Lara Aulestia (00:00):
You need precision for specific campaigns for specific reasons, and you need more reach and more overlap for other types of campaigns.
Eric Wilson (00:13):
Welcome to the Campaign Trend podcast, where you are joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. Our guest today is Laura Alesia, founder and CEO of 10 60 advisors, a paid media strategy, planning and buying company serving the public affairs and political industry. Laura has an extensive background in political media buying with Pastorals at companies that you've definitely heard of, like iHeartMedia, resonate, Xandr and Warner Media. In this episode, we're digging into the need to layer media buys across platforms to achieve our desired reach and frequency objectives. So Laura, one of the big takeaways from the Center for Campaign Innovations post-election survey is that when it comes to media campaigns need a both and approach. You need both your traditional linear TV broadcast, cable, satellite, and it's more important than ever to incorporate streaming both to get the audience reach you need and that message frequency. And so I'm curious to hear from you, how can advertisers ensure that they are buying the right combination of inventory across platforms, across mediums?
Lara Aulestia (01:28):
Yep. That's a great question, Eric. And one of the things that I will say before I even answer that question is that I have sort of a contrarian maybe approach to this, which is that everyone is talking about digital. Digital is superior. There's more people on digital platforms, more money going to digital platforms. I would say in this rise of misinformation and AI generated content, that traditional is actually bubbling to the surface a little bit in terms of its importance in credibility and trust. And so that balance of the two together is becoming even more important now. And so it's something that we always think about, but it's, it's a critical piece in how we think about a strategy. And I would say the first thing that we really look for is who are we communicating to? Because that can change your strategy completely. I mean, based on age or income or even geographics. I mean, we've seen in some markets less than 20% penetration of streaming platforms, whereas other markets there's over 90%. So that can really change how you're structuring your buy. And so it's the who and then what's our outcome. And then from there, building out the layering of a strategy.
Eric Wilson (02:49):
And I think I would clarify here, you'll never hear me arguing that we need to do only digital and no tv. I mean, I think one of the things that our data shows that you got to do both to be able to get the reach and yeah, totally agree with you on that. It depends on the audience, depends on the market, who you're trying to reach. But the key thing is, is that, as you put it, layering all of this together and getting the right mix, it's not an either or calculation anymore.
Lara Aulestia (03:14):
That's right.
Eric Wilson (03:15):
And so when it comes to streaming, we typically see campaigns buying just one or two platforms for streaming or CTV, but with that layering in mind on the streaming side, what do you advise is the right mix of platforms?
Lara Aulestia (03:32):
One to two can limit scale. It's definitely maybe easier to execute if you just buy a Hulu and YouTube and call it a they. But when you add in three to five or maybe even more depending on the budget of a campaign, it can really help with your reach and mixing in a little bit of those premium A V Os, which is advertising video and demand platforms with maybe a niche content hub. We used to have one called crunchy roll, which is all anime that maybe not for certain political campaigns, but good for certain consumer ones. And then there's plenty of other niche content hubs as well. And then some of the aggregators, it just helps with the layering effect. I mean, we've seen consistently that from a unique reach as well as just an overall reach perspective that when you add in more, it can really help expand your universe in this fragmented media environment.
Eric Wilson (04:29):
And that is that constant push pull of, look, I've got to execute this campaign, but I've got to do the reach. I'm constantly surprised at how many streaming services people use. And when we ask this about voters ask this about donors and they use them all, I don't know where they find the time, but what that means is that they are splitting their time across. And so if you're fortunate enough to get an impression on Hulu with them, you need to make sure that you're trying to get an impression for them on Paramount. So it does take that mix and it sure seems like it's getting more difficult. It's almost like if you're having to buy cable without being able to purchase cable systems.
Lara Aulestia (05:05):
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean the frequency capping is super important too because the frequency can get out of control, especially because some of these streaming platforms have a lower ad load. So if you're really heavily going in on one platform with a lower ad load and you're just going to hit that audience so many times in the same place that you need to diversify a little bit.
