Shaping The Washington Conversation With Digital – Tyler Brown (Hadron Strategies)

Tyler Brown:

That's what the policy world in Washington is. Everything that you start to take for granted, there's always shifts. Three, two, every four years that shift can come, and it's a question of how are you prepared for when that shift happens?

Eric Wilson:

I'm Erik Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech Innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Our guest today is Tyler Brown. He's the president of Hadron Strategies, a digital public affairs agency. He was formerly the director of digital strategy at the Republican National Committee where he worked for four election cycles. In our conversation, we are digging into the differences between digital marketing for campaigns and issue advocacy. This episode is sponsored by Campaign hq. If you're looking for a team that moves at the speed of politics like you do, search no further than campaign hq. For more than 20 years, they've been a trusted partner for winning campaigns and conservative organizations to deliver millions of effective voter ID persuasion, patch through and get out the vote calls and texts. They're giving away their best script writing secrets to listeners of the Business of Politics Show, just go to campaign headquarters.com/podcast to get your copy right now. That's campaign hyphen headquarters.com/podcast. Tyler, what are some non-obvious ways digital marketing on behalf of issue advocacy clients differs From what we know from political campaigns,

Tyler Brown:

I think that advocacy campaigns and political campaigns obviously there's a lot of cross pollination that goes on between the two, but I think they differ in one respect. There's a large range of potential outcomes that you could be shooting for when it comes to advocacy as opposed to when you're running a campaign. You know, there may be different ways to get there, but you're really at the end of the day looking for getting to that 50 plus one margin on election day. And so it, it's very singular from that perspective. Advocacy campaigns, on the other hand, can really run the gamut in terms of are you trying to drive more awareness? Are you trying to drive more specific policy outcomes? And even those policy outcomes can really range depending on the venue, whether it's legislative or regulatory policy decisions. So it's, it, it, it's a much more open canvas, which is part of what makes it attractive and, you know, really kind of gets the opportunities to, to really get creative in what they're shooting for and what the client would like to achieve.

The other, the, the second large differentiator, when you're running a political campaign, you're really thinking about a, a large audience as a whole. In, in the case of political campaigns, the electorate, but with advocacy campaigns, the, that size of that audience can really vary. It could be as broad as, you know, potential voters or people who are going to gonna be voting on policy initiatives, but it could even be as small as, you know, an audience of one. I think the famous example was you know, a lot of folks in the advocacy industry that during the Trump administration that were looking to buy television ads on Fox News, right? Because they, they're really trying to reach one particular person. So the audiences can really change. And, and that, again, that is also another piece of what really starts to shape your strategy.

Eric Wilson:

One of the other things that I, I guess I'll be honest and say frustrates me about issue advocacy is the risk tolerance is a lot different than what we have in campaigns. So obviously in a political campaign, you're gonna have voters, there's an election day you either win or lose with, with issue advocacy or even, you know, some of this corporate trade association work, you, it's not as black and white, and so they can be kind of risk reluctant and, and I think that makes it a little bit difficult to really do some of the, the, the things that we know are proven on the, the political side with, with digital marketing.

Tyler Brown:

Absolutely. To your point, one of the fun aspects I think of working on a political campaign is just that you, the, the fly by the seat of your pants kind of the analogy of building the airplane as you go, all the, all those cliche analogies, but at the heart of it is you're, you're really being spontaneous. And I think that certainly you have to run, there's a gamut of approvals and all those things that go out there, but that is much more narrow than anything that you start to see on the advocacy side. And so in a lot of cases, particularly if you're dealing with corporate clients they just have a much different internal, both timeline, but also process. And I think it's important to certainly, you know, sure it could be frustrating but I think that's part of your role is helping hold their hand, guide them through the decisions, show them the potential outcomes of different strategies, and make the case for why you believe something may be effective.

It, it's really easy. You know, I think one of the first things that people find when they are moving from political campaigns into working with corporate clients is this unintended tendency to start bouncing into buzzwords or abbreviations. And it's a type of lingo that you're used to in working with other people on the campaign side, but really you, you know, it becomes pretty apparent pretty quick. And if sometimes they don't, won't stop you, but I'll, and sometimes they'll just let you roll and they'll walk away from the meeting, they'll be like, I have no idea what that person was talking about. Yeah. but when they're doing it, when they're, when they're doing it well, they're, they'll stop you and say that, that's not clear to me. The these, the things that you're referring to aren't clear to me. So it it, you really have to reshape the way, think the way you communicate and walk people through a strategy step by step even some of the parts that are just sort of intuitive coming from a campaign perspective to help them get through that process.

