line. i think everything in life is a gray area. i think all media has somehow not a sense of truth to it. there's people who write all truth and then people who write opinion and then people who write to make money. and somewhere the line in between that and i think that's probably a first amendment thing. i'm not a person that makes those choices, luckily, because i'm not a politician, but i think at some point, the consumer has to make a choice no different than if i go in and is that tv better than the other tv? it's up to me to make that choice. when you go online, you should

recognize not everything you read might be absolutely true and you should try to get yourself educated to what that is. as americans, we have responsibility to believe what we believe and not what other people say. and maybe i just have a different view to that. i think that you can't expect everyone around us to be perfect. we should just try to do what we think is right. natalie: we talked several times about how you brought your business experience to politics. what do you think businesses should learn from campaigns and stuff like that? brad: what, businesses should learn from campaigns? natalie: they have a set deadline. there's a definite. brad: there's definitely a set deadline. i don't know if, you know. natalie: lessons? brad: lessons to business politics. i don't think i've ever been asked that. let me think of what i learned in politics. i think i learned that, well, see, it's different.

i feel like in business, the media is kind of your friend. in politics, i learned that they will completely not your friend. there's so much more emotion in it and opinion and in business, the writer doesn't go, god, i just want to destroy your small restaurant business. let me take this down because i just hate your enchiladas. it's just like, it doesn't happen, right? so you're like, okay, we're all friends. free enchiladas, you can write a nice story, maybe a negative story you don't like the food but it's not so personal, you know? i think, and the one thing, the media. so i thought, a few reporters i met with my friends and then they terrorized me and called me names. i was like, whoa, i guess you don't like me. that was lesson one. but that didn't have to do with business because that doesn't exist on the other side. i didn't know that was a thing, but now i do. what else did i learn? it was really nice to have a really big budget.

you had to show what you can do. the beautiful thing about politics is with marketing, i've been doing this nearly 20 years. never had the opportunity to have this big of a game where i could show the different skill sets i have and bring teams together. i think that was an amazing experience and a little bit of luck mixed with a lot of hard work. you know, it's weird to be sitting up here after all these years and that's a very humbling experience, at the same time, very exciting experience. sometimes, maybe spin something to make it and i think politicians show there's no reason to end up winning the money the day after and sometimes, spend it all to make it and make choices that are a little weaker because what happens if they don't make it? but in politics, you don't have a day after anyways and it's other people's money. so there's this certain difference opinion but i think businesses can learn from that. maybe we should spend a million dollars in advertising on this and maybe we'll make 10. it's just a different risk

reward program. natalie: and final question, what's next for you? are you moving to dc? are you saying to go back to san antonio? brad: no, i think that san antonio would be a unique experience to return to now. i have an apartment in new york. i plan on spending some time in new york. i'm close to the family and i'll continue to work with the family. i got a lot of great people i've learned along this journey. like i said before, matt, garrett, kobe, parks benny. molly, i can't say her last name. i think those people, there's new opportunities and new experiences available and i think all of those people did amazing things and there's a lot of room for us to go out and show other people what we did. if anyone could actually really look at see, there were some of the meetings with matt, garrett,

me, and see what we did and how much we did, i think they'd be shocked and just, we got a lot done with a little team. and the dnc probably had 100 people for every ten of ours and but i think a couple of things. one, people felt more connected and more pride. it's amazing when you get a group of people that feel so driven to do something that it doesn't take a lot of team to do that. i think i could take one of those people against ten people who it's just a job. and i think you saw that in the republican group. i think the republican national committee was ready for this and when trump came along, it was a perfect opportunity. we didn't have that team so all of the sudden, we could all come together and i think when those people, i'm excited to see what all of them do and what i could do with them. good? natalie: thank you so much. brad: thank you.

lee: going to stick around too. i know a lot of people have questions for you, brad. next up, we'll do this in silicon valley style. and next up is daniel huey to talk about the expenditure arm. daniel: hello. sorry, can you hear me now? okay. i'm daniel huey and this cycle, i managed the rnc's expenditure program. i got a handful of things i wanted to show you here. mostly about the mentality of how we approached our advertising this cycle, some simple principles we stuck to that surfaced very well. so none of this is rocket science. very old problems that are getting worse all the time and the solutions are all extremely

simple. everyone in this room understands. the devil is in the details in implementing and executing it all. things that were talked about, more clutter than before, audiences all over the place on different scenes and more ways to buy each of these types of plans. so our solutions, we had three basic principles that guided us here but targeting the same audience across all of the screens. layering our media plans and creativity consistent through all of our advertising. the first one, you know, we used the exact same voter file, found our model target voter audience, exact same voter file is what we used for television, same one we sent to facebook and obviously, the same one we used to target the audiences online and built up from there. two things. one, compare apples to apples better about the most financially efficient way to serve one more member of the target audience but then also, allowed us to do something we thought was innovative and

measure total message penetration. media plans. i think this is one of the more novel pieces very difficult to execute once you get into the nitty-gritty of it. efficiency is great. going into the cycle, everyone talks about data and efficiency and being hypertargeted and that's great, but on television, you're so efficient, talking to a small percentage of the audience because you're not buying "wasteful advertising." online, your microtargeting your audience but at some point, you can't scale that. i think there's a bias towards efficiency we need to move from away a little bit. we constantly fight about, there is a broadcast impression the same as a digital impression and i think that's the wrong argument to be having. i think we should talk about attentiveness of impressions and so, sorry, but a lot of web sites, essentially a digital yard sign. it's the same television yard

sign during the daytime news, no one is watching it. but program, there's a place for that at a certain price but we should place a premium on advertising such as true view, people opt into and are paying attention to. i think that's why live sports is more important on television by far. video on demand with the cable, essentially true view on television. and the final piece is holistic media plans. instead of saying the media budget is x, and this percentage goes to tv and this percentage goes to digital. let's allocate to the thing that the medium is best at. broadcast is best at generating a lot of reach, targeting people at once. but the price efficiency and ability to scale down to reach frequency to your target yenls as tremendous financial diminishment returns. 500 broadcast points that we would get approximately five impressions through our target audience but then we would use cable and a tremendous amount of target digital to the same

audience that we were getting closer to 45 or 50 impressions of total message penetration before we would change traffic. that situation didn't play out in every instanlsce but the guiding principle that we had was a message not based on an arbitrary television level, an arbitrary true viewpoint but rather a holistic delivery of impressions of the audience. and final, creative consistency. everyone understands this principle. everyone understands the idea of having a theme. everyone understands the value of characters and stories and probably rolling eyes a bit but we don't do this often in politics. it requires a lot of up front planning, commitment to something in particular and i think that in order to cut through, this is what we're competing against more than the other side and i think we need to stick to this as often as possible. two states proud of this. one was in pennsylvania, with this bike messenger who carried

almost all of our spots, with a complicated message and he was able to hold people's attention long enough to deliver a complex message effectively. we had another example, i don't have it up here, but arguably more creative example in ohio where we had a "fake newscast." we had an actress, several states show all the places. so this idea of having a character and creating a consistent theme and a consistent brand across all of her digital and television advertising helps you deliver the message. proof is in the pudding. senate majority pack, own bike messenger talking about how our bike messenger was evil but that's how you know it worked. and the whole thing was shady katy mcginnty and a week after the election, the student body was trolling the other student body using the shady katy tag line because that was her alumni.

creative consistency, it can be as simple as these are the colors, these are the fonts, these are the looks and feels, all the way up to here's our geico gecko. it takes a lot of early planning, a lot of committing to the idea by the whole team and a tremendous amount of research. look, i think we all agree on the problems. i think we all agree on the solutions. the devil is in the details and committing to research and budgets up front, i think, it's the name of the game. so thank you. [applause] lee: thank you. we're going to get our next panel appear with andrea, betsy, chase, michael, peter. while on stage, this was the first year we saw political ads hit the youtube leader board. can you pause this one second? so political ads are known for being really bad content.

youtube leader boards focuses each month on the top performing 10 ads online. whether they're organic or have some advertising behind it. this year, this cycle, we had 5 political ads hit the youtube leader boards. i'll show some of them to you today. we have kicked off with a two minute closing at from trump. we will show you another one from the different presidential candidate and then three ads from the senate campaigns and then a theme here that daniel just hit on. so i'm going to let y'all see if you can figure out the theme from the ads shown after this one. >> i understand that when mainstream media covers immigration, it doesn't often see it as an economic issue but i can tell you, it's a very personal economic issue. and i will say the politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers and bankers were crossing the rio

grand or journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation. if i'm elected president, we will triple the border patrol, we will build a wall that works, we will secure the border. i'm ted cruz and i approve this message. ♪ osay, can you see by the don's early light ♪ >> holly was 21 when she died. we lose 129 kids a day to heroin and the only person that i've seen standing up there screaming almost daily is senator portman.

he gives as much time and energy and love to this as any of us parents who have lost. he truly listens and tries to implement plans to make a difference. c.a.r.e. is such an important step in what's happening. i know it will save lives. i am so thankful that we have senator portman on our side. >> throughout his career, john mccain has been a true friend to the hispanic community. he has fought for comprehensive immigration reform and for our small businesses. i urge you to vote on november 8 and i urge you to vote from my friend, john mccain. >> my name is nicole craig. >> i'm kevin craig. >> we live in green bay. we came home with grace.

it was a nightmare we wouldn't wake up from. 25 children waiting to come home. there wasn't clear reasons why. the adoptions were completed. they were final. we had to go to washington. we had a strong player in senator johnson. he's a father and a grandfather and he was going to do whatever he could to get these kids home. dear nicole, thank you for visiting and sharing your story. hopefully, we can find a solution so you can bring elizabeth grace home. your family are in our thoughts and prayers, sincerely, ron. i can't tell you how that felt. i don't think i believed it. and then having senator johnson show up, that was just the icing on the cake for us because i knew at that point it was as important for him to come home as it was to us. >> i'm ron johnson and i approve this message. lee: come on up here.

