Facts About PACs Podcast

Business of Politics with Eric Wilson | Startup Caucus

June 16, 2022 National Association of Business Political Action Committees Season 1 Episode 83
Facts About PACs Podcast
Business of Politics with Eric Wilson | Startup Caucus
Show Notes Transcript

If you’re looking to branch out into new podcasts this summer, we recommend The Business of Politics Show.  Host Eric Wilson’s weekly podcast is a must listen, must subscribe piece of content.  And by the end of this episode, you will know exactly why and you’ll want more.  

 Micaela Isler:
Welcome back to The Facts About PACS. I'm Micaela Isler, now PAC's Executive Director.

Adam Belmar:
And I am Adam Belmar, and you are listening to episode 82 of the number one PAC podcast in America. 

Micaela Isler:
Indeed, you are. Today, we're going to broaden our horizons into another podcast that we find so fascinating. 

Adam Belmar:
Fascinating, and wildly illuminating when it comes to the less understood pockets of the political industry.

Micaela Isler:
You've heard Eric Wilson as a guest on the show before, but never like this. 

Adam Belmar:
Today, we've asked Eric back to discuss his podcast, The Business of Politics Show. For our audience, the bottom line is this, if you're looking to branch out in a new podcast this summer, Eric's show is a must listen/must subscribe piece of content. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly why, and I'm guessing you'll want more. 

Micaela Isler:
Coming up in a minute, inside The Business of Politics Show with podcast host, Eric Wilson. 

Adam Belmar:
The Facts About PACS Podcast is produced especially for the members of the National Association of Business Political Action Committees. In every episode, we recap this week's [inaudible 00:01:11] activities, share actionable intelligence and best practices, all while connecting the PAC community. 

Micaela Isler:
Thanks, Adam, as always. We had some great round tables last week. We did our quarterly round tables broken out by corporate members, associations with corporate members, and associations with individual members. Adam, I really appreciated everybody's openness and willingness to share ideas and have good conversation. Actually, coming up next week we have another webinar regarding election communications. Then, I know Adam, everybody is excited that we're back in person. We have our second luncheon in July where we'll be speaking about diversifying your PAC. 

Adam Belmar:
Those are great events. They're important ones on our calendar. But, in the middle of this heated election cycle, getting a gut check, a reminder in best practices on all of those things, including election communication, priceless. 

Micaela Isler:
Absolutely. Joining us now is Managing Director of Startup Caucus, and host of The Business of Politics Show, our friend Eric Wilson. 

Eric Wilson:
Hey, Micaela and Adam. It's great to be back with y'all. 

Micaela Isler:
Welcome back to The Facts About PACS. Eric, I was an early guest on your podcast, and you were an early guest on this podcast. Maybe just let's start with telling everyone what The Business of Politics Show is all about.

Eric Wilson:
The Business of Politics Show brings our listeners into conversation with the entrepreneurs who build best-in-class businesses in the political industry, the funders who provide the capital, and the operatives who put it all together to win campaigns. As your listeners no doubt are aware, politics is a big business, but too often the conversation is focused on what we call the "horse race", or just the surface level of what's going on. Our podcast brings you behind the curtains into the rooms where decisions are being made so you get a better understanding of why decisions are being made, and what goes into putting together a winning campaign. 

Adam Belmar:
I love podcasts, but this one has always been special for me, Micaela. You were a guest on it early. I got hooked, but I learned something fascinating as I said at the top, almost every episode. The reason is that you have practitioners and all of these different elements of this part of the political business industry sharing personal experience and talking about the things either that they're doing or offering their clients that are brand new. 

Adam Belmar:
That turns me, Eric, to something that as a heavyset man I like, which is cookies. But this is a different kind of cookies. You had a recent episode that literally shocked me to my core. The headline here folks is, "Your Smart TV is Watching You." I want everyone to take a listen to a clip of your interview, Eric Wilson, with Adam Meldrum from AdVictory about something that is fascinating. It's called Automated Content Recognition. 

Eric Wilson:
Help me understand. You're getting this from the cable set-top boxes, or your Roku boxes? Is that where you're getting that data from? 

