The Impact of Political Spending on DTC: July State of the Industry Podcast

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome to the July edition of the state of the industry podcast brought to you by the team here at the DTC index. Today, we are talking politics. And in fact, every member of the DTC index is going to tell you who they're voting for and what their most controversial political opinion is. Actually, that's not at all what we're going to do.

We are not going all in podcast on you guys. We are staying true to who we are and we are actually trying to understand. The impact of pending political spending on your business. That's what we're here to do for you in this issue of the DTC index. As always, I'm joined by the, the geniuses that make up the consortium of data here at the DTC index, and I'll let them all introduce themselves quickly. Jeremiah start with you

[00:00:48] Jeremiah Prummer: I'm Jeremiah, founder and CEO of No Commerce. I'm voting for Sean Frank for president because it feels like that's what all DTC Twitter people aspires to, right? So just give Sean a little something there, but, 

[00:01:01] Taylor Holiday: that endorsed him. It was bought and paid for. That was bought and paid for.

[00:01:04] Jeremiah Prummer: yeah. Sean gave me 10 percent of his Ridge stock in order to get you all to vote for him.

So, but yeah, we are typically we're coming to this with data looking at survey results, but actually we've been diving deep this for this episode, looking at what is different from this election cycle compared to the 2020 election cycle. In terms of campaign financing and money being spent and some of the patterns that we saw from there.

So I'm pretty excited to dive into that. We really don't have a ton of survey data that we'll talk through today in this context, but I'm really interested in the politics side of things. It's funny. I actually, I'm not a very, not very politically oriented these days, but I started college as a political science major. So I used to be really into it. And it's always fun to just kind of dive in and it's fun to look at it from a numbers standpoint, not necessarily an opinions and political allegiance standpoint.

[00:01:56] Taylor Holiday: I am also a political science major. We might be more qualified to talk about this than our, our day to day jobs. We'll see.

Yarden who are you and what are you sharing with us today?

[00:02:06] Yarden Shaked: Hey, yeah, so, I'm the co founder, CEO of Varos basically we provide digital marketing and revenue benchmarks and market trends to e commerce and SAS brands. So we got 7, 000 businesses on Barrows. It's a first party data co op and yeah, leveraging a lot of that data. We have also a lot of historical data.

So, you know, we looked at 2019 versus 2020 to analyze the past elections for this and also the normal, you know, how did July trend, 

That, 

[00:02:36] Taylor Holiday: And Steve, how about you?

[00:02:38] Steve Rekuc: I'm Steve director of data common thread collective. I build a lot of the models that we have here common thread collective and I stare at a lot of the data and kind of make try to make sense of it or at least stare at it until it blinks, including some of the survey data from no commerce that we get for the and calculating the consumer confidence index for. Direct to consumer as, and then there's a lot of insights. I'll pull from that in order for, and some of this analysis.

[00:03:08] Taylor Holiday: So what's always interesting about this show is we're sitting here on August ninth, coming off of a very volatile week in the stock market, but we're going to have to save that for next edition because we're here to talk primarily about July, but also we try to take a little bit of every edition and answer a future question in the well as well, in the past, we talked about. pending upcoming performance related to Mother's Day or Father's Day or looked out at the impact of the Super Bowl in various ways. And so today we're trying to answer a question that's coming up a lot as we eke ever closer to a big moment here in the United States, which is the presidential election. And we really wanted to take a look back at the data sets that we have and see what really did happen to Facebook CPMs, as well as performance across the consumer landscape during the presidential election in 2020. And what can we then potentially anticipate impacting our businesses as we head into the presidential election this year? Then we also went spiraling down some rabbit holes to understand how the candidates are presently spending and how the money is flowing this year in comparison to 2020. So we're excited to dive into that as well, but why don't we start by taking a quick glance back at July? So Yarden, can you give us an initial look at how was e commerce performance in the month of July?

