Some thoughts on the @nytimes story from today about how Trump is outgunning the Democrats with respect to digital ad spend and digital ad infrastructure: 1/X nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/…
2/ Within my Twitter feed, reactions to this story have generally fallen into 2 distinct classes. From media people / politicos: "This is a hysterical exaggeration. Trump team doesnt have a competitive advantage with digital & digital isnt provably more effective than TV, anyway"
3/ aside: the idea being promoted here is that Trump may have spent more on FB than Hillary (Trump: $44MM, Clinton: $28MM), but there is no evidence to prove that the FB budget produced a better outcome than TV budget would have
4/ Second class of responses to NYT story, mostly from tech / marketing people: "This is a crisis and the Democrats need to take this gap in expertise / core competency very seriously or they risk losing the election because of it"
5/ I fall into the second camp: that the Democrats have allowed such a massive gulf between themselves and Trump to emerge on the basis of digital advertising capabilities is a scandal and it very well may cost them 2020.
6/ It's true that FB & Google advertising platforms are not mystical tools that can only be capably operated by wizards. The specific channels arent the competitive advantage -- the user data, audience sets, and targeting knowledge very much are, and here Trump annihilates Dems
7/ In understanding power of FB / Google advertising, its important to acknowledge what these platforms are: combinations of a) pools of inventory across placements, b) very sophisticated tools for defining audiences and pairing them with ads on basis of goal optimization
8/ With FB in particular, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences provide immense value to advertisers by allowing them to algorithmically target people using FB's massive data set on basis of profiles of existing, high-value users
9/ More background on this topic in these articles: mobiledevmemo.com/unpacking-face…, mobiledevmemo.com/why-snapchat-c…, mobiledevmemo.com/can-snap-make-…
10/ And some background on what Trump accomplished in 2016 is also helpful in understanding the Trump campaign's advantage here. This is a good starting point: medium.com/startup-grind/…
11/ So Trump has an enormous database of voters, which is already a substantive head start. But he's using that to create a positive feedback loop with donations and general activism via custom / lookalike audiences. Again, not wizardry, but he's doing it very effectively
12/ Facebook gives advertisers the ability to very rapidly test ad creatives against audiences that are algorithmically defined using FB's data and optimized to some conversion event. Trump tested 5.9MM ad variants to Clinton's 66k in 2016 campaign thenextweb.com/facebook/2018/…
13/ The value of knowing how these creative variants perform to different audiences cannot be overstated. Facebook has created an immensely robust messaging testing system, but those message -> audience pairings need to be discovered and iteratively improved via testing.
14/ Trump has done that and continues to do it now. This post provides some background on how creative experimentation fits into FB's algorithmic optimization model mobiledevmemo.com/mobile-ad-crea…
15/ So FB advertising isnt an inscrutable dark art, but effectiveness requires 1) lots of data, 2) data infrastructure (creating custom / lookalike audiences), 3) a very high volume of creative production. Trump is doing these things and the Democrats, generally, are not.
16/ As to whether this is even a concern -- whether FB / Google advertising is more productive for this purpose (fundraising, voter outreach, get out the vote objectives) than television -- isn't the proof in the pudding? How could it not be? 
17/ I genuinely cannot understand how simply citing the decline in absolute TV ad spend and the fact that it has been eclipsed by digital doesn't categorically refute the notion that digital may be less effective of a channel for delivering campaign objectives than TV
18/ I find it disingenuous in the extreme to try to equivocate on that point and to refuse to accept that FB advertising isn't more granular, precisely targetable, and vastly more measurable than TV. Anyone who has ever bought TV media (as I have) knows this to be true.
19/ To summarize: a) one can acknowledge that Trump has far superior FB / Google / general digital advertising capabilities without granting Brad Parscale savant or oracle status, and b) arguments about digital not contributing to Trump's 2016 win are fatuous / disingenuous