Adam Meldrum:
This comes from the actual manufacturers of the smart TV devices. This is technology that's built in to your LG TV, or your Vizio, or your Samsung device. Those OEMs are the people that actually control these data. And it's opt in. So, when a user sets up a smart TV device, there's so much in the space these days around privacy of data and privacy with that type of stuff. When you set up a smart TV, you actually opt in as part of the T&Cs that you go through when you set up a smart TV. You're actually opting in to allowing this data to be actionable by these device owners. It's actually the hardware built in the device that owns the ACR data, and that data's licensed out or used by those manufacturers to inform audiences, inform targeting, and that type of stuff. 

Eric Wilson:
Wow. So, I should have paid attention the last time. I was really excited to get a TV, and I just wanted to skip through everything. 

Adam Meldrum:
Yeah, I think those T&Cs on websites and on TVs, and donation pages, and all that stuff, there's a lot buried there that folks maybe aren't too excited about after the fact. 

Adam Belmar:
What? 

Eric Wilson:
Yeah, it's pretty surprising, and that's why you've got to read everything that you're agreeing to. I know it's so exciting when you get that new TV and you want to start watching right away, but you got to look at those prompts because not just in politics, but other industries as well, are using the sort of second-by-second recording of what you specifically are watching. They don't know that it's you, but they know that your device is watching it, to target advertisements, to collect data, things like that. It's really surprising. 

Eric Wilson:
Obviously, some really clear and compelling use cases in the politics and public affairs industry getting a sense of what news is penetrating in Americans' living rooms, are ads actually being seen? This is just really powerful stuff. And it's the kind of thing that only gets discussed at industry conferences. So, we're bringing it to our listeners through the podcast. 

Adam Belmar:
Micaela, what this comes down to when you listen to this whole episode, you'll begin to understand that when you are looking at focusing targeted ads in a population of people, you not only can use the demographics and some of the polling information, you can determine folks who have not most likely seen your ad, because their televisions are telling you they didn't watch anywhere where it was being aired. Tell me that doesn't freak you out.

Micaela Isler:
It's really hard to even wrap my head around, truthfully. The thing that just constantly strikes me with Eric's podcast is just how much innovation we're seeing in the political space. I know this isn't necessarily political, but to your point, being able to target ads, target demographics in this way is truly... Like I said, it's hard to get my head around. 

Adam Belmar:
Eric, what happens in the business of politics broadly when an innovation, the utilization of a data source that heretofore was untapped/unknown comes into play? It's not immediately a moral question about can we/should we. It's that, it's out there. Do what you must. Yes? 

Eric Wilson:
It is, but I'll just say this, our industry is very slow to adapt because there's huge risk in trying something new and losing. One of the biggest differences between The Business of Politics and other commercial spaces, with campaigns you only have a single day of sales. That's Election Day, and increasingly Election Month as we've got early voting. But, you don't get to experiment. I could buy a Coke today, and I could buy a Pepsi tomorrow. That is not the case with politics. So, you've got to make a decision. 

Eric Wilson:
One, it is very slow to adapt, and you see some of these innovations get tested out very early on before we figure out how they're going to be widely used by campaigns up and down the ballot. 

Adam Belmar:
Micaela, I spent a first career as a television news producer, network television news. I was as keenly aware as anyone in the industry that that audience was shrinking. We knew early on that the erosion in mass audiences of news consumption was literally happening. You could account for it a little bit with the fractionalization and the explosion of channels that you could watch, but there is something more at hand here when we talk about digital in the campaign space. I'm not talking about elected campaigns. I'm talking about campaigns for ideology, for policy, for consumer goods. 

Adam Belmar:
This comes directly out of an episode that Eric did recently. The conversation you're about to hear is with Kegan Beran from FlexPoint Media. The big takeaway is that campaigns, guess what, they still need Wheel of Fortune. Let's listen. 

Kegan Beran:
Voters who stop watching broadcast TV will stop buying it. Streaming has already taken a portion out of linear [inaudible 00:09:27], and that's going to continue. Amazon getting the NFL. NBC with Peacock. CBS with Paramount+. ABC, ESPN, Disney bundle. 