[00:04:24] Yarden Shaked: Yeah, sure. Sure. So, starting from a, starting from a revenue perspective Revenue you know, in June was, was slower than in, in May. And then in July, there was a little bit of a bump back, but, but it is we are seeing slower revenue growth than we've been accustomed to up until May of this year.

So we're at about 25 percent year over year growth on seven figure brands and 13 percent year over year growth on eight and nine figure brands. So, brands are still growing they're, they're still doing well but we're seeing a little bit of a deceleration here and hoping that trend doesn't doesn't continue.

And on the ad platform side, what's, what's interesting is we saw the first negative ROAS month year over year that we've seen in a while for Meta. So Sped was up 7%, but CPMs were up almost 20 percent and ROAS was down 10 percent year over year where we've been used to seeing either flat or up a bit ROAS throughout 2024.

So something definitely to look out for and interestingly inversely search, Google search has been up from a ROAS perspective in July and CPMs are down which is also inverse from what we're used to seeing and TikTok same as we've seen nearly a 30 percent drop in spend. ROAS is, you know, up and down this, this, this month.

It's flat and CPMs are up 35%.

[00:06:00] Taylor Holiday: So Yarden, it seems that we are in Steve, I'm going to borrow a phrase of yours, some of the dog days of summer here, and that what generally happens as it relates to the months of July and August in particular, is that you get past father's day, you get past Memorial day, and all of a sudden you enter into this period where there's no obvious cultural imperatives for purchase. And so e commerce tends to hit a dead end. Bit of a lull now in the same way that it does maybe in September, October for our industry as well. And so, but it seems that that is even potentially more evident than it has been in other months when you compare it to previous years. Is that fair to say?

[00:06:35] Yarden Shaked: Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, there's this, there's a summer low, but compared to last summer as well, it's like the, the businesses are still growing, but it's, it is a softer month or two then, then we're used to seeing both from a revenue perspective and an ad 

[00:06:53] Taylor Holiday: Steve, what are you seeing? In terms of what are we seeing in consumer sentiment from July, as well as maybe some of the new customer returning customer revenue, what is on your radar? For the performance from July.

[00:07:04] Steve Rekuc: Yeah, I did see that drop off in performance, particularly following the week of prime. So we saw that consumer confidence index, our DTCCI drop off to around an 85 the week right after prime. And I think there was a little bit of burnout that consumers had, like we hit them with a bunch of different sales back to back to back. We're looking at memorial day, father's day, 4th of July and prime days, like, 4 major kind of semi major holidays and DTC in the matter of, like, 5 weeks. So, I can certainly see the burnout there and maybe it was. Well, a little bit preemptive in terms of the economic term down to we were looking at that consumer confidence kind of drop off a little bit before we saw the stock market drop. So, we certainly saw that, and we've seen some recovery in that end. On, with respect to Yarden's data, it's interesting to see that, like, new customer revenue has struggled both for 7 figure and 8 figure more than returning customers. It looks like it's been harder for those customers to get acquired in his data.

[00:08:08] Taylor Holiday: And when you see the meta performance taking a little bit of a hit, that seems to make sense, right? So a lot of that new customer acquisition being driven out of that channel, as I think also I saw a yard in that meta spend was up and Google spend was down again, that's a number of consecutive months in a row.

So the share of wallet. Grows. If that channel experiences efficiency decline, you're going to have some challenge on the new customer acquisition front in particular. So a bunch of signs in there. I want to stay a little bit on prime day because this is a growing cultural moment that it seems that Amazon is trying to stick right into the periods where they don't have natural peaks themselves.

Right? So if you think about prime days, usually in July and October, no major cultural moments that they're benefiting from. And they are, they reported a massive gain in demand this year for prime day. I think the most recent figures, and I think we should back check this for the, for the addition was up 20 percent or so year over year in total prime day volume for the month of July.

So. That sucks up a lot of consumer demand into a space that doesn't normally exist. It's a little bit of a black hole that I think websites in particular struggle from. Jeremiah, is there anything that you guys saw on the survey front or across your portfolio that, that was related to Prime Day?

