Trump Knows Digital Ads Work. Why Don’t Democrats?

President Trump may not be up for re-election until 2020, but since May 31, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee — his re-election campaign — has spent $629,500 on advertising on Google platforms alone, making it the top spender on political ads on Google platforms. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the No. 2 spender, One Nation, a right-wing organization focused on influencing Senate elections.

This information comes from Google, which just increased transparency into political ad spending on its platforms. Anyone skilled in marketing knows the precision, targeting and cost-effectiveness of online strategies to reach buyers, influencers and, in this case, voters. When I was the chief marketing officer of Salesforce a few years ago, the industry standard was to allocate 25 percent to 30 percent of marketing budget to digital channels, and that allocation has increased since then across all industries. Last year, for the first time, global ad spending on digital channels eclipsed traditional TV spending. By 2020, digital is expected to account for over 50 percent of all ad spending.

And then there are the Democrats: The average nonpresidential Democratic campaign spends only 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget on digital channels while pouring 60 percent to 70 percent of its budget into television ads and direct mail. That is shocking, especially because people now spend an average of 5.9 hours online every single day, with 3.3 of those hours on mobile devices.

So why are Democratic campaigns ignoring such obvious opportunities to engage with voters? I’m honestly not sure; perhaps old habits are hard to break. But outdated models aren’t going to win in this digital world. Unlike the Democrats, Republican candidates and right-wing organizations are prioritizing the right channels.

In the average 2016 Senate general election, Republicans outspent Democrats by a three-to-one ratio on YouTube, AdWords and other Google channels. From January to June, during the primaries, this gap was even wider at 20 to one.

It’s even worse for down-ballot, state-level campaigns, which are under-resourced in both manpower and financial support. A typical state legislative campaign might run with an average budget of $150,000 (just 10 percent of the budget of a successful federal House race). With a smaller budget, you need to be intentional and efficient. Why spend money on TV ads, which are often aired beyond your voting district or skipped entirely with DVRs, when you could be utilizing Google AdWords and Facebook ads that can zero in on specific ZIP codes and target voters by segment or even language?

Candidates who understand the potential of reaching people through digital channels on a limited budget, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have seen a lot of success. Her campaign commercial, “The Courage to Change,” cost less than $10,000 to produce and went viral online, garnering over 3.7 million views through her Twitter account.

Other Democrats should take a cue and double down on digital: It empowers them to reach more people with less money, engage in back-and-forth conversations with voters and test what messaging is resonating in real time. It should also prove critical in turning out a younger voting population, which often sits out midterm elections.

State-level campaigns are more crucial than ever in 2018. The people who are elected to state office this November will be responsible for redrawing voting district maps after the 2020 census, which can greatly skew the odds in favor of one party or the other and directly affects the election process at both the state and federal levels for the next decade. The Republicans know this: After the election of President Barack Obama, they systematically focused on the states, flipping over 900 seats from Democrat to Republican by his second term. To win those back, it is crucial that the Democrats modernize and implement substantial digital campaign strategies this year.

In Silicon Valley, support for Democrats is overwhelming, so how can we be getting beaten so badly at the digital game that we largely created?

I’ve done some hand-wringing over the realization that maybe the tech community hadn’t been active enough politically. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one in Silicon Valley seeking a way to put my skills to good use to fix this catastrophe. In early 2017, three tech entrepreneurs started Tech for Campaigns — I sit on the company’s board — to begin building and executing digital strategies for nonpresidential candidates. They asked friends and colleagues if they’d be interested in volunteering their tech skills to these campaigns and within 72 hours had over 700 sign-ups.

Since then, the organization has grown to over 7,500 skilled volunteers, completed over 75 projects with campaigns and played a major role in the Virginia 2017 midterms — contributing to nine wins, eight of them flipping seats from red to blue. They have built an impressive infrastructure that can rapidly scale to help hundreds of campaigns this coming November and long into the future.

These volunteers are defining and executing digital strategies on campaigns: running email campaigns and paid digital ad programs, creating websites, building software and tools for caucuses and campaigns that save time and serve to amplify great candidates and ideas. It might be the largest force of digital talent that Democrats have assembled anywhere, and it came together in less than one year because so many talented professionals were craving a way to make a difference.

Our tech community is full of smart people who have the passion and the optimism to make a change in our electoral process. It’s time for us to step up and make our own contribution to the thousands of progressive candidates who are running for change. Let’s start winning the digital game that we built before it’s too late.

Kendall Collins is the former chief marketing officer of Salesforce and a board member at Tech for Campaigns.

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