hopefully we'll have everyone talk about their ads. >> [inaudible] managed the wisconsin senate campaign that took us all by surprise this fall. ron johnson pulled up a come from behind victory after they had pulled their advertising. chase campbell, a digital advertising specialist with harris media whose resume includes two races, could have, should have been on the races in retrospect but hardly think of him that way because of mitch mcconnell and rob portman in 2016. michael duncan, a digital strategist with cavalry. he works with a couple now and races like indiana senator-elect todd young and john mccain's reelection and mike lee and ted

cruz for freedom works. and peter who managed another one of the most uphill races of the 2016 cycle for pat toomey. we want to first talk about the ads we just saw. >> so the grace ad that you just saw was something that in the work for a long time. we did research early on identifying the constituents in the story and we knew we were going to be outspent so we knew that we needed to be and we knew they were going to see if they would only care about billionaires. and we did our research early

and basically to go around and make sure we captured constituent stories like this one. so this was a spot that did ultimately end up on television but the intent, and it was powerful and so we decided to run wit and ultimately, we had a two minute video, 60 second video and a 30 second video and then ultimately, ran it on tv and we did have it running towards women on youtube on a low burn from, you know, the minute it went up through election day. and we saw with the survey those who watched it two times more likely to vote for ron johnson. so it was a great story to tell. it served a purpose and

something we were proud of. >> the follow-up, republicans talked about a shift in strategy and things that were shifting resources around. is that part of that? >> we knew we were going to be out raised and outspent. this was part of the postlabor day reset that we did. once folks in wisconsin were not enjoying the summertime anymore and kind of paying taex, we hit the ground running but we had laid a lot of that groundwork early to make sure that we were ready to do that.

>> heard this before, but about this time in 2014, an executive director for reelection in 2016 and showed them a slide show since the last time in 2010 and told them the most successful campaigns of 2014 spent five times as much as the average 12 campaigns. you were part of the senate campaigns including an unlikely early adopter in richard shelby but we'll get back to that later. can you tell us what that means? what aspects of a modern campaign are covered under digital? >> you know, i think if you go back to like 2010, people saw digitals part of the comms department.

we were the people that took the press release and posted it on facebook or on twitter and like that was it. it was like, that's a victory. and then people started to realize the potential for digital to raise money and so then it became part of the fund raising operation. and people started to realize that the way mied ya consumption, and that was a huge part of the advertising budget and because of the part of the budget, part of the data so digital went from being on the periphery as everything and richard shelby who we worked on in his primary and todd young or

mccain or portman, or ron johnson or toomey at the ground level. i used to work at harris media with my buddy and called me on christmas day to hire us because it was that important to have that part of the campaign locked up two years for his election. not many recognize how critical the digital component of the campaign and starting early kind of gives you that leg up.

>> they will probably need to get on it right mow. how did you guys do that and what did you learn from the ohio race? began building his online audience and remail list and controlling the message on searches as soon as we could begin spending money. and his, i think, coming off of 2014 and later mcconnell had in his race, he started early as well and began doing stuff with him in march of 2013 for that race. really kind of set the framework for 2016 candidates and senator portman, we were testing video

messages from him in the beginning of the summer, so a lot of, freblgs, the holiday, we just saw, we began running that and tests online at the end of april and beginning of may far before it came on to television. and a leader on, and it was more of a reminder an we did use some cool tools that it had used before with the great team at google. talking about display advertising and we did a test actually because it's a common conception in digital advertising junk. we don't know who has seen it. it might be a computer.

not even a person. that's something we wanted to test with google. so we ran a display campaign for a week on the c.a.r.e. legislation related back to the video and all we said is look at what senator portman has done to curb heroin addiction in ohio. and we ran after his target audience of likely republican voters and for the two weeks after that, people exposed to the impression, not people who clicked on it but just people who saw the ad somewhere online went and searched for the senate 600% more often than someone in the audience who never has seen the ad and sort of searching there too. that was the cool tool we used to help bring some validity back to the display advertisement that we were running for the senator. >> and in lar,particular, that was on earned media hits with heroin stories right, as well? you matched your ads to the earned media? >> there was a combination of targeted advertising to the ohioans likely to be moved on

the heroin issue. >> peter, something that senator toomey talked about earlier on, as a republican in pennsylvania, was his own race independent of the presidential campaign no matter who the nominee was and in the end on election night, we saw interesting results when you compare toomey's counties to trumps. did that surprise you that you won different voters than trump did and does that sort of speak to the way senate campaigns can run more independently than we thought from presidential race? >> we knew, we always knew pennsylvania was going to be an uphill climb no matter who the presidential nominee was. so he planned to always run ahead of them. what is amazing in pennsylvania, you have two statewide republicans win and their maps are two totally. they're very different from one another. president-elect trump found a

path through the rest of the state outside of really the philly media market that we just didn't know if that path was available to us. and i think we went in and we knew we were going to have to find a large number of split ticket voters and go after them, identify what issues mattered to them and then talk to them across all platforms and really feed them information that they would care about and i think we did that, obviously, we did that effectively. i think the philly media market alone, 100 or 120,000 split ticket voters itself and just the philly media market alone and we won statewide by just under 100,000 votes. so i think it is amazing the two different paths, but, so we were surprised on election night when that all kind of came about. >> the beginning of this cycle, all we heard is that senate races can run only so far from a

presidential race and the cycle every race went the same as the presidential. does that mean there's potential for a senate race to turn its own course especially with the new technology you were using this time around? >> we invested heavily in, you know, using data and digital to target people and to really brand the senator on a good public servant. i mean, ultimately, you, as an incumbent, have a negative. and they'll put it in that light. and worked to really save this little girl's life and getting the rules saved to get her lung transfer and we ran an ad on that in the philly media market.

we talked about the senator's independence on the toomey mansion legislation. a lot. we talked about the giffords endorse. and talked about the senators, really, his record and who he was and how, really, the work he had done. we spent the entire primary talking and into the general talking about the jobs he had brought back to pennsylvania. we ran targeted mail around the state and in southeastern pennsylvania. we talked about the refineries that he worked to saved. the 9/11 air wing outside of pittsburgh. we sent mail to all the surrounding towns talking about that work as all the jobs related to that and then on digital, we matched all of those same universes so the mail piece to drop on a monday, digital on a wednesday to the share the same messaging. we were, it was all about repetition and then taking, highlighting the work that the senator did and really talking about who he was and getting

people to vote for the senator and really his work as a legislator and that he deserved another six years to go back to washington. >> and this question is kind of for all of you guys. i think the portman campaign would say all of the cool tools that you have and all of the cool media you're using is without volunteers on the ground gathering information about the voters that you're delivering it to. is that a really big part of the campaign and did you do anything similar with the portman campaign that recruited like 500 volunteers? were you guys doing something similar? >> yeah, for senator portman specifically, the field operation from the campaign was accessing and inside the same database we used on the digital side. they had all the same information that we had every single day and it was a real key component to his victory because everyone was working off the same information and everyone could speak to this. sometimes, the field likes to

use their own tool and fundraiser likes to use their own donation processer and digital person likes to use their own e-mail platform and it's all working on different things and that was never the case on senator portman's campaign and i think that actually not looking at digital as just a piece but something that the entire campaign can be a part of and including every piece in it i think is a real key to success in today's digital world. >> same thing with us. we had a fantastic in-house data director who, you know, made sure that everything that we were doing whether it was the doors we knocked on, the calls we made. the digital universes we were targeting. our tv, everything, mail pieces, everything was from the same song book and it did make a difference. for us, we had a limited budget and we did have to be smart and efficient about everything that

we did. and, you know, we were able to track, you know, every target effort that we had so that we knew, you know, like where there was movement and where we needed to supplement and where we felt good about things and it did make a huge difference in terms of our efficiency. >> and connecting all of those, sorry, did you have? >> i was just going to add something. the mccain race, this is an interesting anecdote in the primary, you know, john mccain actually lost election day by 10 points. but because there's a huge drive in arizona, like with the mail- mail-in ballots except it's like 80% of the e leklectorate will early vote. so we have this permanent early voter list that we were targeting online in the 26, 27 days before election day, all of

the voter targeting. anywhere that we could possibly match somebody or ip target somebody or just match registration data on facebook or like mobile numbers on twitter. anything we could do to maximize the reach and frequency to that permanent early voter list was like absolutely key to winning that primary and all of that data utilized by the team to call through and change it because if we could find somebody online and say, oh, by the way, that ballot is on your kitchen table, please mail it in and kirkpatrick goes on television and kelly ward gets $200,000 to put in the last ten days and so basically using the digital as something that could feed into the rest of that field operation that was like the number one thing that was useful there. >> and betsy, this is something i've within soupbeen super curious about. you worked with the scott walker

campaign. wondering if you have a strong digital campaign used to help another campaign down the road. did you find the information the walker folks had was helpful the you and do you think the guys you had was helpful to other campaigns? >> yeah, absolutely. i see a huge part of that effort here, so thank you. yeah, i mean, i think, you know, it just continues to be built upon and to get better and be refined. we started with our target universe looking at what we called the walker johnston gap. we used the walker post 2014 as the high water mark and built universes back from there and i think that, you know, we want to make sure that that's available and it all lives in the state party and whoever runs in 2018 against tammy baldwin in wisconsin will have that

available to them. it's just something that continues to be refined and made better with every point of contact that we had, every volunteer knock, every digital ad, every touch across any medium that's made refines the file and can be used down the road. >> owned by the state party or travel with the campaign at all? does rob portman need to wield this book to josh mandel? >> we'll see if there's a primary in ohio, but i can tell you senator portman is not stopping that election day is coming on. he's going to continue to keep his file active and make sure that the people in his database are being communicated with on a regular basis so that whoever is the eventual republican nominee for governor, senator, down the line has a good file from which to work. >> this was particularly interesting to me this cycle the way you guys got involved in primary. has digital advertising changed the way with a name id?