[00:09:22] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, we, we did a little bit of digging there and we didn't see anything interesting on that front. The one thing I wanted to say too, going back to the, the D-T-C-C-I, the Direct to Consumer Competence Index one thing that's really unique about the way that we're looking at that is the re basically sales have a pretty significant impact on those numbers.

So big sales moments. So prime day. I think when, when we look at that, we know that. Brands are advertising prime day sales on their sites as well. So if they've got a prime day sale on Amazon, they also likely have a sale on their sites. It's probably not true for everybody, but for a lot of brands that are doing that and they're running ads to their site.

And, and so I think when Steve, we see those good numbers around prime day and then we see that drop off, I think in part it's because of. The fact that the return on ad spend is essentially higher in those moments. And then we see that also for you know, basically the entire Q4 holiday season. So that's the only thing I just kind of wanted to highlight there.

And I, I think that that all makes sense and likely we'll probably continue to see the lower lower score over the next couple of months on the consumer, on our version of the consumer confidence index in part, because of that.

[00:10:35] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that's great. I agree. Those, those moments where the cultural behavior drives people to shop tend to actually be reflected in sentiment as well. So I think we could be in for some, some lower numbers as we go forward. The reason we wanted to use this month is because there's not a lot of really exciting, interesting, or big imperatives in the performance data.

So we thought to ourselves, what could we do to bring a really insightful look at something that may make a really big difference as we go forward. And that is. Election advertising. I promise many of you have heard the trope that there's about to be a bunch of money spent during the election year. CPMs are going to go through the roof.

It's going to affect your ad dollars. And we wanted to find out just how true that was. So we went back and looked at a number of different things. So we want to start with going back to yard in here and understanding what happened as it related to the price of advertising in particularly, in particular in 2024. Relative to the other years in the peak months of October, November that are upcoming. And to illustrate just how much of the amount of money that is going to be spent on advertising is spent in the last 90 days before the election. Here's some some fun data for you in 2020, 52 percent of all presidential ad dollars were spent in the 90 days before the election in 2016, 43 percent of the money In 2012, 60% of their, all of the advertising budget was spent in the 90 days before the election. And we have even reason to believe that it might even be higher this year. There are already pre-booked ad buys from the Democrats of 170 million in future ad, future ad rev reservations and Republicans of 101 already pre reserved, but they're also both. Sitting on more cash than they ever have been at this point.

So there is a lot of potential dollars waiting to be spent, but Yarden, how has that impacted us historically?

[00:12:32] Yarden Shaked: yeah. So, so we went back and looked at actual performance data on meta and Google in the months leading up to the election of 2020 and how that compared to the year before. And there was actually a big impact that the political season had. So if we first look at meta if you, so, so 2020 from a CPM perspective and a cost for purchase perspective was a very efficient year.

It was lower costs than 2019. So if you look at CPMs in July of 2020, it was down 20% year over year. And then as you lead up to the election. It actually flips that by November, it was up 13%. So there is a, a massive swing from being a very positive CPM to having a lot of cost increases and similar story on the cost per purchase perspective.

You know, it was more, much more efficient before. And then as you go into the election, obviously comparing to 2019, which is a non-election year it became more expensive. And if you look at Google that swing instead of from 20 down, 20% to 13% of meta down, 12% to up 3% on Google, but very, very similar shapes.

In the lines and, and trends, I got to say, I was pretty surprised by this data. Oh, and about 45 percent of advertisers have had increased had experienced a CPM increase of over 10 percent year over year in October, November, 2020. So I, I was pretty surprised by this data because when we saw, you know, the whole Timu and Shane Spending trends of earlier this year.

We didn't see anything really crazy in terms of how that impacted performance, how that impacted fashion brands costs and so forth. But here here we actually did. And, and there was there, there were these big changes. I'll say that. Aside from, from what happened in 2020, I do think that the, you know, The way meta works is different now than it was in 2020 meta knows how to handle, you know, they've scaled a ton on the ad revenue side since 2020.