Eric Wilson:
They're sort of like self-cannibalizing in many ways. 

Kegan Beran:
Right. Right. With what we call broadcast TV today, it's hard for me to make any predictions on that. The reality is, it's where the eyeballs are. It's where the reach is, and it's a critical component in moving poll numbers. What we do, it's win/lose. At the end of the day, whenever we've brought broadcast into a campaign that has not broadcast into the media mix, we've consistently seen numbers move faster at bigger clips than they have throughout an efficient cable digital mail campaign. There is just this element of people that don't consume other content, and some of the older voters are heavy broadcast consumers. Without Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, you're missing up to 30-40% of the audience. 

Micaela Isler:
So, digital is critical, but eyeballs are still watching Jeopardy, right Eric? 

Eric Wilson:
Exactly. One of the most important parts about innovation is to not lose sight of what we're trying to achieve. Yes, digital is important for reaching audiences that we can't normally get, but that doesn't mean abandoning other audiences that we need. One of the things that we've found is that some of the old methods like broadcast TV advertising are still really important because you're getting the reach, the scale, and the efficiency that you need. 

Eric Wilson:
Where we can innovate is making sure that the spots that we show customers on broadcast TV are more effective, that we are better at targeting when and where those ads run. But still, you've got a lot of eyeballs on really popular shows like local news, network news, and game shows. One of the most important parts about being an innovator is following the data no matter where it leads you, even if it goes against sort of your own biases or preconceived notion. 

Eric Wilson:
For me, I don't watch any linear TV. I don't get to watch Jeopardy, although I wish I could. So, it's easy for me to have that blind spot of, "Well, no one watches Jeopardy," but what we're seeing is 30-40% of target audiences are still watching that. So, we've got to buy TV. 

Adam Belmar:
This reminds me of a science lesson in the 6th grade. The teacher puts a plastic bucket and fills it up with baseballs, and asks the kids, "Is it full?" They say, "Yeah, it's full." Then he pours in a whole bunch of chocolate chips, and it fills in the gaps. He says, "Is it full?" They say, "Yeah, it's full." Then he poured something else in there, until this thing is completely literally full and you begin to understand wait a second, it wasn't full before. 

Adam Belmar:
So, when you're talking about a universe of people that you're trying to reach for your campaign, whether that be national, regional, within a congressional district, your media plan, Micaela, has to include a whole panoply of things if you want to reach what is truly full. That means, folks, that there are still an absolutely enormous number of us watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and you can't fill that bucket without that. Is that a fair statement, Eric? 

Eric Wilson:
That's exactly right. It's not a question of either/or, but both/and. You need to have TV and digital, and mail, and radio, and social. Putting them all together is the only way that you're going to achieve the reach and frequency that you need to drill your message in to the target audience. It has become very difficult. We moved from having three TV stations, one local newspaper, and a couple of radio stations to advertise on, to now every individual has a totally customized media mix, and we have to advertise against that. That means you have to buy more spots than ever before in more places than ever before. 

Micaela Isler:
Eric, you must have to educate these... This is super sophisticated stuff, and expensive, I would imagine, and a little bit complex. How much time are you spending educating these campaigns and getting them on board with this approach? 

Eric Wilson:
One of the biggest challenges in our industry is the cultural shift, getting people to think about this in new and innovative ways. People know that they need digital, but they don't know why they need digital. One of the things that I'd like to focus on is the why, because when you understand the why, then some of the other stuff comes into place. If you think about it in terms of "I want to go directly to voters. I want to own my audience. I want to be able to have the reach, and the frequency," then it becomes clear why you need digital in all of this.

Eric Wilson:
The second challenge is, people get really distracted by the shiny objects of "Oh, I can geo target this block. I can do this, that, and the other." Or they may misunderstand why we target ads. It's not so we only show it to the people that need to see it. It's so we show it to fewer of the people who don't need to see it. I really spend a lot of time going through these concepts and explaining them as a way to get people to understand why the different tactics matter, and how they can choose the right ones for their goals.