Eric Wilson:

So, adding to that kind of challenge of being lost in translation, how do, how do you measure success on these types of projects? Because in, in campaigns, the scoreboard is clear. You know, you either raise money, more money than your opponent, you either win the debate or you don't. You either win on election day, tho those metrics are really clear. Oftentimes, you know, in advocacy, we're trying to figure out, oh, well, was our language included in the bill? Did this bill really die? What, what are some signals that you're looking for?

Tyler Brown:

I think that's absolutely right. One of the, one of the important pieces is that advocacy is always a long-term play. Sometimes the campaigns themselves or the the client engagement may be a short sprint of a campaign. A lot of times they're calling when the house is on fire as opposed to before. But what you'll start to realize is that even if it's a series of small sprints together, they're a long play that are trying to move towards a long-term outcome. And you have to recalibrate your scoreboard, as you were saying, to take that into account. There are a lot of metrics and, you know, one of the things I always tell clients when I'm working with them is that, especially with digital campaigns in particular, there's, there's an infinite amount of data after action metrics that I can show you for how a campaign is performing. And to be frank, I can show you any one of those columns and point to and say, this is really good, and sort of color over whether the campaign's performing well or not. And I think that's one of the things that is a bad habit in the industry to try to just, you know, shine a spotlight on the things that are going well, not providing the full picture.

Eric Wilson:

Well, that's, that's one of the challenges with digital marketing. And there's just so many metrics available cuz we can measure everything that if, if a client doesn't know, or the in consumer of that report doesn't know what metrics matter or what to ask for, you can always tell a positive story.

Tyler Brown:

Right? Right. You, you, you can come up with any picture you want. I think, you know, particularly one of the things when we started hedge drawn my, my business partners and myself was that we were trying to find what were differentiators. And as somebody who had worked in politics and worked with a number of vendors, a lot of great vendors so I'm not trying to cast a a wide spell, but I think one of the biggest frustrations was a lack of transparency. And so when we begin to work with a client, you know, one of the things that we try to highlight upfront is we're gonna try to tell you the whole story. We're gonna try to tell you what's going well, we're gonna try to be frank in terms of where we are not seeing the success that we had hoped to achieve.

And I think that you'll build a, a higher level of trust particularly to that point about multitudes of data. But beyond that, I think that it's really important to define what success is going into it. What are the KPIs, the key performance indicators? You know, just in the small example of say, digital ads, you know, you can always point to and say, look at all these impressions. And that's fantastic. It's millions and millions of impressions. But if what you're really trying to achieve is getting some sort of direct response campaign or sending letters, for example then that impressions data is not the right metric to judge by. So I think you know, being transparent upfront, deciding ahead of time, what are your key performance indicators the, the digital component is only, is always gonna be one part of a holistic strategy that interacts with the, an, you know, analog or offline parts of the campaigns. And they should be working in tandem. So, well,

Eric Wilson:

So, so Tyler, on the other side of, on the other side of that, that data equation is, is not just what we measure, but how we target. So obviously in political campaigns, we have the voter file, that's the foundation for all of our digital efforts. Is there an analog that digital marketers have available when it comes to issue advocacy? Or, or is it that voter file?

Tyler Brown:

So I think this is a part where political campaigns and advocacy campaigns are dealing with some of the same issues. One being that first party data is king, and I think this, you know, this starts to get into some of those other,

Eric Wilson:

And, and let's elaborate on, on first party data that this is something that some a supporter has opted in and provided to you, and more importantly, given you the permission to contact them via email or text or things like that.

Tyler Brown:

Exactly. And and I like to think of 'em, these, these are, these are, this is data that you own, and I think this is important. You know, in some cases, I, the data is, is the community that exists prior to whatever you're trying to achieve. And so in the cases, this could be your client community, this could be your customer community, it could be employee communities, it could be like-minded supporters who have been with you in the past and could be good advocates for you moving forward. But I think that first party data is so important, particularly as Facebook, other platforms in general, acquiring data has become not just more expensive, but more difficult as we've seen policy changes internal policy changes at places like Facebook, but also potential regulatory changes here. Yeah. Well, let

Eric Wilson:

On the other side, let's dig into that because of course Facebook has added restrictions to, to political advertising but they didn't really make a distinction between candidate and pac and, and instead focused on kind of the content of the ad. So these issues of national importance, what impact has that had on issue advocacy? Because it seems to me that it was overly broad and was trying to solve a problem about politics and elections and created new problems when it came to issue advocacy, legislative discussions, things like that.