They rolled out advantage plus and many new ad formats. Things became a lot more automated. Advertisers continue to shift. To doing broad campaigns, just putting in the creative and letting Meta distribute it. And that makes Meta more efficient to handle these big scale impacts. So, hoping that it's not going to have as big of an increase as it did in 2020, but we can expect, you know, some real changes here in October, November even September.

[00:15:30] Taylor Holiday: So one of the things well, actually let's see, let's just jump over to you to add some additional context related to how those changes in CPM affected performance. And then Jeremiah, I want to come to you to talk a little bit about. How this year might be different from some of the research you've done on presidential spending and campaign spending generally so Steve What how did those CPMs affect performance in our data set across those time periods?

[00:15:53] Steve Rekuc: Yeah, we definitely saw that jump in CPM as well. I think in our, when I'm looking at the particular weeks, it's like the 2 weeks prior. The 2 weeks, the week prior and the week, including the election. So, like, it jumped from being, earlier in Q4 of 2020 being slightly down in CPM cost to. Up 21%. The 2 weeks prior, and then the week of you're looking at up 27 percent in our data set. And what that really causes even more. So is, I think there was a distraction to from purchasing as well. So it's not just like CPMs increase, but people are paying Thinking about other things you know, all the different aspects of their election, whether it's presidential or local or state. So, in that Amer dropped during election week, 46%. Like, a massive drop off in the acquisition marketing efficiency ratio. So, yes, CPMs were higher that week, but even more. So people weren't converting as much. You know, the

spend, 

[00:16:58] Taylor Holiday: see, yeah, it seems like that the price of inventory may not even be the core driver as much as the attention and energy soaked up by the election itself in that week versus it's purely a relationship between CPMs go up and performance goes down. We know that's not historically the case on meta, but it seems that that may be an even deeper part of the story to think about than just the price of the ad inventory or the competition.

[00:17:20] Steve Rekuc: yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's certainly a good amount of distraction and we even solve, like, the new customer revenue drop off that week despite people, you know, despite brands putting money into that time.

[00:17:31] Yarden Shaked: Well, to your point Taylor, a lot of times the CPM spikes because of a buying experience, right? This is like a very unique whatever that word is phenomenon that like people, there's actually a massive increase in scale of spend, but that's not towards getting someone to buy, it's towards getting someone to vote.

So, you know, it doesn't lead to to, to those conversion 

[00:17:57] Jeremiah Prummer: absolutely. It's it's dollars in into the ecosystem and no dollars measurable dollars out. It's just an app and that we're trying to drive

and in this context. So.

Yeah, and I'll go ahead and dive in a little bit on some of what we're seeing. So 1 of the things that's really interesting is there. The 2020 election cycle is just different from the 2024 and, there's a couple of factors here, right? Like, 1 of them is cobit was obviously a big thing in the 2020 election cycle. And I, to be clear, there's not any specific research. We're looking at here with. 2020 cobit and and 2024 to see what that difference is, but just as a, as a note, there's a difference there. And then the other thing that is different is that the 2020 election. We had. A 

a primary on the Democratic side. That was pretty massive. And so you had like Bloomberg. I believe that this is off the top of my head. So I believe it was something like a billion dollars that his campaign had. It was a massive amount of money in total, though, on the presidential side, there was between 1 and 2 billion dollars spent and just the primary process for the Democrats.

So that's obviously a massive difference from what's happening this year. 

[00:19:10] Taylor Holiday: Just to layer on to generally speaking, I'm looking at some data right now from ad impact. If you guys look at this, that the non incumbent party generally spends an immense amount of money in the primary election. So in 2020 the Democrats on the non incumbent side in that year, there was a primary spent 400 million in February alone on advertising that just didn't exist this year.

So that is a big change.

