Eyeing 2020, Priorities USA blows up 'television-first strategy'

[DonViejo]

Top Democratic super PAC rethinks campaign ad spending.

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO 01/14/2019 05:31 PM EST

Priorities USA Action, the top Democratic super PAC targeting President Donald Trump in 2020, is promoting its head of digital operations to a new role overseeing all paid media — something akin to a watershed moment in presidential politics.

The move to install Danielle Butterfield as paid media director leading the organization’s integrated marketing effort, first reported by POLITICO, is a tacit acknowledgment of the growth of digital spending as a share of campaign ad dollars. It’s also a sign that the primacy of television and radio advertising, traditionally a presidential campaign’s biggest expense, is fading.

While television remains the dominant platform for reaching mass audiences, the altered media consumption habits of Americans have caused a rethinking of the traditional reliance on TV ads as a campaign persuasion tactic. At the same time, Democrats have struggled to keep up with Republicans in the digital space.

Butterfield spent the midterm cycle running media and analytics at Priorities, after serving as Hillary Clinton’s deputy director of digital advertising in 2016 and on the Obama campaign in 2012. Priorities’ leaders said her charge will be to treat paid communication as one holistic program.

“We will not operate off of a television-first strategy,” Guy Cecil, the group’s chairman, said in an interview. “We will operate off of a strategy that is simple and straightforward: We’re going to identify our targeted voters and we’re going to develop a paid media program that reaches them, whether it’s television or digital.”

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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/14/priorities-usa-digital-tv-ads-2020-election-1099486

[Blue_playwright]

1. Good news but

They still need tv to target the older independents- I hope it’s not abandoned to the point that it is ineffective.