>> a couple of things on primaries. that's a really good point and not one that i think was lost on, you know, the leadership on our side and the people that run senate races. i think the whole attitude has changed. you know, a few cycles ago it was, we're not going to talk about the primary opponent with low name id because we don't want to raise their awareness. but what we've seen and having worked on both sides of this coin, right, like having worked in primaries or insurgent care candidates, you see the problem in republicans is online. those voters overindex for usage of the sbernltinternet. the the, if you are not defining your opponent before they have a chance and someone says shock

poll three weeks before the election and suddenly, you're neck and neck with this guy with 20%. you want to get them under water. and early to those people who know who they are and the way you do that is online. you know, i think what we see in the primaries is the digital shows in the verbatim statements you get read back to you from the people that you're calling. and so if you use digital to really change that sort of flow. we talk a lot about fake news now after the election. and i mean, honestly if you worked in the republican primary, you've been dealing with this problem like forever, right? if you look at what people say about your candidate, you've dealt with the issue of fake news before. but like now that it's affecting the general election, now suddenly, like the liberals

cares and the media cares and everyone cares, right? and if you worked in the senate office this 2010, 2012, you've dealt with this problem literally and what it is is info flow problem. it's not your fave on fave. it's literally what people are reading every day about your candidate. and they're reading it on facebook or they're seeing it on twitter or basically what i'm saying is your number one task in these primaries is to change that info flow, is to get people to read your content and not what you would deem to be fake news or biassed news or what some radio host is saying because you took some vote for cloture that wasn't the correct vote. if you're going to have an insurgent candidate against you in the republican primary, if you're not spending money online, you will lose. >> a quick lightning round? since we listen to brad talk about what the trump campaign did, and you're all

professionals, anything you want to take forward going to senate campaign? >> i think that, you know, their use of earned media with everything that they did is something that should be replicated. i think digital ads are treated like tv ads now. and it's a lesson that the trump team did really well and i think we can all use to our advantage, particularly, when you've got limited budgets, you know, treating your digital ads like a tv ad and making sure that you're raising money off of them, making sure you're putting on and pitching stories, it's the greatest thing that just happened is really importantly and only expands your reach. so i think that's something that the trump team did very well and we can all take from. >> i can only hope to work with a candidate in the future that carries earned media and news cycle like brad had the opportunity to do.

but i think of all the things he said, one of it was the seamless hierarchy hierarchy. that wasn't a lot of hands in the cookie jar when it came to putting it out. a lot heard the stories about 2012 romney, 100 people had to look at a tweet before it went out. that's an exaggeration but it was a lot. we say that after elections, joke about it and then we forget about it and then we go to the next campaign and some of the same problems come back again. so i think, you know, we still have candidates today that want to look at every e-mail before it goes out and change one word or, you know, and that's a problem. i think as much there's a seamless hierarchy there for decision making, it's better for all campaigns. >> i really liked the square video for fund raising on facebook. i thought that was very unique. i liked the native use of

subtitles. i think that's very good in a way that draws people's attention. it's not just to exist on facebook. we immediateneed to not just say we won and we're the best, but like think about ways like that that can sort of disrupt these other advertising venues or other social media platforms to really engage with the user. not just take the 30 second spot and run it. >> i'll go two things. one is, i think, brad's ability to understand donald trump's voice is actually critical to what they were able to get done and finding, building a team on a campaign, especially a team putting out public information that understands who your candidate is and what, how they speak and being able to kind of capture that helps to streamline that process and two is the social media following. i will be completely honest, i didn't totally buy into it when

i started. my job in twin. i knew there was benefits down the road, but it was like, we're just growing our facebook likes and always kind of asking, what's the point? but really what i found is the ability to turn people out to events was cheap. i mean, $5 cheap that you could be able to target. you could, through social media, to be able to get people to come to an event and even a center race where it's much harder. we didn't get the size of crowds that mr. trump got but to get 100 people in a county with joni ernst, it helps in ways you don't see when you're getting up and running but in the end, it does give you benefits to be able to talk your people and get them involved. >> as somebody who covered these races for the past two years, it's a privilege to have all of

you on the stage. cool things happening in all the races. >> thank you. [applause] okay, next up, ted peterson. >> hi. what's up?

all right, rolling. i'm ted peterson. i was digital director for the nrcc independent expenditure. played in 29 races defending the republican's largest majority in 80 years. the media expected us to lose around 15 going into election day and we lost 6. the nrccie spent digital out of the $75 million budget. 30% of the total media spend. digital budget increased by 60%. for the first time, budgeted for digital creative video. i want to touch briefly on two google relevant topics from ie. search strategy and 15 videos and bumpers. start with search. okay. so when a voter and third district searched for jim mower

on google. a negative ad. if they clicked on the voter guide ad, this is where they landed. clicked, this is where they landed. if you scroll down on this page, you learn more about jim hour. you may notice some things about him are kind of negative. if you scroll to the very bottom, unit this -- you notice this. search was a thursday -- was the first thing to go live. it is a site that had information about all of our candidates and the competitive house races. you will notice what appears to be at inventory on the sidebar and these were linked to the nr cc score. we wanted to give this site a

news like feel and we felt that -- and when we created a site that did not look like an attack ad but has all of our tech hits. 500,000 -- was great about these visitors, instead of running a google search id. of these were individuals actively seeking information about democratic candidates in our target district. we were able to reach them through our data. back to the search results. ad on this page, it is the wrong for us ad. they were directed to a page that had a 30-second tv spot. the wrong for a stock on landing pages was also where we directed users to click on display ads designed to look similar to the video creators. you can watch the video and the

static image doesn't do it justice, but you scroll down and read markup the candid -- candidate or sign up for more information. back to the search ads. one thing we did a little differently this cycle was busy -- bidding with two different ads. we own the democrats names -- was never to be found. when anyone search for a democrat, we had to ads with anderent creative styles deliver a message them. we benefited from owning the top two search results. let's move on to some of our

digital first creators. most of you probably saw this in the d.c. tv market. is there a play button back there? it's not going to be able to play. i can them revise. bennett, our developer, she owned a person a lot. 30-second ad. we broke it down to 15 seconds. this version that you would not have seen on your tv. it had the same message. for some districts, we went even secondr and we saw a six-

bumper ad that showed a small clip from the tv creative. it was all over broadcast. we had two versions with the same message running on youtube. it was a multichannel effort and it was a big part of our success on election day. while last thing to leave you with, i think we were particularly successful this cycle because we started with a plan. content,'stailored planned to spend a nine dollars on digital and planned a strategy and executed the plan. thank you. >> next up, a panel on ballot props. and laurenome amanda benson. there were more ballot props this year that we worked with than ever before. i'm sure all of you are going to start seeing the same.

thank you for joining me. jump into our panel, i have a very exciting topic. tonow we are very close drinks so we will go as fast as we can through the digital research ad effectiveness results on ballot props. don't get too excited. roulette -- in my role at

the job ofave focusing on voters. what are voters doing on digital? and the way we understand voters and their intent in election cycles is looking at multiple different data points. everything from what they're typing in the google search boxes, they're typing very interesting things to partnering with third party research firms. so today, we'll walk through our evolvement of research and findings on ballot props this cycle. but at the end of every cycle, we seem to be in this position. questioning the effectiveness of advertising at the overall level, all the way down to digital and if i had a nickel for every time i was asked in the research industry to show me the effectiveness of digital ads, i might be the next billionaire running for president. this is a number one question asked we get. how we set up research this cycle was to focus on three different buckets. really focus on the shift that

we're seeing in the brand in consumer world of the time spent on media and 2 hours online to every 1 hour on tv and really where it gets interesting is to go into the influence in the way of digital and finally, rounding out the effectiveness but google, we don't want to stop. if ads are working, we want to go beyond to understand how, where, and for whom the ads are working. so we took an innovative approach this year and i wouldn't be on stage without the help of chris and amanda and their partnership. so we worked with come score and -- we looked across multiple and worked with comscore and working with their national panel but we know elections are won and lost at the local level and we thought there was a huge opportunity to

understand more on the bella props. so we looked across 35 states and identified a few and had com scores cut their panel and screened in for likely voters. and the third stop is tagging the creative's so we could say with a significant lift and the true controlled and exposed experiment if digital ads worked. so we will spend the rest of the panel talking about the strategies and how chris and amanda executed these strategies and pivoted throughout the cycle . but we have some results. so we looked across all persuadability metrics. knowledgeability, intent to vote and some intent to recall. we saw significant lift in the double digit percentage points across multiple metrics.

more to come and reaching out to your google team, this is scratching the surface. but i want to start with chris and amanda. so the first question that we had is as we've heard a lot today what made a successful digital campaign on the senate presidential level, i would love to hear from your perspective working on ballot props as you worked on ballot props, what were some of the challenges and differences executing a ballot prop strategy? >> okay. >> there's no, there's very

little awareness going into all of this. in california, for example, there were 17 ballot initiatives. and the voter guide was 250 pages long. that's just the statewide voter guide. that doesn't include your local races and initiatives. so with we had to battle and the awareness of our side. at least one of the benefits of ballot initiatives is in general awareness does lead to favorability but we do have that in our favor. >> i think that the audience side of that is really -- [no audio] republican voters and figure out who that audience is and across party lines. with that and enough with the well-funded effort, have a great

investment. this is something we had on our end. we were able to take microtargeting data, combine our online targeting, not only with what was in the mail but what we were doing on tv as well. we partnered with analytics, did extra work with them and were able to target online. and so all of that kind of fueled by if fact that we had to go find this audience. >> great. so chris, you came from behind on double digits and ended up meeting and then exceeding by, we think, 70 points. >> it was a good night. [laughter] >> it was a great night. >> one of the reasons that happened is because it wasn't just a well funded effort. we ended up with the ballot proposition and new jersey is in [indiscernible] and new york is the most

expensive. you're talking about for outside groups, $5,000 a point. so to go in and play there, it's incredibly expensive. we had well funded effort and because of that well funded effort, we were able to start early on in the process. we had researched starting back in may on this before it was decided what number on the ballot. this was going to be yet and then once we decided, we went big and never came down. >> great. amanda, with this research of what did you find was the most surprising or any pivoting from your internal research? is that what was coming in as you moved towards election day? so one thing, we're in a similar boat with one of these campaigns. down by 25 points and ended up 4. among one certain group, digital

only, people that you could only reach -- they either watched tv over the internet or did not watch any tv content whatsoever. so that was huge. one thing came from the study we did was -- and there was daily polling going on with these campaigns too like who we need to target and how we need to change. but with the study, the thing that surprised me the most is that we all believe that digital can move voters. we believe that it was nice to see it in numbers and present that to our clients. but the thing that i really enjoyed seeing was as we changed messaging, the lift in message recall popped and we could, i was seeing on the results that the messaging that we are running in september was popping and then kind of integrating our october-november messaging into that but it wasn't, you really didn't see it move and basically found that the message that we

were weaving throughout was really from polling and from focus groups was the message that was going to win us this campaign. so we went full bore the last couple weeks of the election. cross stream tv, digital radio, everything digital, direct mail, everything. i mean, everything had the exact same imagery in it. the exact same tagline, the exact same message all across the board. and we saw a lift of, i think 32 points or 25 points, i can't remember exactly what the number was, but it was huge. so to be able to see the difference in just message recall as we were changing the messaging, it actually shows that it's working. >> so -- like you said, the numbers might nobody be assigned until later. so what tools from a digital perspective did you use to educate voters, as this was pretty different from the awareness levels that we were working on presidential incentive.