[00:19:33] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah. And actually I think Taylor, so I'll, I'll touch on this. I think it's exactly that same data source that I was looking at that was talking about total year to date spend in 2024 versus 2020 2024 was 1. 4 billion by the time that this was written, which I believe was in June. And then 2020, sorry, 2020 was 1.

4 billion. 2024 was 716 million. There's already a 700 million gap. Through the first half of this year compared to 2020. So essentially there's a lot, been a lot less political spending up to this point. You also have the, the Harris campaign is announcing over a billion dollars raised in that, that includes biden's funds that were transferred over which is the most that's ever been raised by any campaign at this point in a, a process. And if you look at the cash on hand, both the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign are over 300 million cash on hand as of the end of July. If you compare that to 2020, those numbers were let me make sure I don't misspeak on this. It was well, it was 121 million, I believe, for the Trump campaign and 99 million for the Biden campaign.

I actually don't have this written in the spot, but it was much smaller. In total, it's 3. 2 million. Times as much cash on hand right now than there was in the 2020 election cycle. So that that's all really interesting. And then, oh, did you have something 

[00:20:54] Taylor Holiday: Well, I was, I was just going to say, yeah, that's super interesting to think about. The allocation of that capital waiting to be done. Right. And so, so it's a, it's a great point. I want to talk about a little bit about where they're spending. If you're going to jump into that, if not to finish what you were saying, sorry, Jeremy.

[00:21:10] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, 

the only other thing I was going to talk about in terms of, like, the pacing of spend. The other really important notes when it comes to spending is if you look back at 2020, the ad spend starts accelerating in September. So we're actually going to see the acceleration of this happen in about a month. And so if you look at 2020, when it came to the, the spending of the dollars the Biden campaign spent to, this is according to Reuters data. So. It shows that they spent $285 million in September, which is compared to 360 million for the entire general election cycle up to that point. So they, they spent almost as much just in September as they'd spent up to that point. And then the Trump campaign spent $139 million in September, 2020 compared to 384 million up to that point. So massive increases in spending starting in September. And then obviously that carries through. To the election. So really, all of September, all of October and into the beginning of November, we're going to see massive amounts of increase in spending compared to what we have seen up to this point.

[00:22:15] Taylor Holiday: So there, there's definitely a lot about to happen now. If we think about one of the things we tried to go after was like, okay, who might be most affected by this giant spending? And so we started to look at how do both Democrats and Republicans spend their money differently? And where is that money being spent? Cause you could begin to think about the overlap between the target demographic of these advertisers and your individual business as potentially being places that might be more or less affected relative to the competition for somebody's newsfeed. So some fun data here. The Republican Party is just not spending on Metta. In fact, since July 22nd, spending on Metta and Google in total, the Democrats have spent 42. 3 million. This is in the last basically three weeks. And the Republicans have only spent 5. 3. So for some reason, whatever it is, their motivation now on television, the Republicans are outspending the demographic or outspending the Democrats.

So there are tens is, I don't know if this speaks to demographics or exactly. I can't say what the strategy is exactly, but digital spending out of the democratic party. And then there's also add specific ad formats. So as an example, the Democrats spent over 15 million on national advertising during the, during the Olympics, Republicans spent zero.

So one of them opted out of that event in entirety. The other went very much for a very broad national event. And then the third thing is obviously geography. We know that given the electoral college map, there are areas of immense focus with these advertising dollars. So, Right now, the number one spending space state on television through 8 12 is number one.

Not surprising is Pennsylvania twice as much spending in Pennsylvania by both the Democrats and the Republicans versus any other state that's at 20 million each. Michigan comes in second for the Democrats, Georgia coming in second for the Republicans. Whereas the Democrats seemingly opting out a little bit more in Georgia, Wisconsin is fourth, Arizona is fifth, and everything else after that is half of the lowest one. So, so many of the ad dollars are getting concentrated into those five states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Ohio is the, is the next one as well. So part of this is, do you have an overlap? Michigan? I'm sorry, not Ohio, Michigan are concentrated in those spaces. So as you think about who is your customer, are they a democratic leaning?