Tyler Brown:

Yes. This is something I've been very vocal about and very frustrated with. As, as you mentioned, I think the policies that they've set in place, they're the, one of the largest issues that Facebook is dealing with. And this gets into content curation and, and advertising policies, is that they are trying to build rules around the English language. And you don't have to go too far in philosophy 1 0 1 to understand how difficult that can be and how slippery the English language is to draw, you know, firm walls around. But putting that aside, if you go into the policies that they, the, the definitions of these policies that they define as political, anything, having to, and I'm paraphrasing, but anything that has to do with issues of national importance, and that is a huge, huge category. And if you get into it, you know, energy taxes, the economy, healthcare runs the gamut. Everything starts to fall under this. And then pretty soon just about everybody becomes political advertiser, regardless of whether the F e C would consider you a a political campaign. And I would, it's

Eric Wilson:

Crazy cuz we already had regulations in place for this,

Tyler Brown:

Right? That <laugh> Right, that's written a hundred percent. And I would argue that it is unfair to cast the same rules from political campaigns to groups that would not fall under the F E C.

Eric Wilson:

And I wanna underline that too because we, we haven't seen it yet, but I I think it's coming where someone says, this organization's ad was labeled as political on Facebook. Yes. Therefore, their nonprofit designation needs to be taken away by the I R S I I, I really do think we're not far away from that

Tyler Brown:

A hundred percent. They are applying their own standards and labeling things political, which are not political as we would understand it. And sometimes this, this impacts issues that are, would more fall under what we would traditionally consider a public service announcement where they are trying to advance something of community good. But because these are issues of importance or issues of national importance under Facebook's definition, they get a political label, which makes it received in a much different light. But all this to say, you know, I think that one of the major questions that's going on in the political world right now, and it, and it's, you know, you're seen in discussions around fundraising specifically, is acquisition. How are you building new lists? If you're a existing player and you had large lists to begin with, you're probably not as it is in much trouble. But if you're an upstart political campaign and you did not exist in this what I call the, the era of easy Facebook, actually That's right. It's kind of like the, the treasuries easy money policy

Eric Wilson:

And zero interest rates. Yeah.

Tyler Brown:

Yeah. Zero interest rates. Well, the, the, the, that interest rate is extremely high right now for new folks coming into the market trying to acquire and build lists. So all this is bringing it full circle back to what we were talking about before, which is what is the data that you're bringing to the table? What is the first party data that you have? This is a great point to underline. I think every public affairs agency, I think everybody who works in advocacy, any type of issue advocacy would love if their clients came to them to en engage before the house was on fire, so to speak, <laugh>, right? That's us usually, you know, that might be a pipe dream and that's something that we would all love, but I think on the part of first party data is especially important because it's so much easier to build a relationship with, again, it doesn't matter if it's customers, if it's like-minded supporters, if it's employees, what have you, to establish what kind of values you share and build that relationship where they are getting trusted information from you. You're not just asking them to do things over and over without having built that relationship first. And then it becomes a much more effective weapon when you are in an advocacy fight or when you're in a policy fight that you have a resource to turn on rather than trying to build it as you in the, in the online environment that we currently have.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, and I, I, I agree with you, the, the time to give people like us a call is, is before you have an emergency. I thinking back to our episode with Wesley Donahue, right? Where, you know, you need crisis support before you have a crisis. And, but, but that is, that, that can be a valuable wake up call where you know, <laugh>, what, what, what went wrong or you had a, a near miss and you start doing all the things that you ought to do. You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. This episode is brought to you by campaign headquarters. I'm speaking with Tyler Brown about the digital advocacy landscape. And Tyler, I want to get your opinion about how the dynamic of change in partisan control, like we've seen in Washington or even at the state level, affects digital advocacy strategy. You mentioned, you know, with, with Trump, people were buying Fox News so they could get a Trump tweet. How, how, how are things changing in Washington, for example, now that we have a Republican house?