Eric Wilson (05:26):
Right. I often see in campaigns there's that battle between the premium versus long tail inventory. People get really strange about what we call fast free and ad supported channels, things like Euro, Roku or Tubi, and I only know them because they're installed as apps on my tv, but I don't know what they've got on them. But on one hand, if we trust the data and targeting, we are hitting the audience where they are and an impression is an impression. But on the other hand, to your point there, a desire to ensure that our ads are appearing alongside the highest quality content. How do you balance that mix when you are building out a layered media plan?
Lara Aulestia (06:07):
I think no doubt, if you look at, let's say like a Fox News or a CNN or a major publisher, wall Street Journal, New York Times, people are going to perceive that to be more credible or just a higher quality compared to a pet helpful, which you may never have heard of, but is a long tail site with thousands of articles and a lot of that clutter. And so there is a balance between the two where if you've got too much ad clutter on one of these long tail sites, people aren't even going to see the ad and they're just going to get annoyed. But you want to be able to reach your audience in some of these places that balances out the CPMs. So you might have a higher CPM on those more premium sites, but you're focused on a budget and you need to reach as many people as you possibly can in your universe at a reasonable budget.
(06:58):
And so there is a balance between incorporating premium and then adding in some of those brand safety tools. Like a double verify is one, and IAS is one, and they just help you with understanding fraud ad clutter. Where do we want the ad to be served? Like looking at viewability, is it likely to be viewed on the site when someone pulls it up on their browser? And so it's a little bit of a balance, and some campaigns may warrant only running on premium sites for whatever their strategy is. And then in other cases where you're trying to reach maybe a large part of the electorate and you're really focused on reach, as long as you have those important brand safety filters in, it may make sense to go on some of the longer tail sites.
Eric Wilson (07:43):
Got it. So would another approach be sort of like, Hey, we're going to go out and buy broad on some premium content and then narrow on some of these long tail or remnant inventory?
Lara Aulestia (07:56):
Yeah, I think in terms of how you can structure those buys, you can definitely say, okay, if I have a hundred dollars just to use some easy math and I want at least half of my budget to go to premium inventory and you're in a programmatic platform, you can add in different, depending on which platform you use, you can add in different factors that will allow you to, if you can't deliver to that premium budget, it'll automatically default to the next priority. And then if you can't deliver, and that next priority may be a longer list of sites, that's not the elite, but still very good. And then your third waterfall strategy may be a much broader list. So there are ways of building it in as a waterfall so that you can reach both quality premium, high profile, but still reach your audience across some other niche places that they go online.
Eric Wilson (08:48):
So obviously this would add some complexity to this, but I'm wondering, could you do the direct to publisher buy plus kind of your programmatic buy? Is that something that you see?
Lara Aulestia (08:58):
Absolutely. That would come into play? So for example, we have a campaign running right now where we're doing homepage takeovers. We want a higher concentration of our rotational ads to run at a higher rotation on the site. And so in those cases, we a hundred percent want to make sure we're on that one website. We want to have premium placements on that site. And so we are buying directly with that publisher to assure all of those things are in play. But then we have a broader strategy that is new specific where we can run on other places and we may pull that website out. We don't want that in rotation because we're already doing a direct buying. And so yeah, it's a balance of the two for sure.
Eric Wilson (09:44):
Yeah, I think it's one of those things where people get so focused on the tactics and the execution of it that they don't take the time to step back and think about what the strategy is. So your strategy is you believe that the ad that is showing to your target universe is going to persuade them or build awareness or achieve some objective. Therefore, we might want to do some of that premium placement, but layer in the long tail inventory to get frequency so they remember the message that they first noticed on New York Times or people or whatever the case may be. But if you just think about, oh, well, I want it to be on the best inventory, well, you're probably going to have a hard time getting that frequency. And if you just say, look, I really want to do frequency, it might not get noticed. As you mentioned, some of these ad sites are pretty cluttered.