Are they Republic? Are they conservative leaning? Are they concentrated in areas at swing States? Those are really going to define your areas. But if you have coastal elite customers. The likelihood is that you have very little competition in your ad feed for those spaces because those states are so predefined on the electoral college.

[00:25:04] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, the, the other thing to Taylor, you're talking about the Olympics. I saw a bunch of those ads, from the Democratic Party, and a lot of it's focused around fundraising, and I think that's another thing, too. Like, we're still in the fundraising. Part of the campaign spending cycle for a lot of these and some of the data that we see here shows that the vast majority of ad spend up to this point has actually been about raising more funds.

And so I think that's something that that has an impact here, too. So we're going to see it's probably like what I'm seeing in Colorado and a state that's going to go blue. It's all it always does. It's going to be very different than what somebody sees in Pennsylvania. I'm sure. And so there's that also is, I think, an interesting dynamic here, where there's so much money being spent to raise more money. And that's been the majority of the ad spend up to this point.

[00:25:50] Taylor Holiday: And in particular, that's true on meta where I'm looking right now. And if you look at, they break the source here is the Wesleyan media project and they break spending into two categories, persuasion, where they're trying to persuade you to your vote and fundraising. 100 percent of the money that Trump has spent on meta is fundraising.

So it's interesting to think about that as conversion optimized meta advertising versus the democratic party. This is pre action. This is through may. So this was Biden was sort of 50, 50 fundraising and persuasion. So interesting use of tactics as well in terms of how they're using each channel.

[00:26:26] Yarden Shaked: Taylor. I think you'd be the most set up to answer this, but something I was curious about as you're talking, as we were reading over the reports is, is there This political spending on meta, let's say, is very different than the spending that we know in, in e com world. Right. Because it's actually like, like how, how are they going to do it?

Because I'd imagine that if you just put in creatives, like as an e com advertiser would, it would just like, meta would just spend on the people that would vote for you. Cause those people are the most attracted to it. So you actually like, How are they, how are they scaling spend immediately without creative testing?

And how are they getting to the people 

that they want 

[00:27:09] Taylor Holiday: it's funny. I actually think like, when I, as I analyze this, I still think this industry is like lagging substantially in their own behavioral patterns. Like I'm looking right now of the money spent and this was 2020. So yet to be determined, but let's see 70 that's 79 between all, let's see 77, like about 84 percent of all of the advertising dollars went to television.

[00:27:31] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, 

that was gonna be. 

[00:27:33] Taylor Holiday: yeah, it's crazy how much of the ad dollars are still spent in television. 

[00:27:38] Yarden Shaked: is, but that's the easiest, but, but to me, you know, that actually, it makes sense in the sense that TV is the most like you can get probably the clearest, like demographic and location and who's watching it. Like you can get a pretty clear view of like, who's watching PBS in Michigan at 8 PM.

Right. Oh 

[00:28:03] Taylor Holiday: don't know. What do we,

can you you can, you can determine there's a TV on in a house, but you don't have any idea if anybody's watching anything.

[00:28:11] Jeremiah Prummer: I think what's interesting, though, is so to go back to what you

were saying, Yarden, about this idea of the In meta creative basically drives who you're going to put, who, 

who's going to interact. And so I think if you look at the spending the spending that data I was looking at, this is from the Westland research here. So if you look at March 6th, May 19th, so kind of the beginning of the general election cycle, 49 percent of that spend was digital between both Democrats and Republicans. If you just aggregate all of it together. And I think the reason for that is because they're looking to raise more money, right? That money is being used to raise more money.

And so meta is actually a great place and Google are great place to put those dollars. If your goal is to actually, yeah, you're just you're trying to drive conversions.