Tyler Brown:

Anytime you have a change in leadership or a change in the party or the power dynamic in Washington or state houses even, it disrupts the status quo. And I think it's an opportunity for everybody to reset and reassess what the landscape looks like. There's always going to be, you know, it, it can be an advantage if you look at it, you know, certainly it can pose new threats, but it can definitely be an advantage that you have the opportunity to find new audiences to talk to. You may be able to find, you know, there could be incoming new chairman over overseeing some of these committees of relevance for your issue that have not had, have not been a hearing as much about the issue or your perspective on the issue. Likewise, there's constituencies where this is, you know, they had been existing and what they thought was the status quo.

And now that status quo has been uprooted. And when it starts to get into some of these niche issues that you, you know, may not be leading Fox News or CNN n breaking news on a daily basis it may not be the Chinese balloon that we're all watching, that we're all watching, but it could be extremely important. It could have a very large economic impact locally or across the country to bring those to new audiences. And likewise, there is the opportunity to sort of give a wake up call to constituencies that had maybe taken the status quo for granted and now start inform them and educate them on how the dynamic can change. You know, there's this idea that in Buddhism, there's this concept of impermanence, and I don't wanna do any dis you know, I don't, I don't wanna do any dis justice to I I'm not a religious philosopher, but <laugh>, that's sort of what that's what the policy world in, in, in Washington is everything that you start to take for granted.

While this will never move or this will never get past that party chairman, there's always shifts and, you know, every two, every four years that shift can come. And it's a good question of how are you prepared for when that shift happens and people are doing their due diligence? And you often see this going into the election. You are prepared for multiple outcomes. I think if you're only planning for the conventional wisdom, you're probably going to be find yourself. You know, we don't have to go too far back to all the people that were planning for a Clinton administration or we're perhaps planning for an extremely large Republican majority in the house. You know, conventional wisdom is more often than not, probably wrong

Eric Wilson:

<Laugh>. So I wanna shift gears for the rest of the show to talk about folks who are, are looking to make a shift into this space. Whether that's the entrepreneurs that we work with via Startup caucus or or other listeners who are, are maybe digital campaigners. What do they need to understand in order to cross over from politics and electoral campaigns to more corporate and issue advocacy work?

Tyler Brown:

Well, I think the part that you brought up earlier about the pace and the risk tolerance is a large one. It can be eye-opening for people coming into this space. I think secondly, perhaps it's a commentary about politics in this day and age, but we've seen politics move towards turning out the base strategy and that becomes their electoral strategy, which means that more often than not, partisanship becomes the goal. And when you are working in an advocacy space, it moves from partnership partisanship being the goal to a much more outcome base objective, specific type of deliverable that you're shooting for. And that more often than not is going to be really nonpartisan. I think the biggest wins tend to be with those that you have built some sort of agreement between particular advocates in both parties who have come together and now their reason for getting there may be different on, on both sides of the aisle, but they are able to form some sort of consensus either happily or, you know, the old adage that if everybody's unhappy, then it's a pretty good agreement.

You know, that might be the, the outcome. But that really being able to put partisanship aside and try to find those outcomes. Not to mention that being I think the corporate world has, it's been a little eye-opening for them, the 10 years of how many shots they, they have perhaps wittingly or unwittingly found themselves in these partisan debates more and more often than they would like to be. And so I think they want to be able to find solutions that can remove that target from their back, that partisan target on their back and getting back to, you know, selling widgets or whatever they do better because they would prefer not to be in that right in the middle of the arrows flying back and forth

Eric Wilson:

<Laugh>. Right. So let's flip the coin around and, and find out what issue advocacy professionals can learn from their political counterparts, the, the folks that are using digital marketing data and technology to win elections.

Tyler Brown:

I think it really goes back to data. One of the reasons after having worked in politics for a long time that I was really interested in moving into public affairs and this idea of digital public affairs was this notion that I thought that the public affairs model had become a little stale. I think that, you know, it was really built around being able strictly media, a lot of media relations and, you know, the outcome being, okay, can we get, can we get a story put in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? And my point was always that the media as, as we've moved towards a more digital media landscape, that the differences between these channel platforms was no longer, you know, jumping from one device to another. It was really swipes after swipe. You know, you're going, your, your, your iPhone or your device becomes your, where you go to listen to music, it becomes where your streaming opportunities are coming through. It's where you're getting news and information. And so I felt like that was really the, the key locust between how information was being disseminated and collected. And so with that when you're taking that approach, data starts to become really, really important. It wasn't that long ago that, you know, political operatives were promoting the fact that each cycle so much data is lost because it was sitting in Excel sheets or on laptops that never came back. And