>> on our end, it was particularly challenging because ours was about casinos in a state where you can gamble. so we had to go in and do an education component of this campaign that made our search strategy challenging. people much smarter than me on our team worked closely with the google team to officially make that buy. it was something we were constantly dealing with and bidding against, the same folks we were trying to stop. >> we went up early on with search advertising before we even had a ballot number and because if anybody was hearing about something to do with it, we were basically using terms like if they're searching for something even loosely related to this, let's be able to get our message in front of them. so search was extremely important component of all of that. another thing with how confusing all of this was is that we had to figure out how to word our strategy appropriately.

so for one ballot initiative they were running, it was -- we were the no side and the initiative was basically to fund education, and we knew that people in that state supported more funding for education. everybody thought education needed more funding, so we couldn't go at this from, no the state doesn't need more funding for education, so we had to figure out how to word that appropriately. and that all translated into the search ads we were doing and we went up for most of the campaigns in early summer and went up hard and didn't come down. >> i would say another component of this is frequency. it's something that in dealing with an education campaign, you need to get your frequency up in order to burn that message effectively. especially when there is not a face or can nate or media that -- a face or candidate or media that will go along with it. we did two things along those lines. one of which we figured out cross, medium, what individual

voters were likely to see on frequency. where we could, we augmented that with individual. tv is example of that. making sure the frequency was higher amongst the cord cutters, we knew the broadcast buy was less likely to hit them. then the other thing that we were able to do is we were able to download through data transfer 2.0. the cookie device and d log of -- the cookie and device -- the cookie and device id log of frequency on a daily basis and match that up. we could go in and identify folks that were below the frequency we needed to hit them and increase that as we saw fit. >> i think we have time just for one more question. so what do you both think is on the horizon? we pushed some boundaries of even pushing com score to look at state level panels and had some funny think kind of pushing the industry forward and operating in this type of research. but what do you think is next or

where would you like to see us go with the digital research frontier? >> it was really disappointing to me that com score could not measure the mobile impact of what we were doing. with the shifting trends toward mobile consumption, most of the revenue is coming from mobile devices, we couldn't measure what the lift was from that mobile component of it. i would really like to see that get pushed forward. in addition, it was hard to get significant size and we were operating one of the largest geographic dmas in the country. the research has a far amount to go even though the targeting is certainly where it needs to be. >> yeah, we were concerned about the size as well and -- but i think from a research standpoint, it's -- it's hard to say. one thing -- this is kind of loosely related that we found with a few of the ballot initiatives that we were running, from polling numbers,

was that 20% to 25% of our voters, i mentioned this earlier, were not able to be reached with tv advertising and so i'm not sure how many of those people are actually measured through the com score study because the panel was relatively small. it would be interesting to see the difference in impact with those individuals specifically versus just everybody else out there on the internet who could have potentially been getting the tv ad on top of the digital advertising. >> thank you, both. [ applause ] >> thank you. matt lira you are up next. thank you for dealing with our av problems. and for your pleasure, matt has decided to go ala tim cook, no slides, just tim. >> no slides, i don't like the accountability of slides. i told you. but before i start kind of what i was planning on talking about,

i want to share something that struck me as i was in the back and listening to the panels and all the earlier discussions, that's the assemblage of people in this room. i see digital strategists, ad strategists, creatives, people who work on committeeses, candidates and causes and people worked their way up from the bottom and people come in from the top and make a difference. all of you have been fires for the fact that digital is changing the way that campaigns are being run. and whether it's local initiative or the presidency of the united states, you've all been willing to take the risk, put your reputations on the line and to fight for this new and better way of doing things. so i think as we're kind of collectively maybe give ourselves a round of applause or what we've achieved and what is ahead. give yourselves a roupdnd of applause. [ applause ] obviously ward and brad, todd

and shields and brian, it's a really great group of people that have really fought and stood up and put the reputation down when the chips needed to go down to make that change. now we have the opportunity to change the country. to my real talk, essentially we're seeing a change in media, this disrupted change in marketing and sell products and entertainment, politics, et cetera. and it's challenging. i think it's something that our democracy has seen before. you know, if you look back to abraham lincoln he said once that matthew brady and the cooper union speech made me president. matthew brady was a photographer in the 1850s and 1860s, believe it or not, that the time still photography was this disruptive new medium. they thought still photography was kid stuff, like ent tank distraction you throw to the side. and matthew brady and lincoln

were able to realize that this is how you could shape the opinion of a back country lawyer and turn him into a national leader. and he leveraged that to lead a country through some of the most divisive times we've ever confronted. you zip ahead a few decades and ee fdr. he realized radio, this new disruptive media, could be used to communicate with people in the living rooms and forge a connection with the american people and guide them through a depression and world war. you zip forward to the rise of television, jfk has the audacity to do something weird and unusual and wear stage makeup to be on tv. the serious politicians wouldn't necessarily wanted to do that. he realized that the master a new medium meant to do something a little weird at first but is core to what makes that medium distinct and different from its predecessor. one of the things that strikes me how digital is different is its interactivity.

it's still going to have great sound, still has to have great audio and great imagine, but it has to be fundamentally interactive and strike people as an emotional connection through kind of interactive medium. so many people did that really well this cycle. so we're at this peak moment where we have the opportunity to run you know, the country with the house, the senate, and the white house, but i think we need to challenge ourselves because the media is continuing to change, digital will continue to rise, and we need to continue to find new ways to leverage disruptive thinking to make interactivity more central to how we run campaigns, how we sell policies and ultimately how we govern. as a wrap up thought, one of my favorite economic theories is the sailing ship phenomenon,

which is this idea if you look back at mid 19th century, there were four or five major ship builders and they had been dominant for centuries, by the end of the century not a since he will one of them existed. why, when faced with the self evident truth that steam technology was going to fundamentally build disrupt building the ships, why don't they start building steam and they were unable to make the leap that the world was changing. it's not an isolated story. if you look at why didn't xerox embrace the graphic user int ter face, why don't block bus buster interface interface streaming. if you don't disrupt, you will be disrupted. i think as the leaders of the conservative and republican community, at least as it relates to campaigns and campaign strategy in this room,

we have an obligation not to -- not we have an obligation not to rest on our law relevantsurels., but to continue to push ourselves. so thank you, and appreciate the opportunity. [ applause ] >> thank you, now we're going to have the war room for san antonio from the trump campaign. we have jonathan swan, garrett lancing, garrett coby, brad pasquale, matt. molly schweickert, and i got to say this is a little bit better looking an than the war room in san antonio if you have been there and can drinks are flowing. if you didn't have a mike --

>> well, this is a fantastic panel, i'm sure most of you are familiar with these people, this really is the donald trump digital team. these guys were the core of the team. jared kushner obviously approving things but these guys really were in different respects responsible for the operation. and you know, we've seen so much reporting, some of it correct, some of it slightly incorrect about the various roles. just slightly. so i'm keen to dig into that. but one thing i think everyone would be really interested to hear and maybe we'll start with the rnc folks here, is can you just give us some insight into what it was like to walk into

the donald trump operation when you first did, how did -- how much did you resemble a normal digital operation, was it just something completely different. just give us a bit of a flavor of it. >> [indiscernible] >> so he had a business he started running, a beautiful office, but as he kind of shared for that 1.0 window, he was running a solo operation. you know he would pull in guys here and there. he had some folks i know he had to pull in, i'm sure at times. but it was, you know, something he was running solo. it was pretty impressive they got so far in that way. and our first meeting, it was kind of a little rough around the edges i would say. we're like these rnc guys showing up down in texas.

i'm saying so through that, we hung out there a couple days, came down a couple times, grew a really good relationship just working together. >> i think it was pretty sparse when we got down there. i think therefore surprising, but we had a good connection. everyone wanted to win. i think from our perspective, i knew coming in to the rnc that there was 16 or 17 campaigns and none of them therefore because of the resource split was really going to be able to have a digital operation that was -- could scale into general election size very well. i think he had a well sized and scaled operation that could have done it, but we knew back in june or assumed back in june of 2015 that wasn't going to be the case.

i wanted the rnc operation to be as large as possible and have major e-mail operation list and staff ready to go at a moment's notice when the nominee walked in the door. so it was ironic or maybe perfect that the campaign that came out of the primary had the smallest digital operation. in terms of just man power, not footprint. but it ended up being a great match that we sewed together over the first few weeks and the rest is history. >> this one is for brad. i want to know to the extent to which you think not having the hillary clinton super structure was an advantage, so actually being smaller, not having as someone said 42 lawyers to sign off on a tweet. do you think there were advantages as well as disadvantages to that? >> well, it was cheaper, one point it was all mr. trump's money, so it kept me around longer. i mean, so you know, i think we only spent $2.4 million until

the convention total on digital and i would say $2.2 million, $3 million was probably all in ad buys. we built the website, the digital structure and everything i billed less than 30 grand, at a point when we were in iowa, that's not very much money. we built a store, built all the pieces, done everything, but again, i did that from the house. so -- >> what about in terms of function alt. >> functional? i think it's hard to look at version one and version two and version three that way. if you look at the end, i think our digital operation, by that point, i can't say our scale was actually smaller.

