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 Now the two digital strategy gurus are facing off on opposite sides
of the 2016 presidential race, as Republicans get serious about
closing a digital strategy gap with Democrats that cost them dearly
in the last election.
Campaign disclosures filed last week revealed the two biggest
players so far in shaping the increasingly high-powered analytical
tools used to tailor messages to donors and voters - a bigger
priority than ever for candidates.
On the Democratic side is Andrew Bleeker, a 30-year-old wunderkind
who founded the digital consulting firm Bully Pulpit Interactive
after whipping up President Barack Obama's digital outreach strategy
for his second presidential run in 2012.
Bleeker cut his teeth in a low-level role on Secretary of State John
Kerry's unsuccessful run in 2004, worked on Obama's 2008 campaign,
and is now playing a leading role in Hillary Clinton's digital
campaign.
The leading guru for the packed field of Republican runners is Becki
Donatelli, 61, who began her career working on Ronald Reagan's 1976
bid for the Republican presidential nomination and who says she was
first person to raise political donations on the Internet. The
veteran strategist helped sweep several Republican senators into
office in 2014, including Iowa's Joni Ernst and Arkansas' Tom
Cotton.
The campaign of Democratic front-runner Clinton has paid Bully
Pulpit $1.4 million, while four Republicans - the senators Ted Cruz,
Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham - have paid Campaign
Solutions a combined $1.7 million. It's not clear exactly what
services the candidates are receiving.
For the first time, Democrats and Republicans are agreed on the
importance of good digital strategy and they are investing in it
earlier and more heavily than ever.
Since failing to win the presidency in 2012, activists from the
conservative Tea Party and the Republican establishment have been
talking frankly about where they went wrong.
Obama - building on a strong digital strategy that helped mobilize
supporters and voters in his 2008 victory - deployed a complex
system for the 2012 race to determine which voters needed the most
attention and how to reach them.
Republicans, meanwhile, including those running former Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, were still sending out
volunteers to knock on doors in neighborhoods they barely
understood. They blasted out mass emails with little heed to the
sensibilities of their recipients and spent tens of millions on
one-size-fits-all television ads, political strategists say.
HIGHER LEVEL
Now they know that sending mass emails, composing witty tweets or
getting Facebook users to click "like" on a post is far from
sufficient. Through people like Donatelli, they're ready to square
off with Democrats on a higher level.
The most sophisticated operations now use a combination of
psychological profiling and data management to talk to people on in
highly personal ways. Much of their ammunition for doing so comes
from people's preferences expressed on social media.
Remember that last Facebook quiz, the innocent time-waster during a
ten-minute office break? It promised to determine your likeness to
characters on the cast of a sitcom, or perhaps your dating
proclivities.
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It also had another purpose: to gather personality data that could
be sold to marketing and digital strategy companies.
"Not only do we know now that Joe is a plumber, we know he has a
personality that responds to fear-based advertising," said Barry
Bennett, who is managing Republican Ben Carson's presidential
campaign.
Strategists use the wealth of information to come up with highly
precise ways to talk to people. Some of the ads that pop up in the
margins of their favorite websites, for instance, are now designed
just for them.
The goal is twofold: To raise money and to get people to show up at
the polls. Increasing voter turnout for a candidate by just a few
percentage points can flip an entire election.
The strategists are also responsible for assessing how people felt
about the messages in the ads and whether they were influenced by
them.
Donatelli's latest work involves designing targeted ads using
psychological profiles created by London-based firm Cambridge
Analytica based on tens of thousands of phone interviews. The firm's
staff includes people with PhD.s in physics and is owned by the Ted
Cruz mega-donor Robert Mercer.
Donatelli said her firm maintained strict firewalls between the
teams devoted to each of the candidates to avoid any information
leaks that could give one an advantage.
Bleeker declined to be interviewed for this story.
Though Bleeker and Donatelli may seem like opposites - the
Millennial versus the seasoned insider - they have much in common.
Both are constantly on the lookout for new technology and aren't
inclined to scrimp, according to media interviews they've given.
They're the cream of a very small crop of strategists competing in a
field so narrow they sometimes cross paths working for non-political
clients.
Donatelli told Reuters last week her firm's longevity had its
advantages: "We’ve been around long enough to see trends come and
go," she said. "We have a healthy skepticism and a really healthy
desire to try new things."
(Reporting By Emily Flitter and Grant Smith; editing by Stuart
Grudgings)
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