Eric Wilson:

Several of those hard drives are in my basement at home right

Tyler Brown:

Now. <Laugh>. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. and so you are seen, and because of that, you've seen the shift towards bringing software solutions in for those types of voter contacts and other pieces that software becomes the way that you don't have that loss of data. Likewise, I think that there is a lot of valuable data that is circulating. You know, the, as I mentioned, there can be a lot of short sprints in public affairs campaigns. But that, you know, so you may be over the course of a year working with a number of different clients a lot of data being accumulated and it's really sitting in an Excel file that you, you know, or is buried somewhere in your downloaded file or what have you and, and lost cuz you've moved on to the next thing. But I think that there's a lot of lessons to be taken from that and inform it helps inform what you're doing next. And so I would really love to see more of that data a a constructive way to work, build relationships between agencies and clients. There's value on that data so that it's both sides are benefiting from it and becoming more informed for the, the clients are more informed and prepared for their next you know, fight wherever it may be.

Eric Wilson:

Right. And I always talk about, you know, everyone wants to be data driven, but really what you're aiming for is to be data improved. Yeah. And, and you can't be data improved if you're not closing those feedback loops. So you mentioned some, some tools and, and software out there. What are some that you rely on to build effective advocacy campaigns?

Tyler Brown:

Yeah, I, I, I think it, I think it all starts with integrations. Every campaign's gonna be slightly different. You know, that you may be starting with some sort of digital advocacy tool. We use Speak for a Lot. I've been really happy with the products that, and if

Eric Wilson:

Folks are interested, we, we had Joe on the, the website, the founder speak for on, on the podcast. He can check out that episode on our website.

Tyler Brown:

Exactly. I think, I think he's done a good job of identifying, you know, what were the pain points and how to become, create more ni a more nimble platform. So I really applaud him for that. But you, you, the campaign may, you know, you may start with a C R M or maybe you're starting with an email tool. I'm kind of agnostic on any of the email tools or, you know, a digital advocacy platform. But I think the important part becomes how do they integrate with each other? I think the integrations and the, particularly the built-in integrations, I'm not a developer by nature, so anytime I have to go in and create my own API connections, it, it usually is a lot of trial and error and a lot of pounding my head. So those built-in integrations are key. I think Zap Zapier is basically like the, the the digital advocacy. This is your duct tape right. And it becomes,

Eric Wilson:

It's not just for digital advocacy. I think it's, it's the whole digital marketing world's duct tape.

Tyler Brown:

Yeah, exactly. And being able to connect what you're seeing, you know, it's really getting away from data terminology. It's really the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing and being able to bring that full picture together and get them to work in concert. And so I think there's a lot of greatest software solutions. The nice thing is there's always new stuff coming in. The difficult part is sometimes that it's a crowded marketplace and a lot of different platforms. But I, you know, one of the best places I like to go is just being, going on product hunt and seeing what's trending that day. And I, you know, I try to do it a couple times a week, but the question I'm always asking myself is, are there any, are there any things in here that are gonna make my job or my, the job of my team easier?

And you know, you never know what may be there. You know, a lot of chat G B T right now and seeing what people are building on top of that which I think will be, I think will have a large impact in public affairs moving forward. But there's a lot of great ideas and there's a lot of really it bringing products, making products easier for consumers to use. And I've been working in this space for a while. It doesn't make me an expert on writing code or other pieces, but even those tools that are you know, no code developer tools are really kind of putting an interface on a lot of things that had used to be difficult mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and made them much more easier and much more accessible so that you're not worried about the hard backend pieces. You can focus more on what are the strategy pieces and how do you deploy 'em.

Eric Wilson:

My thanks to Tyler Brown for a great conversation. You can learn more about him and his work at Hadron Strategies at the link in our show notes. I also want to thank our sponsor for this episode Campaign hq. Getting your calls and texts placed to the right people can be frustrating and time consuming, especially when it's on short notice and your under deadline. That's where Campaign HQ's team stands out. They focus on what's going to move the needle. So you can win Check out campaign headquarters.com/podcast to get their best script writing secrets. That's campaign hyphen headquarters.com/podcast. As always, 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 or colleague and the bonuses you look smarter in the process as well. Remember to subscribe to the Business of Politics Show wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. You can also sign up for email updates or check previous episodes on our website at business of politics podcast.com. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. See you next, Todd.

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