And then if you look at that compared to the 2020 numbers. So in 2020, I mean, Taylor, to your point, it's basically 80 percent of the dollars are going to TV in some capacity. The numbers that I'm looking at for sorry, let me make sure I get the right source here. E Marketer is the source here. Their, their estimates show that basically all but 18 percent of the spend is going to go to TV this year. And so I think what we see basically is, is that Meta and Google are probably, we're probably actually going to see a little bit of it. They're definitely going to be spending money there in September through November, but probably a lot of that spend is happening now or has already happened in terms of trying to drive. More funding to then go to TV and, and push ads on TV. So I think that is a big piece of the behavior. That said 18 percent of, of billions and billions of dollars spent on campaigns.

It's still a lot of money that hasn't been spent yet, even if that's all it hits. But yeah, I think there's a lot of the money. The reason why the percentage is higher so far is because of the type of response that they're trying to get from those ads, which is more dollars raised.

[00:30:02] Taylor Holiday: I do think though that this is where potentially this problem is slightly overstated for our industry is that we look at these total ad dollars, but if you start taking 80 percent of it and you put them over on TV and then you take the remaining 20 and you cut them up between meta Google, whatever other digital channels, like I'm guessing they're buying a lot on GDN or whatever it might be.

And then you break it into the concentration and key swing states. Like, I think the overall consumer overlap ends up, Way more watered down than the big numbers may make the advertising pile seen. And that's why I think some of these performance things are less related to the flow of dollars and CPM and price as it is to where is the attention of people in these various moments as we go.

[00:30:44] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

[00:30:47] Steve Rekuc: in that they're not as concerned with digital conversion. If you're not doing a fundraising campaign specifically, then the digital conversion doesn't matter to as much of, as it does to our listeners. So it's an interesting thing that TV winds up being a lot stronger area of spend for them because they don't care about digital conversion for, in general.

[00:31:10] Taylor Holiday: There's also like, The data on advertising is a mechanism for affecting voter turnouts, not actually very good in any medium I've seen like there was a lot of this was put to the test. I don't know if you guys have read much about the what's the dude's name from the crypto scam company? What my curly haired goofy guy? 

[00:31:27] Steve Rekuc: Sam Bankman. 

[00:31:28] Taylor Holiday: say and make them free. So like during 2020 election, he would go into these very local elections where he had this like political agenda related to climate change and these other things. And he would massively overfund one campaign. Like to the tune of like a hundred X, the advertising value of the other people.

And he was basically able to affect almost no elections with any of the influx of additional capital. So I think there's also just like the data on. How do you make an ad increase voter persuasion and turnout both are like they're it's hard at best and unclear in many cases.

[00:32:01] Yarden Shaked: It's also, I think just like, it's probably old school running it, you know, big agencies, they're doing what they did past elections. Cause, cause TV, well, why can't you just do, you know, a lot of connected TV then and like get a lot more data and be a lot more targeted. Like it feels like they're not moving with, with the shared 

[00:32:24] Jeremiah Prummer: I do think that is one shift that is expected for this cycle, is that connected TV spend is expected to basically double, it looks like from 2020. So that, that is one aspect.

[00:32:34] Yarden Shaked: Yeah, okay, but I would have guessed that connected TV spend, like, quadrupled or 

[00:32:41] Taylor Holiday: well, yeah, it's funny. Like, if you think about, I mean, a lot of this ends up in your world. Jeremiah, which is that the problem with all the ad dollars spent in September is they're talking about an action in November. 

So now the proxy for what is working is an attempt at surveying the people in those regions that may or may not have seen the ad with a qualitative response to the thing.

And so it just becomes a measurement challenge too, to determine the efficacy as you're spending. Like you're the, the ultimate measurement is an action months away. And so it is really hard if you think about how hard it is to determine and attribute a direct purchase that happens within, you know, a few hours of action, sometimes like try actually attributing ad success to a vote three months from now, it's like really hard.