Lara Aulestia (10:34):
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Eric Wilson (10:36):
So I think the original sin, if you will, of digital advertising is that we promised it would be targeted precisely and eliminate waste from reaching the wrong audience in the way that TV advertising did. So I live in Northern Virginia, I cannot vote for candidates in the District of Columbia or Maryland yet I do see ads from those jurisdictions frequently. That's an issue with TV that we typically don't see with digital unless you're doing something very, very wrong. But how should campaigns think about the potential for overlap when they're layering media? So you gave the example of maybe we're buying a Hulu and a Paramount and we're hitting the same person. What sort of mindset should we have in that case?
Lara Aulestia (11:21):
If you try to eliminate overlap completely, A, it's impossible, but B, it can definitely hurt you because people are so, their media habits are so fragmented that it is very hard to build frequency on just one specific media outlet alone because people are getting their news and information in so many different places. To your point, they're like, oh, okay, I just watched White Lotus on HBO and now going to unsubscribe to that one, and then I'm going to resubscribe to this other one because they're launching something else. And so you kind of have to have that layering. And I think of the precision and scale, almost like a dimmer switch where you can turn it down, you can turn it up. It's not like a binary thing where it's an either or. You have two situations. You can be a little bit fluid. I think you need precision for specific campaigns for specific reasons, and you need more reach and more overlap for other types of campaigns. I think overlap is important. However, there are situations, we had a TV buy that had a lot of connected TV partners on it where we saw that two of the CTV partners had particularly unique reach, and two of the broadcast networks had a lot of overlap. And so we're like, okay, maybe we pull down a little bit over here and maybe we give a little bit more to the unique reach because that's going to help expand us overall. So it's really a balance. I keep saying that, but it is
Eric Wilson (13:01):
True. You're listening to the Campaign Trend podcast. I'm speaking with Laura Estia, and we're talking about media planning, layering, balancing your media buys, and I want to stay there for just a minute, which is that we have this desire to avoid waste and make sure that only the people we want to reach are seeing our ads. But I often think about people kind of over-applying the idea of audience targeting. And really what we're trying to do is cut down on waste, but we can't eliminate it completely because then we sacrifice frequency. And so I do think that some of our plans where it says, here's the audience, here's the voter file that we want to target, and this is it. Well, and our listeners should know that match rates are all over the place for some of this data. And so let's say you have a 70% match rate on an audience with a provider, that means that 30% of your desired audience isn't going to be seeing your advertising. How should campaigns think about balancing that out?
Lara Aulestia (14:03):
I think with the consumer space, and when you're targeting for a brand, there's always a strategy of adding in additional data targeting. You have a consumer audience and maybe they've purchased from you before or they have likely intent, but you want to find people further up in the funnel. And I don't think it is a bad thing for a campaign to expand their audience beyond what just their voter file is. I think it's dependent on the message. Maybe there's a particularly polarizing message where there is a strategic reason why they really don't want someone to see that ad that is outside their universe. And so maybe in that case there's a more general message, a more friendly message for a bigger audience that could be utilized. But in order to really reach the full universe, you have to overlay some additional targeting strategies or else you will miss those people. So I think it's maybe a conversation. We don't do any creative, but that is something we might say back to someone. Is there an opportunity to expand this by tweaking or changing the creative somewhat.
Eric Wilson (15:12):
And so I want to go back to this idea of layering in both your traditional and your streaming. And I think one of the challenges is how do you measure the reach across those platforms? So obviously we have our old friend, the gross rating point, which is still doing a lot of work, or I guess it has a better reputation than what we're actually seeing, but that was always such a clear like, okay, we're on these points and we know what that means from market to market. We know what that means from cable system to broadcast, whatever. Where are we at getting something similar in the cross platform space?