i might say the scale was larger. i don't know exactly how many people had. we had a pretty big -- we were a hundred plus people by the end. we had a lot of different assets there. it's unfair to look at one point of it, that had nothing to do with hillary, that would be a question for the other candidate and i think i had a heck of a primary candidate on my side there. it wasn't as much about us. you look at the general, we put pieces together fast, in partnership with the gop and rnc, cambridge, other partners, i was able to pull out -- my company is not small, they make it sound like i'm sitting there by myself, it's 70 people, it's a whole city block, it's not like it's a little building. i just hadn't pulled resources because i had to bill for those. by the campaign we started pulling more and more resources, we outgrew our office and had to move to another location in the city and then we got almost a whole floor of that building and then i forced a lot of them to fly here because i didn't like flying to d.c., well san antonio, so they all, which

wasn't a bad place in the united states to be stuck, it's sunny, no direct flights, but we can fix that now. [laughter] [applause] >> it's good to see the power is not going to your head. can we send the mike down the other end. so one thing i think that a lot of people are curious about, i was talking to some republican operatives this morning and saying what would you be interested in knowing about. they want to know to what extent in your digital operation was persuasion and what extent was fund-raising, can you tell us about how both of those elements worked? one of the cambridge people, maybe, i have not spoken a lot. [laughter] >> obviously as brad talked about the -- that was about infrastructure, getting both new e-mails addresses to turn over to the e-mail marketing team and direct fund-raising, which we

had a tremendous amount of success doing. as we came down into the cycle and understand the pocket of voters and understand mr. trump's story from an -- and identifying our supporters and making sure they had the tools to request ballots and understanding where to go on voting day, thez were important parts as well. it was digital first. whatever the various objectives of the campaign were, whether that was raising money or getting supporters to come out, digital tools were used in order to accomplish that. >> you want me to answer that. >> many wise, gary by far got most of it, the fund-raising. the gop and rnc handled all of the digital fund-raising for the most part in partnership with the campaign and jiles. we would produce content, they would and gary would lead that team and then we had partners

from third party companies to push the content. that was the majority of the money, i think, i don't know who how many millions of that is, i would say 70% rang. then we had a persuasion budget and gotv budget. that was mainly run again through the rnc through another portion of the operation that garrett ran. i don't think we did that much gotv digital through the campaign itself and then we produced content and then worked with them and then you had the persuasion budget which i believe was, i don't know, 10% to 15%, 20%. i think we ran our fund-raising effort in a way to be persuasive as well. maybe gary can talk about that, i think that's a big difference of the way we did fund-raising to meet two goals at one time. >> i think first it's the way we're running the fund-raising in terms of our turn.

we were aggressive and had a mindset of if we're getting three extra we're not doing it right we're leaving money on the table. we had such a short window to operate, we were bringing as many donors and dollars as possible, really the goal was when we were getting great return. roi, a third roi at times, we really kind of ramp up our volume to push it down to bring in more total dollars and if we're operating at 1.3 x that means we're doing better than in my mind than 3 x because 3 x we're leaving money on the table. in terms of how the operation probably helped with the persuasion, you know, trump followers got amazing kind of engagement, so a lot of our content gotten gaugement, lot of our content got shared, we were extremely aggressive with testing and pushing envelope, what kind of messages worked for dr. and we found, you know,

sometimes the video didn't have to have anything to do with the actual -- the content was important to get the user to stop and watch it as sort of the first step to the funnel. whether that was relevant to the actually acts why we're asking them to give us $35, didn't matter. and whatever video got the users eye balls is what we used. that is something that typical campaigns, i don't think we would be able to do. i think people would stop us and say well, that doesn't make sense, we're focused on that ultimate goal of getting the conversion and donation, so we're able to push through and do those things, additionally, because our ads got so many engagement, that led to even more reach with those ad units. in swing states we would try to use persuasion style ads, message style ads, knowing that that ad unit is was going to be seen by our donor target and then their community. their friends.

just by them engaging with that content. so we were able to garner incredible amount of kind of social impressions, more reach, with users that we weren't even targeting for donation. >> you double dipped. that's good. i'll come back to fund-raising, before we do that, i want to talk particularly to the cambridge guys about targeting. and you know, after 2012 and to some extent 2014, i think micro targeting was fetishized by some on the left there was intrigue about what cambridge was doing with the psychographic profiling. i want to understand because we hear about that and we see what were very kind of generics, big theme, big emotion ads and you

know daniel, i think it was daniel before saying, in some cases targeting, we need to actually stop being so efficient and we need to pull back a little bit. i want you to talk about how you used the tools that you have and just that field in general. >> yeah. i don't want to break your heart, we actually didn't do any psycho graphics with the trump campaign. i personally did woefully little on the digital side as well. most of my role was on the data side, rn side crushed it. we had tv ads budget from that. i meaninged the goat rodeo and zach went to new york. he was in my background, pe periphery. so we didn't really use psychographics that much because we had to walk before we could run on this campaign. similar to the story that gary told, we started around the first week of june in san antonio with regulartively no data structure existing.

we're parsing together csv files, it was a few weeks or a month before we could build a model and the emphasis was always on fund-raising. to gary's point on why he needed to raise money, every four, five, six, clips, it it was fueled by fund-raising, mitt romney had a fantastic dollar operation which could fuel the campaign. mr. trump's team did not have that luxury early on. every dollar that came in went to other parts of the campaign. brad was robbing peter to pay paul to get stuff done. on the targeting piece we're talking about building a database, working with the rnc, the alamo base, and then leveraging cambridge's database, combining those three things together, building partisanship models, 12 issue sets, the basic

building blocks you need from a campaign. over time we got into things like sentiment, basic nlp stuff, darren in the back. was working on a facebook spot late in the campaign that leveraged nlp technology. but we had five months to scale extremely fast and talking about doing siekographic profiles requires a much longer ramp time. >> the other thing that cambridge provided and the rnc provided me was if i want to make budget decisions every day which i was making lots of them, i wanted kind of two sets of data of what people thought was happening. i didn't want to make all my decisions off just one set of data. at cambridge started helping us with polling internally, making what 1,500 live calls, 500 web -- it was 1,500 live calls per state, plus web and other stuff, i don't remember what the numbers was x we were bringing

enough data in they could create models and the rnc provided, so i had two data sets to look at all the time. rnc say you are dun in georgia and cam rage saying no, i think we're up 3. i could say why is there a difference. i had a third set that were doing larger polls to find out what is going on on the ground. i was able to bring that data in and have a better picture of what i thought was happening. cambridge provided a full time employee that could sit next to me all day to put it in a visually sags, i could do it in a method so fast i could make a decision 15, 20 minutes because we were going so fast. ability to digest that much data, even if sometimes it was the rnc data going back to cambridge and back to us, they were able to visualize it, so i could consume it to make better decisions. >> i think one benefit brad had

he had control of research, data and digital and tech which is kind of a dream if you are someone who has been on presidentials before doing this. it gives you a ton of leverage and helps you make more holistic decisions where you are not fighting with the digital team to target the audiences you want to and you are not fighting with tech to build you a new page every day and spread operational control over those three or four wings, you can go to his .1500 surveys a week, across 17 battle ground states, mixed method -- live to sells, that goes into rerunning the models every wednesday, gets new audiences, gary gets new audiences and rnc is providing data and we're going back and testing the digital performance off the back of that with google and facebook and also traditional survey work and dial testing. the campaign was consistently learning from itself which is very require and much more run -- which is very rare and much

more run like a business than most campaigns have been a part of. >> i might get gary to answer this, in terms of to borrow on the fund-raising. i think you raised a quarter of a billion, something in that range, which is phenomenal and i know there was days when you broke was it $7 million, some days, more than that, 10 maybe, nine? >> [indiscernible] >> i want to ask two questions, one is a macro question. can you break down how you raised that money, i'm not going to get you to say we spent x with facebook, i know you are not going to do that, i want you to give me some idea of ratio between e-mail versus, you know, ads bought versus x, give us some idea how you raised all that money.

>> so the general break down was about 60 to 65% e-mail raise and then the rest basically advertising, some of that comes over the transom of people visiting the website obviously huge social presence. that outperformed my wildest expectations, there were a couple, one, two percentage points of the overall. e-mail i was happy to say, i was expecting to be 75%. i think gary and the cambridge team had an aggressive advertising style that really has never been seen before in politics that brought in so many extra donors initially and then e-mail was able to get them the second time. you know, the e-mail, like i was saying before, there are so many campaigns running in the summer of 2015, we knew we had to have an e-mail list, there is a time value to these assets, which means that the only way to build a giant list when you need one is either -- if you don't have one, is either spend a ton of money and catch up really fast but you are going to spend 10 or 20 x per e-mail, or build a time

machine and go back and start the e-mail list from scratch, not scratch, the rnc had a good one when we came in, we built it up much larger. having assets ready was incredibly important. i think going forward in the next cycle, the next presidential, i think text is going to be more like 10% to 15%. >> talk about that a little bit. that's pretty interesting i think. >> sms, gary and the group ended up running a lot of that, but people were signing up, you guys had those -- the banners on this podium, all throughout the primary, you walked in with like 600,000 text messages, i totally dismissed it and said there is no way we'll end up raising money on it, ended up doing several million i would say. >> towards the end it was a lot heavier and they had messages, mms messages, video messages

where we raised half a million dollars, which was rather absurd. and you know, brad switched up the event, you had to start running your own event sign up where you are captioning mobile funds and that helps for growth in the msm list and also had a lot of protesters, they had to get verified through their mobile number. that was the goal. it also gave us a massive sms file which we raised a ton of money off of. >> combined together you have the e-mail list, the big tech message list. you can do more, that is why the assets are so valuable, i would go to the political director and pns director and say the e-mail, the money that i need for e-mail, should you be arguing for too that will turn out voters persuade vetters. next to the candidates time and

message i'm not sure what is more valuable asset besides e-mails and smss. >> you have to remember, too, the reason why they raised so much money is because donald trump was a really good candidate to raise money from. >> i'm glad you say that. the next question i was going to ask you is how much is represent my kabl and how much is because of donald trump. i want you guys -- and the three kids. >> yeah. you twisted me in, sir kels -- you twisted me in circles here. so if you are a campaign that is is maybe gearing up for 2018, what things can you take and learn from the trump campaign and what things do you think were uniquely trumpian and cannot be so easily replicated.

