It’s one thing to put an ad in front of a voter watching a college football game. It’s another thing entirely to pull them out of the game and actually persuade them to vote for the candidate you’re backing.
Priorities USA and its President and Executive Director, Danielle Butterfield, are investing $30 million ahead of 2028 figuring out how to do the latter.
This week, I connected with Danielle about what Priorities research is teaching them, what political advertisers can learn from corporate brands, and how to actually persuade the voters watching the football game or playing the online game you’ve spent an ungodly sum of money interrupting.
THIS IS ON BACKGROUND
5 short questions. 5 quick responses featuring the wisdom of Former Clinton Campaign Deputy Director of Digital Advertising and Priorities USA President and Executive Director Danielle Butterfield.
Danielle, you’ve done a lot of research on reaching voters when they aren’t thinking about politics at all. What’s the biggest lesson for Democratic communicators trying to break through while someone is watching fitness or true crime videos?
People aren’t explicitly thinking about politics, but they’re living it all the time. Our job is to draw that connection. Most ad campaigns try to interrupt someone’s day and force a pivot to a topic they don’t want to think about, like running ads about inflation during a live sports broadcast. We need to understand first where people are actually spending their time, then build strategies that feel native to that space.
In Ohio earlier this summer, we ran a program that reached persuadable young men by targeting the content these voters were already watching, instead of ZIP codes or the voter file. The ads themselves blended in with gaming, finance, and fitness content.
We did this by designing ads that had the same tone, styles and visual cues of the videos that they are running before. We believe that today, better ads are ones that blend in rather than stand out. Once you know what someone is already paying attention to, it's easier to hold that attention than to yank them out of it and change the subject. That's what our research is focused on right now.
Watch the ad here:
Ads like this don’t look what we’re used to. How much of Democrats’ problem online is the message, and how much is simply that our content doesn’t look like anything people actually want to watch?
You can’t separate the message from its delivery. Our research found 54% of voters aren’t seeking out news, so we’re pitching them on topics they are actively trying to avoid.
Corporate advertisers don’t operate that way. They use behavioral data to build campaigns. My feed right now is full of tennis skirts and different brands of tennis shoes – because my online behavior tells them I’m watching the US Open. None of those ads feel interruptive; they feel native to my life.
Democratic advertisers still treat digital like it’s broadcast TV, putting the same :30s ad everywhere, forcing a topic in front of voters that they want nothing to do with. As Priorities gears up for 2028, we’re building something different: showing up in moments of real relevance. A health scare, a car purchase, retirement planning. That’s economic anxiety showing up in their life and an opportunity to connect it to politics.
If you were sitting down tomorrow with the comms director of a Democratic campaign, what’s one thing you’d tell them to stop doing and one thing you’d tell them to start doing?
Stop confusing “reach” with attention. We can’t claim we reached voters if they’re skipping past our ads or turning to a second screen during a commercial break.
Start looking at the signals that actually tell us someone is paying attention. We spend so much time crafting messages in a vacuum, routing every little thing through approval chains, when the internet is sitting right there. We can just put things out and learn in real time how they’re landing. The internet isn’t just a distribution channel; it’s a place to listen.
Priorities is building tech to make that easier. Our media intelligence tools turn billions of rows of online behavioral data into decisions we can act on. They are already helping us drive smarter decision-making across paid, owned, and organic media, and we’re putting these tools into the hands of more practitioners every day.
What’s one thing you want to shout from the rooftops?
YouTube is not TV. Just because it reaches everyone doesn’t mean you can run one-size-fits-all creative against it. Some people scroll it like a social feed, some stream podcasts, some watch live sports. If we’re not planning and buying with that lens, we’re wasting money.
Our research keeps finding that content targeting on YouTube can lead to more persuasive results! Take the Ohio program I mentioned. We reached young men watching gaming, finance, and fitness content and found real room to increase persuasion by matching the ad with what the voter was already watching. When you stick to targeting by geography or voter file score (the way you’d target a TV or mail campaign), you’re leaving votes on the table.
Who else should we make time to talk to?
I’m most hopeful when I’m talking to groups that have picked an audience to go deep on. Instead of trying to be all things to all voters, Equis and Somos Votantes have zeroed in on Latino voters; Onyx Impact on Black voters; Galvanize on moderate women. Rural Path is focused on rural voters who often get less attention. And real investment in young voters from Youth Turnout Project and Alliance for Youth Action. I’m also excited to see what Kyle Tharp cooks up in his new role at Crooked. It sounds like he will be working to break through in non-political spaces, which is an all-hands effort.
All this to say: the more outside groups can carve out expertise with specific audiences, the less it will feel like we’re all fighting each other, and more like we’re building real relationships with the voters we’re communicating with. More of that, please!
Thanks for your time, Danielle!