Lara Aulestia (15:49):
What people are using now is to really understand de-duplicated reach and just cross platform is using some of these tools like a Nielsen one or a video amp or as Samba. And so that's really helping you with that. An answer to the GRP, I mean, the model has completely shifted to impressions from the traditional grand space. I mean, you and I,
Eric Wilson (16:11):
Are we the only industry still buying points?
Lara Aulestia (16:13):
I mean, you and I were at that conference where someone said they were buying like 2000 GRPs a week because they were trying to put something in a bucket that just wasn't working, where if they had maybe diversified more CTV platforms and kind of got their mindset out of the GRP and it more impression model, it would've maybe been more effective. And so I think it's just because people know that metric that they've kind of stuck with it. They knew traditionally and historically it would move polling numbers, but the industry's really shifted to impression-based model and then using some of these cross platform measurement tools to understand your deduplicate reach.
Eric Wilson (16:56):
Got it. And I take it these cross platform metrics and be somewhat pricey to access and don't come to us in the way that we know what the points are for a given TV show.
Lara Aulestia (17:07):
I guess cost is relative. I mean, you're spending the amount that you see spent on some of these campaigns. I think it's definitely a relative cost that could be factored in.
Eric Wilson (17:17):
Well, I'm just thinking about how TV got so competitive where you could see what the other side was spending. We don't really have good competitive in digital across platform yet. And I think we also have to consider the fact that there's kind of a self-selection bias of if you're a political junkie, you're watching the cable news stations, you're watching local news, so you're going to expose yourself to more legacy advertising than maybe the average voter would.
Lara Aulestia (17:43):
Yes, that's right. And actually lots of consistent research shows, even in DC that traditional news of all types, whether it's cable broadcast, newspapers, newsletters, all of that is still very highly consumed and deeply compared to some other markets. That's funny. There's people that are more politically engaged.
Eric Wilson (18:05):
So one of the things that you touched on earlier was fraud detection, the brand safety. How can advertisers ensure that they're getting what they paid for with digital media?
Lara Aulestia (18:16):
I think a transparent relationship with whomever is you're working with from my perspective, really understanding what are the partners they're using? What are the inventory sources? What are the brand safety metrics they are putting into play? What is the frequency cap? If there needs to be an adjustment to the frequency cap, is that being communicated and is that okay with the advertiser? What are the viewability standards? If we can't get our reach and we are requesting to lower viewability, is that going to hurt us? So just having some of those conversations about what we're spending, how we're spending, what the brand safety pieces are, and just a high level of communication and transparency across the conversation is really important.
Eric Wilson (19:10):
And our conversation has really been focused on video. We've sort of just taken that as implicit and a lot of our political, digital is focused on video. And again, that goes back to we buy what we know, we know that TV works and we've got TV creative and we invest a lot of money in that. So let's do that online. Where should we think about display and paid social and factoring that into our layered approach for media buying?
Lara Aulestia (19:37):
So Eric, I think, well, social has a lot of video on it, but one of the challenges can be that,
Eric Wilson (19:44):
And they're not TV ads, right?
Lara Aulestia (19:45):
That's right. It's different video.
(19:48):
And one of the challenges is the ads on video have lower completion rates, and so putting a static ad there in terms of the way that people scroll through their feeds with a strong call to action can help reinforce what is being said on video. So that layering effect that you were talking about earlier, that can be really helpful. Using if there is a retargeting strategy in terms of trying to get someone to take some kind of call to action display can be a much more effective way of utilizing that. And then it can just help with costs, just overall your cost and in terms of the reach that you're trying to get and what is the cost per impression. It might be helpful there too.
Eric Wilson (20:37):
Well, my thanks to Laura Tia for a great conversation. You can learn more about her at her website. We'll put a link in the show notes and link to her LinkedIn where I'm sure she'd be excited to connect with you if you've got questions about media buying media plans. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend. It makes you look smarter in the process, more people hear about the show. It's a win-win all around. Remember to subscribe to the Campaign Trend podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode. And you should visit our website@campaigntrend.com for even more articles and newsletters. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio.
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