>> good candidates with good messages win election, what we do helps on the margins, my life before helping brad and cambridge was walker in wisconsin and parks who i think is somewhere out here doing my fund-raising for that there. i would have died to be able to say half the stuff that mr. trump would say in funds raising, a lot of typical republican candidates, others of you who worked for rubio, i see other folks in the room would have loved to say and have the kind of message and ten or mr. trump had in his fund-raising, that message matters and parks will tell you even subtle word choices mean the difference of 10% to 20% in e-mail on deliverability. mr. trump was the vehicle, but they were able to harness it. >> what was some of the messages that resonated, what was some of the things that really popped. >> build a wall. >> build a wall. >> give us insight to how that worked. >> one of our biggest days outside of the third debate was

august 31st, the last day of the quarter, great day, also the day he went down to mexico, totally dominated the media. tv for us really felt kind of like, it would create an echo, whatever we were doing online would be juiced up if he is dominating the television news, all the users are watching, it's relevant and front in the face. 8/31, he was the president, he was playing that role. and he is also talking about an issue, you know, immigration, wall, that does really well for us. there is -- when i talked about earlier how we started using persuasion ads to raise money, you know, talking about immigration wasn't really our persuasion ad, but we had an ad from early on, it was direct to camera, which we did a ton of these direct to cameras, i started going up to new york and writing scrips for the kids and

mr. trump filming then. we had one eric trump was talking about the wall and it slaughtered for months, we keep running it and running it, most of our creative would burn out after a couple days because we were aggressive with pushing it. we would pull it down for a couple days and bring it back. we could be asking money for anything, that piece of content would fire the user up, ask them for a membership card, this or that, they're interested now. >> are we done? i will give you one thing that is interesting about the fund-raising, we had all this in one kind of shop. fund-raising, small dollars literally followed two days ahead of polling data. and that was really the truth. meaning you could take that graph and show as fund-raising went up the polling data to media and things that got happened got them excited in the base and made them move to trump's column would vote with their wallet. >> when it plummeted after

access hollywood did the -- >> as polling -- as the votes came, as you saw as we improved or the ebb and flows of the up and down of the campaign, fund-raising would match that. people vote with their wallet. it was nice with a small dollar fund-raising, you could see this. it was nice because i could see as the in goes as we saw other data showing the victory, fund-raising continued to grow as well and it went all the way to the last day and people were trying to vote with their wallets, when they weren't happy they would vote with their wallet. >> i want to ask you one last question. what is going to happen, brad, will you be working with kellyanne. >> i will have a job outside the white house. >> are you going to be the chief digital dude on the outside group? >> no. i haven't made -- right now i'm enjoying life, dinner with my friends across the street. so that's as much as you are

going to get. i will have a job and it will probably be outside the white house. those are the fwotwo answers to that. >> we're all fairly confident. thank you, guys, appreciate it. [ applause ] >> okay. we're going to show a few videos from the super packs for the last panel and then we're on to cocktails. >> why aren't i 50 points ahead you might ask. >> well despite insisting. >> i am a real person. >> hillary admits -- >> last time i actually drove a car myself was 1996. >> the clintons made $100 million. >> we came out of thehouse not only dead broke but in debt. >> she is under fbi investigation, but -- >> people should and do trust me. >> so why aren't i 50 points ahead you might ask. >> 45 committees responsible for the content of this advertising.

>> hi, i'm ruth, two certain things in life, death and taxes, one thing is certain for me, with lieu an bennett you get higher taxes. it rules out raising taxes saying there are times when you need the revenue, doesn't the government take enough already. meanwhile she is out there criticizing her owe po intent. whether it's higher taxes on families, higher taxes on businesses, you can couldn't on lieu an to lead the charge. virginia doesn't need lieu an bennett, learn for. >> my home, my family, and my marriage, i have a lot of things to worry about besides some politician's future. empty promises of special treatment are the last thing i need. i want a leader who will fight for me and my family. from my home to my job, there's a lot depending on me.

i know i can build a better life if we can finally get the economy on the right track and there is no limit to what i can do when my family, my job and our security are priorities for my elected leaders. that's why i'm supporting carla for congress. he knows i deserve equal pay for equal work and he understands when i succeed, my family succeeds and america succeeds. >> what is at stake in this election? it's not just who goes here, it's who rules here. the supreme court. the justice who guaranteed your right to own a gun is gone. now, the next president's choice breaks the tie. four justices support your right to own a gun for self defense, four justices would take away your right. >> the second amendment is outdated.

>> the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right. >> what does the second amendment mean to you? >> not the right of an individual to keep a gun next to his bed. >> and hillary says? >> when it comes to guns, we have just too many guns. >> the supreme court is wrong on the second amendment. >> hillary has made her choice, now you get to make yours. defend freedom, defeat hillary. the nra institute is responsible for the content of this advertisement. >> in iran, a woman's life is worth half her husband's, christians persecuted, it's illegal to be gay. people stoned beaten and hanged for what they believe, how they were born and who they love. ted strickland supported giving billions to that regime. without concessions for human rights violations, when we had leverage, ted didn't stand up for the vulnerable. that's why we can't trust him to stand up for us.

american unity pack is responsible for the content of this advertising. >> why aren't i -- >> okay. so brian we're going to start with -- can you hear me? okay. so future 45 didn't start running ads until later in the race at which point there had been hundreds of millions of dollars spent against hillary clinton. what made you guys decide to get involved at that point and how did you guys decide what kind of messaging to use, who you wanted to target and how you wanted to run your ads? >>? -- >> is this on? >> hundreds of millions was probably an overstatement there. >> i was about to object to the

premise of your question. i think at the point that future 45, we were formed in early 2015, but we certainly didn't spend the bulk of our resources until after labor day of 2016. at the time that we got involved, i think something like $150 million had been spent against trump by secretary clinton and her allies and i think maybe 8 or $9 million had been spent supporting mr. trump, mostly by the nra. so the playing field was wide open in terms of the types of issues you could talk about to define secretary clinton.

from our point of view, we always start with research. so we undertook a very large research project, both on the subject matter and also on what voters cared about, then we tried to target our ads to the right audience. so we had ads as lee knows aimed at millennials, ads that were aimed at folks who really cared about the women's issues, ads that were aimed at people who might engage with politics on a humerus basis, we did a lot of humorous ads and tried to be funny. like the supreme court and economy and so forth and tried to match those creative opportunities with the right audience. >> what was it like running ads for a super pack for a candidate who was already so well known in the media? was that part of the reason why you decided to mostly just go after clinton rather than airing ads promoting trump? >> we did both. the media liked to talk about the anti-clinton effort, but the reality is there were a lot of

opportunities to positively talk about the president-elect and vice president elect. in fact, the ads aimed at economic opportunity and the economic plan, i think were a real bulk of the advertising we did, especially in september and especially in pennsylvania, some of these will sound familiar, michigan, wisconsin, ohio, iowa. so we definitely focused on that. at a certain point, everybody understands the role of an outside group versus the campaign. at a certain point, the campaign itself put up some really high quality positive ads aimed at talking about mr. trump's economic message. and at that point, when it became clear that they were carrying a very effective positive message, we then altared our strategy to go more negative. there was another group run by -- they had several really great quality ads as well. so we focused more on defining secretary clinton. >> how did you determine what effect your messaging would have on down ballot races, they -- >> the map is the map. i believe that whoever won the presidency would also carry the senate.

and one of the targeting opportunities was there were a number of voters who were really core trump voters who were not necessarily for the republican senate nominee. then there was another sub set that they were for the senate nominee but not necessarily for candidate trump. so we tried to aim our messaging both on air, but more significantly through digital means and then to a lesser extent mail and phones to marry up those audiences, if you could persuade a rubio voter to also vote for trump and vice versa, a trump voter to vote for rubio, we felt a rising tide lifts all boats, as todd used to like to say, hillary's slogan was stronger together, you're view was we're better together. if we could be better together and get folks to turn out for the entire ticket, both the presidential candidate, senate candidate and my friend shields would say the house candidates. finally that was the reason why future 45 spent really the bulk

of its resources buying national advertising. so we were up on i think it was 18 different cable and broadcast networks nationally, including $30 million in the last week alone as people were making their game day voting decisions. >> so just to open it up a little bit. this was obviously an unusual election year and one way was that we saw less spending on tv advertising on the presidential level, but more in congressional races. would you guys each talk a little bit about how you worked to make your ads kind of break through that noise, particularly on digital platforms. why don't we start with you, mike. >> with me, sorry. we can talk about the ruth ads that's what we did, one of the things that we did. the concept for the ruth ad that you saw, really was me looking over the shoulder of my 14-year-old son who watches a lot of youtube content, and

thinking through about how you have websites that are mobile sites that are different, and a lot of the content that we created in campaigns over the last two, four, six, eight years, we've really -- as we've -- the argument about whether or not we should put things online and what the budget should be, i think has changed, it's sort of been settled in campaigns to a certain extent that you are going to have to do this. now it is what does it look like in my opinion. and taking a television ad and cutting it into a 15 second and throwing it online was sort of 1.0. as we get to a different version of can we take the exact same research but do different creative that is the same message and the same -- to the same audience we are trying to hit on television, but do content that works online, that is going to be in someone's feed that they're going to recognize, they're not going to swipe past because it's a political ad or it doesn't have clouds over the capitol with lightening, something you can't see, what is if that people look at when they're looking on small screens