Micaela Isler:
Are you seeing this more in the independent expenditure space? Or is it truly the campaigns engaging in all of this activity?

Eric Wilson:
Campaigns are where we're seeing a lot of the innovation, and that's for two reasons. One, they're limited by time. You don't get to change when Election Day happens. Second, you are limited by how much money you have. There are caps on how much you can raise from individuals. When you are constrained by time and resources, that is when you have to be creative. Necessity is the mother of invention. So, this is where campaigns are getting more creative and trying to find that edge to get them to win.

Eric Wilson:
On the independent expenditure side, you are not constrained by money most of the time. So, you can do the more broad TV, mail, out-of-home, all of those tactics that we don't have to measure and target as closely. I think that's a missed opportunity where we can actually become more efficient with those independent expenditure dollars if we're more innovative and thoughtful about how we deploy them. And, looking at ways that you can find leverage and advantage, and sort of asymmetric opportunities if we were going to be more creative. 

Eric Wilson:
I think one of the things keeping folks back is the role of IE is not as heavily scrutinized as the win or loss of a campaign. As long as you spent your $100,000.00 helping your candidate, you did your goal. I think the IE community needs to look at readjusting what their key performance indicators are. If you're trying to be more effective, then you need to look at some of the stuff that we talk about on The Business of Politics Show.

Adam Belmar:
It takes me right back to The Facts About PACS Podcast. We're talking with Eric Wilson. I have to say, Micaela, we have been talking of late with practitioners who have gone back in the same way that we're talking about Wheel and Fortune and Jeopardy, to simple handwritten thank you cards, and utilizing the mail. There are some things that really do work, that don't take reinvention of the wheel. You've always been a proponent of keeping around the things that work in the personalized outreach.

Micaela Isler:
Yeah, you're so right, Adam. Just even in the round tables, we're hearing that folks are still sending direct mail to the home sometimes because that's effective. We also know up until recently, one association was still faxing solicitation letters. But it worked for them. I think obviously knowing your audience, and what works, and what doesn't... To Eric's point, we've had the luxury of 20, 25 years here to sort of test some of these ways of engaging in our business, but I know there are nuggets here from Eric's podcast that even our PACS may be able to take and embrace down the road. We too, Eric, tend to be slow to adjust and slow to change. 

Eric Wilson:
That's exactly right, and some of that has to do with stakeholders. You may be dealing with trying to make a CEO happy, or a certain member of Congress happy, rather than what is effective. That's one of the reasons why I don't criticize other organizations and their strategies, because I don't know what their goals are, what their objectives are. If you want to become a more effective organization, it's not about using all this new stuff. It's about focusing on what your goals are, and your outcomes, and measuring it. 

Eric Wilson:
I think one of the biggest opportunities that we're going to see in terms of digital transformation in specifically the business industry's engagement in politics, is every other business unit in a company has to perform with metrics and analytics. If it's not working, it gets cut, or it gets re-tooled. Someone gets fired. We are going to start seeing more of that scrutiny from businesses in their political and advocacy engagement. So, I think if your listeners who are listening to this podcast and obviously want to stay ahead of the curve, need to start looking at what are the ways that we can focus on clearer outcomes. 

Eric Wilson:
There are a lot of great tools to measure that, and target it. It just takes stopping and thinking about why we're doing what we're doing.

Adam Belmar:
I want to play one more proof point, if you're still on the fence about whether The Business of Politics Show, available on iTunes and everywhere you get your podcast, is right for you this summer. Here's a clip. I want to preface it by saying that I think that this was just last week, Eric, but you interviewed a gentleman named Rich Tau from Engagious. In this clip, he is explaining how trade associations are using high tech tools to dial in their messaging because polling doesn't go far enough on their own. Have a listen. 

Rich Tau:
A client will come to us, let's say it's a trade association, and they say that they're concerned that their public policy message is not resonating. What we do is help them separate the weak from the chaff, rhetorically. In the context of an online survey, let's say, respondents are typically shown a point/counter-point debate over a particular public policy issue. It's an issue that, let's say, an association says, "We're concerned the message isn't working for us, so we want to test it." While they watch these videos, they slide a little red dot back and forth on their screen on a scale from zero to 100, zero being they totally disagree, 100 being they totally agree. 

