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This episode has been featured in the Financial Times.
Matthew Oczkowski, Head of Product at Cambridge Analytica, joins the show to discuss his experience heading digital strategy for the Scott Walker primary campaign and Donald Trump general election. We discuss how the candidates used Snapchat and other social media, the differences between primary and general election campaigning in terms of digital strategy and marketing, and we also discuss how microtargeting works in practice. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattOczkowski.
The following shownotes are taken from a blog post about the podcast by American Majority, written by Nick McIntyre.
"2016 was the first year in which we saw candidates really start to use Snapchat as a platform for not only reaching voters with unique content, but also for limited information-capturing purposes. Snapchat is a social media platform that allows users to send/post photos and videos that disappear after a short period of time. This platform is especially popular amongst younger generations who use Snapchat as a more private social experience than Facebook or Twitter and can enjoy it with their peers only. The private and mobile aspect of Snapchat poses a challenge for political campaigns, who often rely on Google searches to drive traffic to their websites and other social media platforms.
Governor Scott Walker, an avid social media user, enjoyed using Snapchat in his brief presidential campaign to reach voters with different content than other platforms. Oczkowski noted that Walker was extremely authentic, and posted content “like your father” would, as opposed to artistic graphics and edited work. Voters valued authenticity highly in this last election, and Snapchat is a good visual platform for “raw” content. Likewise, the Trump campaign used Snapchat to show behind-the-scenes shots of campaign rallies to portray to magnitude of the “MAGA” movement.
Oczkowski used the term “platform agnostic” to describe his preferences on social media for campaigns. All this means is that campaigns will go to whichever platform the voters are on, and message to the demographic appropriately. In Snapchat’s case, this means reaching college age students and those under 35 – a demographic that conservatives have struggled to reach (and convince to vote) at times. New media is giving campaigns a way to capture information as well. One of the advantages of using Snapchat’s advertising feature is that it’s the only straightforward way to measure metrics from Snapchat, due to its private nature. By placing ads on Snapchat, you can track how many people you are reaching, and also give users the option to swipe up and submit their email addresses to the campaign. According to Oczkowski, both Walker and Trump collected tens and hundreds of thousands of emails from Snapchat alone. As Snapchat continues to implement revenue sources into the platform (like Facebook did), it will be interesting to see how they further incorporate advertising into the user experience. It poses an opportunity for future campaigns if offered better targeting and information-capturing, in addition to being a unique content platform.
On Targeting
Microtargeting has been a part of campaigns for a long time, and even digital microtargeting has been around for close to a decade. However, as more information regarding individuals and their preferences have become available on the open market, tech integration has become more widespread. In 2012, Harper Reed and his team at Obama For America even developed an in-hous