and what do they pay attention to. that's how we kind of came up with the idea of having ruth, who is sitting right here, talking straight to camera in a sort of familiar way and part of that too is we came to google and we said to google, look, you manage youtube stars and create these personalities, if we wanted to create a position at our -- we have a com director, press secretary, can we produce an online spokesperson talking to our audiences and trying to build a relationship with them the same way youtube stars do that and the personalities they build on there and so brian, our digital director, our communications director, i have to say this, i sort of came up with that stuff and i was off doing other things and they actually executed all this stuff and made it happen. so -- they could tell you a little more, but they crushed if in terms of people paying attention, clicking, watching

the whole video, the feedback that we got, how they moved numbers and so for us, you know, our approach was creative is king, buying online and all those sorts of things has reached a point where we can hire a lot of firms to do that very well, but what i'm not seeing as much of is people paying attention to the specific online creative and so that is what we focused on more at congressional leadership fund. >> i would like to jump in there, too. i think with what we did for the nra, we did two types of creative, i'm from tennessee, they say to make a good country song you need three cords and the truth, i think that works on digital creative. what we did was an authentic real person story with black screen behind them, nothing else. something you can watch on the phone and -- if it wasn't that, the next thing we did was stuff that looked like a movie. because we're platform agnostic, most of our creative was designed to have parts that would work on all platforms and so we didn't want to interrupt

people's entertainment each night as they watched whatever their favorite content was with advertising that looked like a piece of crap, piece of junk mail. we invested heavily, the ads that got $5 million put behind them, we had several for the nra, those looked like a movie, we spent the money to make it, we spent months in development and testing. one of the ad ds we made 12 versions of before we got it right, we went to focus groups in four states and kept getting it rong and trying to learn from our mistakes, you asked about the difference of how you decide what works online versus on tv, we took a really blended approach, we think all these things work together. people use all devices, we don't pit flat form versus platform. we try to pervade with everything. we did 13 tractor trailer full of mail, it was a holistic of approach.

so i don't know that i would argue that you make those decision continue tians, you say -- you make those distinctions. you say how can this help me deliver that message. we thought youtube and google did a great job helping us own big events, we thought this was a race with two national stars and big events would matter. we were ready to go with youtube and searched traffic for conventions. we had specific creative that ran in the conventions, a violent crime survivor only ran during convention night when hillary gave her speech and we had a budget to run it. third debate i think we did probably took advantage for man anybody else did. and captured i think quarter million, 257,000 searches on our topic when it came up during the debate. google and youtube helped us own it. when the world series came on, we bought ads but had a lot of search stuff going on. if you were searching for the team, candidates, second

amendment, we knew that those big events were really important and we would have the whole country standing by some device. >> so i think that the question of how did we break through on digital, one of the things that drove us at american unity is we didn't really have a choice. i mean, my peers up here are running much larger organizations than american unity pack. i mean, we have our own budge, we have done $12 million as a super pack over the last couple cycles, you might do that in a single state. i think that for us, it's not only that we are a leaner organization, it's that we're single issue organization and so american unity pack has a pretty focused mission of helping those republican candidates for congress who believe in lgtb freedom and so you know for us, we can also afford to play in those races, because we're

dealing with a smaller universe. it was hard for us this cycle because we had so many allies, this is a good problem to have. but we had people like john mccain running in arizona, rob cordman in ohio, as you looked at the battleground senate contests a lot of the people running in those races were either incumbent, pro lgtb senators or a chaleninger we were excited about. looking at that at the outset, our team started to assess what could we afford to do, especially since we wanted to have a clear niche in helping these candidates. we knew we didn't have the budget to be, you know, overall a definer in the ohio senate race. but we knew that we could take on some part of the mission to reelect rob portman and the clear path was digital. to refine that further, knowing if we were going to break through with our message, we

needed to understand what was going to motivate the voters. so you are hearing themes, research, mull tatiple version of ads. if you look at the light span of american unity pack even though we are an lgtb ad organization, at thispy about 93% of our dollars haven't mentioned lgtb issues, we're spending ads on corruption or attacking the democrats for being you lousy, this cycle we wanted to play with our issue a little bit and see if we could find an effective way to bring that in. we told ourselves we can't really do that unless we can prove that it's effective. then we can inject lgtb issues on behalf of republican candidate in a general election and be successful in doing so. so we researched that. we worked with a group called the women's initiative, two ladies here, and we started to understand this group, the women's initiative is

researching women's voting, motivations, opinions, it's a deep research program, you should learn about it, if you haven't and sub describe to it if you haven't already. we learned in that process, women voters, especially independent women voters were hawks, i'm dramatically simplifying this. we learned that they were hawks and there was a real foreign policy message. one of the ads you saw about the iran deal that is what we developed out of that deep research process was that we could talk about the iran deal, in a different way and instead of focusing on the nukes, focus on the human rights abuses of iran and the horrible things that the regime is doing to women and yes also to gay people and to show imagines of that and in the testing process, we learned it just had amazing impacts with youngster left women, which is a prime group we want to peal away from the senate owe po nens, working with googt we were able to put serious money behind that in ohio in a first waive.

do some brand lift survey advertising and understand where was it being effective. great recall was driving huge search traffic and again, we saw that that -- it was borne out by the real world advertising that our testing, you know, proved to be true, that young center left women responded to this image and baby boomers responded to the national security aspect of this message. we felt confident after running it in ohio we took it on the road to illinois and nevada, and i think there was maybe one other state, was there another state? pennsylvania on behalf of senator toomey. we couldn't have done that unless we had the deep research on the front end and the ability to testing it live. we shifted resources and i think that was the great thing about working with google and also the nature of digital is you can make a lot of those judgement calls in real time. >> anything to add?

>> i think part of your question was how did we know if what we were doing is working. and i think -- i think the moment where i thought, you know what, i bet trump thinwins this thing, i think it was late october, but lee dunn, he sent out top five searches and i think trump was jobs, economic plan, sure there was a couple other crazy outliers on there, the one about secretary clinton is what happens if she gets indicted. how many foreign countries have given to her foundation. how many, blah, blah, blah, all five completely negative. and what it showed was a lot of the messaging that all the outside groups were doing and especially the biggest megaphone, the president-elect was doing was breaking through to people and the trust issue really was being driven home.

and so i think you got that real time feedback from the google platform. >> so brad, just to go back to you. the nra was one of the first groups that aired ads this cycle and became one of the top spenders. how did you decide to get in so early and what was the messaging that you found? >> a lot of that was due to the research from what went wrong in 2012. we did an autopsy of our own efforts after the romney campaign loss and one of the things we learned is a lot of people we hoped to reach made their mind up very early and we didn't talk to them until very late. so we adjusted our schedule. we were the first group to run an ad in the general election, we did it before the republican convention, that add got 2 million views on youtube and a million of those were purely organic. i think part of that is because it was con controversial and we managed the after us for shooting in a veteran cemetery

and we baited it and took the hook and made the v.a. write us a letter and went on tv as much as possible. we are fine with managing chaos and controversy and experienced with doing it well. our post elect showed a 71% of voters decided before august. and so our creative was weighted pretty heavily to that. later as the campaign went on, one thing i would say that really worked for us with google and youtube because of their large scale in the rest of the economy beyond politics, trump coalition was very different. most of what we do on data as republican operatives is driven by a lot of things really grounded with our republican or independent voter history targeting. but trump was going to win with a lot of people who didn't fit those heavy voter, heavy -- a lot of partisan data. we used google and youtube's resources of information from the other side to find people

whose lifestyles matched. it was rural women. trump had a problem with women and 3% of the voters in the country who skipped the '12 elections were likely to vote this time and 79% of them backed the nra's viewpoint. most of them were rural women. if you were interested in do it yourself projects, camping, i'm not going to -- there are a lot of things that -- the list is long but we specifically aimed at that kind of data from google and youtube and you can only get it from a platform that big. >> great. to go back to you for a second, who is the target audience for the ads and how did you decide what content to focus on more than just the style itself? >> the target audience depended on the district. we had some audiences that were built through the data trust. we actually worked with a deep root analytics and optimus and had on some of our districts we had them building out audiences for us. it really dependod which

district we were going into and which audience we were trying to get to. the data shows the ruths ads crushed it with women which i don't think we would be shocked at that. and most places a big part of our audience and what we were trying to get to. that's a recurrent theme across all republican campaigns and target audiences. i'm sorry, what was the second question? >> i think that was it. >> oh, okay. >> thanks. and tyler, for you, you talked about sort of focusing on digital out of necessity in part. if you were to do tv ads with the content change or do you think you'd adapt it? >> it would have had to have

changed. i don't know if stations would have run it. it almost didn't make it through google approval. it was highly refined and our audience was -- and we were doing this probabilistically. it was overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly independent and leaning left, soft partisanship scores. but we did build in to that a few other very interesting audiences. one of which we set out and lee and i talked about this very early on. we started doing this planning a year out. and one of the things we knew from previous ballot measure fights trying to win the freedom to marry in the states is that we knew that republican voters who had a preference for sushi were dramatically more likely to support gay rights. whatever that means. but we knew that. so we had a hunch if we built in a profiled audience and google has a custom sushi lovers audience, it's not huge, but it was highly efficient. you can't do that on television. that was on the iran deal campaign. we had another one promoting equal pay for equal work for women.

and we were really limited in that for starters we didn't have enough republicans who support the policy. if we had more republicans who support that, we could have done some of the most effective ads on their behalf. think about that for 2018. for this cycle, we weren't going to just air that to a huge audience. we know there are wrinkles on the right with a policy like that. but what we also knew from the research with the women's initiative is that that issue as a wedge is more likely to grab the attention of an independent woman than any other, you know, economic or pseudoeconomic issue that we're aware of. and so by being able to go into ohio again on behalf of senator portman or south florida on behalf of congressman cyrbello, we could target independent women audiences using digital that you can't do on broadcast tv or even cable. >> here's a closing question for you guys. there are any super pacs in the democratic party that you thought did digital ads really well and really effective this year? >> i think they showed up today. >> okay.

