A Conversation with Chris Nolan About What Comes Next

I connected with Chris Nolan, founder of Spot-On, over email to talk through how campaigns are actually reaching and moving voters, and why a lot of the conventional wisdom just isn’t holding up. There’s a lot here about what’s working right now, and where campaigns are getting it wrong.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you got here

I grew up outside of Washington, D.C. on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and went to college in New York. For 15 years, I worked as a local news reporter up and down the East Coast and then in DC covering Congress. I moved to California to take a job as a Silicon Valley columnist at the Mercury News in San Jose. This was as that new fangled Internet thing was getting started so I had a little fun watching some people who are now billionaires change the world. After a few years at the Mercury News, I moved the column to the New York Post. 

When the tech bubble burst I had to look around for something to do – no one cared about Internet geeks then. I knew a little bit about politics and a little bit about the Internet so I thought there might be a business selling political ads on local news sites. So I did. 

A lot of campaigns invest in programmatic digital (for the uninitiated, digital ads that follow the voter around the internet). How is what you do different?

 Spot-On buys directly from local news outlets. So no fraud. And full accountability and transparency on performance and pricing. We know the publishers, we know their disclaimer and editorial policies (for better or worse), their circulation areas and readership numbers. Oh, yeah, their pricing, too.

We buy direct for a few reasons. One, reliability. Spot-On buys premium placements – the big stuff at the top of the page – on the sites where we place ads. We also monitor ad performance for each outlet and each piece of creative so we know when things are going wrong – or right. And the ads we place talk directly to voters – some of whom may escape various targeting attempts. On average, more than 70% of local news readers are voters so we’re putting political ads in front of the right audience – consistently.

Spot-On also places high-impact premium take-overs, what’s known as ‘rich media’ with video inserts. In some cases we also add newsletters and streaming video to our campaigns. But our client always knows what we’re doing – and how much it costs. 

In short, we’re directly accountable to our clients for performance and budget on every buy.

So programmatic digital doesn’t reach the New York Times? Why not? 

It does – but it’s limited. 

The Times – and other outlets – have decided that less is more when it comes to ad sales and they want to control as much of the buying process as they can – especially for political and advocacy efforts. Their programmatic fills in what they don’t sell directly, it’s not what they rely on to sell all their digital inventory. More and more publishers are moving to this model. 

If you visit NYTimes.com you’ll see large premium placement ad units, some with :15 and :30 video inserts. They look more like glossy print magazine ads than the display banner ads that a lot of political campaigns buy. That’s why the NYT – and a handful of fancy magazine websites – get ads from Apple, Cartier, Chanel and Spot-On.

What’s the biggest mistake campaigns (or their consultants) make with their digital buys? 

They’re looking for a digital silver bullet. They want to match the easy buying process that TV gives campaigns with the targeting accuracy of mail. 

When Spot-On started, we had consultants who loved Google Search because it was free – until a user clicked on the ad. Then there was something called the “Google Surge” where consultants thought they were buying “all” of Google’s inventory for a specific market. Spoiler: they weren’t. Facebook’s very specific targeting had a vogue for a while along with voter-match micro-targeting. These days it’s CTV, YouTube and “smart” TVs. 

We’re still seeing a lot of voter-match campaigns but their effectiveness is diminishing. Julie Sweet did a very good presentation at AAPC this year about all the state laws covering use of data and AI – which are getting confused. Those laws – combined with the filter agents on every phone and laptop – mean the mass outreach that’s been part and parcel of political outreach just isn’t going to work.

Let’s talk about ad blockers.

Okay. They’re there and they matter – a little bit. They’re most used by one group: younger men (around 34%). 

The biggest other reason people use blockers is because janky web sites try to compensate for low priced ads – many delivered programmatically – by running lots and lots and lots of them. So if you’re a programmatic ad buyer – and only a programmatic ad buyer – you need to worry about blockers. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was well known for his use of social media, and as a consultant, now all my candidates want to “do great social.” How should campaigns think about social as part of their media mix?