Rich Tau:
We take a reading from each person every second from the beginning to the end of each video, both the pro side and the con side. We aggregate all this information, and then we average it across all the respondents in the group. So, the output looks like an EKG with lines spiking and dipping on the screen as you watch a video with a line superimposed. This all happens before the focus group ever takes place, like the day or two before. Then during the focus group we play back for the Respondent snippets of the videos they had just seen before the focus group, but this time with their moment-to-moment responses superimposed on the screen. 

Rich Tau:
We use this to find out why they responded well to certain messages and poorly to other messages. 

Adam Belmar:
Rather than counting heads, Eric, like you do in a poll, these tools help get inside people's heads to understand what they're thinking. Is that right? 

Eric Wilson:
That's exactly right. And, as Rich mentioned, it's really important that you layer it on with your quantitative data. Think about it in terms of a metal detector where you're trying to find the hot spots, but then once you're there you need the pinpointing device to find the actual artifact. That's what behavioral research and dial testing focus groups do. I'll give an example from a campaign that I worked on. We found an issue that was a winning issue. The way we asked the poll question, 80% of voters agreed with us on the position we were prepared to take. 

Eric Wilson:
We didn't have the time or resources to put that in front of voters to see how they actually reacted to our ad, and that ad caused huge headaches for us. It's one of the only ones that people remember from that campaign, and we took what should have been a winning issue and made it into a liability. That's why you need to have the qualitative, the "How do I feel about this? How do I react to this?" along with the hard data of yes or no, ones and zeroes. 

Adam Belmar:
Absolutely fascinating, Eric. I think for people who are in the audience of The Facts About PACs, many of whom are part of some of the most important trade associations, and even for our corporate members who understand that the consumer communications direct to the public, communications that their enterprises are involved in do incorporate a lot of these kinds of tools. Even if they're not on the table or the workbench for you, they are out there and it's good to know about them. 

Adam Belmar:
I want to just take a second personally to say Micaela and I are on our 83rd episode, okay? We're going to be back next week with Jim Ellis. We're going to talk about polls. Not how you get in people's heads, but just counting them, where they are, and where we are in this election, Eric. You launched your podcast in September 2021, and you haven't missed a single week. For anyone out there who's engaged in doing this kind of work, or thinking about doing it, what kind of commitment is necessary to be successful? And what advice do you give people when they ask you, "How did you do this? Can I do it? Is a podcast right for me?" 

Eric Wilson:
I'm a big believer in creating content. That's how I approach problems and opportunities, because I believe content is a great way to gather people. Just tons of benefits from it. Whether it's a podcast, a newsletter, or a blog, the key is consistency. No matter how hard it is, you have to put something out on a schedule. For podcasts, once a week is a good cadence. You could probably do every two weeks. Newsletters, they really need to be once a week. So, if you want to build up an audience and a following, you've got to be consistent. 

Eric Wilson:
If you're just getting started out, don't bite off more than you can chew. Just do what you can consistently do every week, and that alone is going to put you ahead of all of your competition. I see a lot of people get really hung up on, "Oh, well the audio quality isn't there. I need to do more graphics for my email newsletter. The production company hasn't finished my video." Those are all excuses to put your content out, and a lot of people are afraid about the feedback. But you'll find that if you are creating, and you're giving, people are not going to be critical for that because they appreciate the value. So, just be consistent. Don't be afraid. 

Micaela Isler:
Eric Wilson, the host of The Business of Politics Podcast, thank you so much for being our guest again, and being on The Facts About PACs.

Eric Wilson:
Thanks for having me again, Micaela and Adam. It was great to see everyone. Appreciate everyone checking out The Business of Politics Podcast.

Micaela Isler:
Eric, I send my students at GW University to two podcasts, The Facts About PACS, and The Business of Politics. Thanks to everyone downloading and sharing this podcast. Subscribe, and meet us right back here next week.