>> okay. >> this is not quite answering that question, but some of the people at another conference have heard me bitch about this before. one thing that's frustrated me after this election and i give google all the credit for having the trump team here and people that have been involved in winning here so that -- and the press that's come here today to talk about this. but after the '12 campaign, you know, republicans had to face the music, even though brilliant things were done in the '12 campaign. the rnc data was good. a lot of good things happened but the democrats won so they're geniuses and we had to whip ourselves for years to get ourselves into shape again so that we could be ready for 2016. we did all that hard work with a lot of the work of the people in this room doing it. and we won. and so i'm waiting on the books and the long articles and the magazine articles to talk about how smart we all were. and -- and the articles about how bad the democrats were

because one of the frustrating things from the dccc and house majority pac are articles saying we were wrong about all these races but it's because our polling was bad. as if that's an excuse. we're held accountable for our polling. if the polling is bad it means our data back end was bad and the system created to build the polling infrastructure was bad. we got it right this time. our polling was better. voter scores at rnc were better. not only should we be celebrating that we got it right and more articles written about that. the democrats should be held accountable for how wrong they were and have an introspective argument amongst themselves about why they got it wrong. >> i was going to say, i agree with mike in that there's just to refine it slightly. the best thing the obama people did in 2012 was the number of

creatives they did matching up with the number of audiences. we all read the articles. they were advertising on tv land aimed at folks who watch tv at 4:00 in the morning, reruns or whatever. republican candidates and republican groups and the party committees did a great job of huge numbers of creatives matched up with audiences. the one thing you asked about the democratic superpac, i wanted to answer it. i was stunned, and i don't know what the trump folks have said about this, but priorities usa basically ran the same playbook against trump that the republicans ran during the primary. ads and arguments and messages that didn't work during the primary, and they repeated it with $150 million of ads that didn't move the needle once. so i'm stunned that those donors to priorities usa haven't asked for a refund because it just really didn't work at all. >> you know, that's interesting. the ad that -- one ad they had had that worked really well was the -- they called it the role models ad. a bunch of kids watching trump on television. i tested that thing everywhere. and it worked like a charm until hillary clinton came on in the last 15 seconds of the ad. and then it went in the tank completely.

and i think they got that for a while. they cut it back to 30 and took her out of it. the last two weeks, what happens? they brought the version back with hillary back in it. i think that they couldn't get out of -- they couldn't out of the way of their own success in 2008 and 2012. i'm glad you had garrett and brad and garrett kobe up there. they built an e-mail fund-raising list bigger than hillary clinton's, and she's been working on it since watergate. it's -- and they did it in three months. and so i think there really does need to be a lot of coverage not only of the fact that a lot of guys on this side got it right but they ran 2008 playbook again. you can't do that, especially online. >> well, great. thank you guys so much. [ applause ] that wraps it up. we're going to move to cocktails. we're going to play one last video that was the top forming youtube leaderboard video.

if it doesn't make you want to drink and take a rest, i don't know what will, but it should be familiar to you. ♪

kevin brady talks about republican plans for attacks -- for a tax overhaul and repeal of the affordable care act. newsmakers today at 6:00 and 8:00 on c-span. >> i do think you can learn from failure. if the next president wants to aspire to be like somebody, they

probably want to aspire to be washington or linkedin. you can't re-create the -- or lincoln. you can't re-create the civil re-create acannot new country. strauss talks about james buchanan's presidency in his new book "worst president ever." differentiation of good presidents and bad presidents -- washington, lincoln and fdr are always at the top of the survey that historians make. you can't come to the top of the latter and be deceptive -- and not be decisive. buchanan was a waffler. james polk hated him for being a waffler. that's how he was as president. inquire asked tonight at 8:00

p.m. eastern on c-span's q and a. was electeds to arizona's fifth congressional district in november 3 prior to winning the u.s. house seat, he served in the arizona senate and house. arrived andative ave briggs, you are replacing republican who has a long history in the house. what advice did he give you? >> matt is a good friend. his advice to me was to be myself. an arizonadoes

native for 35 years. matt is right there still if i need help. he will respond anytime. >> what is your background? >> i'm an attorney. i retired. i served the last 14 years in the arizona legislature, the last six in the state senate. i was majority leader for two years. for the four -- for the last four years, i was the state senate president. i guess that is the emea background. -- i guess that is the immediate background. >> what about that do you think will help you in washington? >> i'm familiar with the legislative process. we just attended a meeting of roles. although the rules are somewhat different, the processes the same. that is somewhat helpful. the arizonathor of budget for the past six years,

one thing i know is how to work with people from diverted viewpoint to get something done. believe me, looking at congress and my constituency, people want to see something done in a positive way. i can't go into an isolated shell. i need to work with people and get something done. >> what is on your agenda? thing fort important members of my district's regulatory reform. , large small businesses menaces who would like to expand who are hampered by regulation. it is a real drag on my district economically. everything from epa, clean-air that are shutting down our power plants that impacts our district. another thing that people really talked about his budget. everybody is very sensitive to the fact that we have a massive national debt. they are concerned about the

direction of the country. the third thing would be wrapped up in the idea of national security and border enforcement, being a border state. our viewers know that there are factions within the republican party out here, the health and freedom caucus is a name that they know. do you plan to should -- to join a group? if so, why? >> yeah, i would be honored if they asked me to join can they have impaired but if they do, i would be honored to join. my predecessor was one of the cofounders of the freedom caucus. the other thing that my legislative experience tells me is i know where i am. i know were my belief system is. it is good to have others who share that believe system. and in a place where there are so many people, sometimes you need to be able to leverage that up a little bit. but at the same time, getting back to my previous point, i know how to get things done and work with anybody who is going to help me get this stuff done

that i believe is important to the nation and to my district. you also are a lottery winner, the clearing house winner, $10 million jackpot. is that right? >> let me clarify. there were two sweepstakes at the time. there's the one that you hear about on tv with the private -- the price per troll. and there's another one that is the family publishers, with ed mcmahon and a clarke. that is the one i won. it was $10 million. no, they did not come out with balloons and a big check. they notified me by fedex. >> i've been very blessed. did that experience change you? how does that impact you in this job? yeah, i mean, i'll be honest with you. i don't think anybody can go through that without being impacted. it certainly impacted me in my family.

but really, i don't think it changed us too much. we still live in the same town. we still do the same things. we so it at the same places we used ee. we still have the freight -- the same friends and places of worship. would say i know how to fake around it when people are looking at you. and people were really looking at me after we won that sweepstakes. i learned to stay grounded with the family. >> tell us about your family. >> i have been married to cindy and we met at a political event. believe it or not. 25 years. married for we have 26 children. only one left a home. the other five are all out of the house, doing their thing. four of them live on the east coast doing different things.

and we have four grandchildren as well. >> will your wife and remaining child join you here in washington? my remaining child is a junior in high school and she is reticent to leave the friends behind that she has made and she loves her school yard test school. so my wife and daughter will stay there. my commitment is to try to get back every weekend if at all possible. be when i'm here, i will working as long and as hard as i need to to get the work done. >> where will you be living here in washington? >> i have one of my kids and i come up both together in one of the suburbs in d.c. >> no plans to sleep in the catch in your office? >> no plans to sleep on the couch. not now, anyway. >> what legislation are you working on? atjudiciary is my committee

this point. foreign affairs is also. i think i have a next matisse in international and foreign affair -- i have an expertise in international and foreign affairs. the science committee would be interesting. natural resources is usually important to arizona. but i think my wheelhouse is really judiciary. in your times out here, your short time at here with these orientation meetings and setting been office, what have you told that may be surprised you or stays with you as you start this new job. we've been told a lot. i'm not sure how much has stayed with me because we been getting a lot. but i think what is really important -- and we find it at every level -- i found it and my expense of the state -- how you treat people and the relationships that you form and that you must always be honest,

100% honest in everything you do. if you do that, you will be in good stead. andypresentative elect biggs, appreciate your time. >> glad to be with you. c-span's "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up this morning, news media alliance president and ceo david sharon on what the media industry could look like under the trump administration. he also talked about how the media can stop the spread of fake news. then jd vans discusses his book "hillbilly elegy." the struggles of america's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor rust belt town. and eric lipton takes a closer attacksrussia's cyber during the campaign.

c-span's "washington journal" at m eastern this morning. join the discussion. >> i do think you can learn from failure. if the next president wants to aspire to be like somebody, they probably want to aspire to be washington or link mp and you can't re-create the country and you can have a civil war. so what do you do next? you aspire to be james monroe? i don't know. but you can aspire not to be james buchanan. talks aboutrauss james buchanan in his new book "the worst president ever." >> i think the differentiation of good presidents and bad residents -- washington, lincoln at the top ofways

the surveys. they were decisive men. you can come to the top of the letter and not be decisive. buchanan was a waffler. james polk aided him for being a waffler as secretary of state. himlways -- jim spoke hated for being a waffler secretary of state. he always went back and force. now they memorial service for u.s. senator and astronaut john glenn who died on december 8 at the age of 95. among those speaking at the service, vice president joe biden and john glenn's children lynden david. about two hours. [no audio]

♪ [bagpipes] >> please be seated.

welcome to this celebration of a life of service. we come from many faiths and perspectives. brought together by a desired to remember and honor the life of john glenn. service we won't began to capture the depths and s of the-- breadth life he lived but we will try. theill also celebrate unfailing promises of god. we remember love for us is stronger than death.

today, we hold fast to that truth as we celebrate senator glenn's life. now, please join me in our call to worship. before god spoke the first word of creation, there was love. when we draw our last breath and leave this world, love will be waiting for us. then let us worship god. ♪ mr. glenn: looking back on it now, it was almost an idyllic