[00:33:25] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, and the other challenge with that. So, I mean, probably what's happening in a lot of cases is they're doing some sort of awareness survey, right? They're basically trying to measure, like, are we increasing awareness of our candidate or specific issues or whatever that is. In the places where we're spending ads, but to your point. It's a single action that happens. At a future date. So you don't know if people are actually going to take that action, even if they, you are increasing awareness. So really, the only thing you have to measure towards is some form of intent, but that measurement of intent doesn't mean the intent is going to happen. And once that action happens, nobody cares anymore to even participate in that sort of research and study. So I think it becomes a huge challenge for sure. 

[00:34:11] Taylor Holiday: Cause you could create influence today that gets derailed by something that happens in the future. And so then that, like that gets lost in some way as well. So. Yeah, 

[00:34:19] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a little bit of a microcosm, I think, like, the, you know, Biden dropping out and Harris running instead is a good example of that, right? So. I think that's part of the reason why you see her raising so much money in the last few months and spending so much so many dollars.

I'm basically being like, Hey, I'm running give me money because she's still trying to build awareness that she's even the, the candidate. And, I mean, just just had her VP nomination and all these kinds of things. So I think there's, there's definitely a factor there. 1 thing I wanted to highlight to you.

That's really interesting. It's just looking at 2020. Dollars in terms of the spending and what it was spent on. So. Open Secrets has a, an article from early 2021 where they, they pulled the, the campaign financing data and looked at the ad spend for the 2020 cycle. 8. 7 billion was spent on congressional elections and 5.7 billion on presidential. So I do think that's an interesting factor too. When we're talking about presidential election, all that matters is those swing states really, right? But in the congressional elections, that's not the case. So I do think that maybe what we were talking about a little bit earlier with that, it could potentially understate that those dollars being spent on the congressional side in certain states.

And I don't know enough about each individual states races to know which ones are gonna be affected by that. But I do think that's something to to be aware of to in certain places. There's probably a massive amount of spend certain places that are not swing states, just in terms of. Trying to get a specific candidate to Congress. There was, I think it was the Georgia election last year or sorry. And 2020, let me see. Yeah, Georgia 

[00:36:03] Taylor Holiday: Senate. race, cause they had the race and then the runoff when there was

[00:36:06] Jeremiah Prummer: Yeah. So the 

[00:36:07] Taylor Holiday: For 

[00:36:08] Jeremiah Prummer: 510 million and then the runoff another 363 million. So if you're in Georgia, just, just that one race was almost a billion dollars in spend, which, I mean, you compare that to a presidential election and that's actually a significant. Amount of dollars. I mean, that's that's something like call it 15 percent of the total that was spent on the presidential election just for the state of Georgia's Senate.

[00:36:32] Taylor Holiday: sure. And that's where the sort of the concentration of impact here gets dispersed relative to your customer base in various ways. That is definitely worth trying to think through some of these insights. So in this edition, if you sign up this month, you're going to get all the usual July data around media performance, share of wallet, et cetera, from the month of July, as well as. A lot of these charts, graphs, insights related to political spending and impact as you go forward so that hopefully you can plan your Q4 and consider some of the elements that may help you make better decisions about how this reality here in the United States may impact you as a business. So as always go now to the DTCindex. com or just DTCindex. com, drop the the and use the code SUMMER50 to get 50 off any investment. Your first edition. We have the library of all previous additions in there now as well, including last month's, which covered the entirety of the first half performance for you to understand if you've outperformed the market year to date and little teaser, we're thinking about launching very soon, a private. Subscriber only call to review data live with you all. So to give you a direct Q and a, an opportunity to interact with us and ask specific questions about your business, about your industry, your sector, Yarden will be there with his Varos dashboard loaded up, ready to answer questions. Steve will have his consumer insights and Jeremiah will have built you a survey right on the spot if you need it.

So we're going to make it as a. Hands on as we can for the members of DTC index. So please go check it out. DTC index. com. Gents, thank you all for coming by and good luck at the polls.

[00:38:10] Jeremiah Prummer: Yes.

[00:38:12] Yarden Shaked: Thanks, guys.