I was never a big fan of having Facebook, Instagram or any social media part of a media buying plan. I think social platform activity is field outreach and I’ve  thought so for a while. The Mandami campaign just drove that point home for me – and lots of others, I suspect.

Social media outreach needs to be more personal and focused – not targeted, focused. Social activity needs to be aware of and include rapid response and it should, ideally, be based on what the viewer- not the campaign – is thinking about. That’s why it’s social – it’s an interaction, a back and forth.

That’s also the definition of field: Go talk to someone, find out what they’re thinking, then talk about how the candidate/campaign can help. 

Putting a media buyer in this mix because the delivery mechanism has a screen and takes ads seems easy but just increases costs, slows down message delivery and does not ‘listen’ to voters. 

For many people, say “political ad” and they think of the traditional :30 spot. Now that many voters have “cut the cord” which is probably a dated term, as many never had the cord to begin with, CTV has become a bigger and bigger piece of the ad spending. Why do campaigns need to expand beyond CTV? 

Because it’s not ubiquitous. It sells out. AND you can’t buy political ads on the most popular streaming services. AppleTV, Netflix and Amazon Prime aren’t going to take political ads any time soon. That’s like saying you should buy cable but you can’t have ESPN, CNN or Fox.

On top of that, penetration for broadband coverage – which is necessary to get these services without interruption – isn’t even across the country. In rural areas in particular, there are gaps. That goes as well for mobile video. We forget that many mobile phone users have data plans which limit what they can download. Video eats that bandwidth quickly which doesn’t win over voters.

We’ve all heard of the death of newspapers. Political consultant Will Robinson has recently been aligning swing Congressional districts with news deserts. How do you address that with what you do?

Well, we’d argue that a lot of swing districts are not news deserts. If you run through the swing district list on our Pinpoint Persuasion platform, you see that – for instance – the IA-03 has more than five local sites up and running. So does the CO-08. And that doesn’t count larger outlets not located in those districts which serve residents.

My suspicion is that some of the underlying data for these determinations rely on print metrics: We talk about the death of newspapers not news websites. So perhaps what we’re looking at is the physical paper’s circulation – or location – rather than its digital reach. That’s not a surprise; Spot-On has been asking publishers for their digital circulation numbers for the past year and we’ve found that many don’t have that info close at hand. In some cases, we’re the first to ask for it.

As we talk to publishers we also find that some of their digital products – specifically newsletters – outstrip their site in terms of readership. We also hear from pubs that their digital readership coverage is larger than their print, extending outside the paper’s circulation area. That’s not surprising because most sites also have more readers using mobile devices than reading on a desk or laptop.

There’s also a trend here that may be discounted: the death of small town rural American newspapers is tracking declining and aging populations. In other words, they’re news and people deserts. In some parts of the country you can call up a local news site – which we’ve done as we built our database –  and see that the two biggest advertisers are cemetery plots and funeral homes. That tells you something about that community. 

Tell us a memorable war story from your career.

My all time favorite reason for a campaign getting cancelled: The client got arrested for beating up his girlfriend’s husband. 

Finally, give us a shameless plug for your company.

Happily! Spot-On has built a new ad buying platform – Pinpoint Persuasion – that strips away a lot of the friction we’ve talked about here.

Pinpoint Persuasion (P3 to its friends) makes buying local news sites as easy as programmatic buying with maps to help buyers see the districts they want to reach and create plans appropriate to their targets. 

Our comprehensive list of local sites – more than 3,000 – is updated regularly to give buyers information about readers, pricing and specific zip coverages. The platform handles creative uploads for all outlets and provides real time reporting for pacing delivery and creative performance. And since we know the publishers your ads fill premium positions on sites that voters trust.

Be the campaign that supports local news! Drop us a note for information about P3 seat pricing and service fees.  

Chris Nolan, Spot-On, cnolan@spot-on.com