Uplift

Digital-first creative, ad-buying and strategy to help you raise money, build a following and persuade the voters you need to win.

[Kate Gallego @KateWGallego]

A big win for @AdelitaForAZ in #AZ07! Congratulations on taking the next step in being the next congresswoman from AZ.

Running for office takes a lot of courage and want to acknowledge @Deja_Foxx & @danielforaz for the hard work put into this primary.

[The Election Center @ElectionCenter_]

Projection:
Adelita Grijalva is the Projected Winner in the #AZ07 special Democratic Primary. She will defeat Deja Foxx.

#Election2025

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

Our creative team has been crushing all branding work this year. Some of the latest ⬇️

[Adam Kinsey @adkinsey]

Big news: We're launching Viewpoint — a new kind of buying shop built for the way voters actually consume media today.

Too many campaigns still treat linear and digital as separate worlds. We’re changing that.

1/3

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

I'm very excited to launch Viewpoint Media today as a unified media buyer separate from Uplift.

Post-cycle we spent a lot of time internally thinking through how we could push our clients (and the broader party) into making smarter decisions. The biggest problem we identified was the incredible inefficiency that resulted from siloed media buying and vibes-based media planning that had absolutely no resemblance to media consumption in the real world.

We decided to fix those problems in two key ways.

First, we built our own media planning software called Calibrate. Calibrate ingests public and private audience and ad performance data from every platform that allows for political advertising. We can then run that information against any unique voter audience and budget to provide scores for each platform that reflect both the likelihood that we'll reach that custom audience as well as the efficiency of each medium in doing so. That means that all our media plans and mixes will be informed by true data science, not guessing or "experience" that may or may not reflect the modern world.

Second, we took our already great digital buying team/infrastructure (led by @sfalmy and executed by Maya Perez, Chris Darcy, Elizabeth Reyes and Josie Savaria-Watson) and fused it with a traditional buying operation allowing us to serve ads across linear, digital and streaming.

We hired Ann Bremer to run the traditional media buying operation last fall and she has proven to be the best at what she does. We then added strength to strength by bringing @Lili_McFarlane over after her stint on the @KamalaHarris campaign. Lili will be working with clients across all mediums and ensuring we incorporate the smartest thinking/lessons learned from an innovative presidential campaign into what we do.

The result is Viewpoint.

By breaking down silos in media planning we're eliminating any incentive to do anything other than what is the absolute smartest thing to do for our clients.

No more bad-faith fights between consultants and vendors. No more conflicting objectives, accidental bidding against ourselves or unintentional overlapping resulting in tragic inefficiencies. This is a unified approach to maximize reach, incremental frequency, efficiency and quality across any screen to give our clients the absolute best chance to reach their targets and move the voter they need to move.

Higher efficiency = more wins. It's that simple.

Viewpoint will be free to contract with any other outside agency -- though it will also work as the ad buyer for all @UpliftTweets clients.

Jamie Patton and I will be moving our media buying work over to Viewpoint, and we've chosen @swansoncora1 to lead Viewpoint. Cora is one of the hardest-working, most-organized and relentlessly cool under pressure people you'll ever meet in this business. She's the perfect person to run this company that will be built around optimizing efficiencies at every step.

https://t.co/RR4aIccsd5

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

Welcome Viewpoint Media! We’re excited to announce that Uplift’s media buying arm is spinning off to form Viewpoint – a unified digital and traditional media buying operation. This move allows our best-in-class buying operation to focus on what they do best to contract with any outside agency.

Viewpoint Media is about creating and executing ad strategy for the modern media landscape. Our proprietary statistics-driven approach to media planning is inclusive of all mediums and ensures you’ll reach your targets where they actually are. Head over to https://t.co/xKh4DD2i1X to learn more about how Viewpoint is changing the game to help you win on Election Day.

https://t.co/S5MKaCUnUi

[Mo Goldman For Congress @MoGoldman]

I’m Mo Goldman, and I’m running for Congress in #AZ06.

Republicans are tearing this country apart — and too many Democrats are too afraid to stop them. I’ve spent 20+ years fighting for families as an immigration attorney. Now, I’m taking that fight to Washington.

[Michael Bennet @MichaelBennet]

Colorado, I’m running for Governor.

From expanding the Child Tax Credit to securing $7B for Colorado’s infrastructure, we’ve made real progress together. Now, it’s time to keep building a future in Colorado that works for all of us.

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

This is a really big hire for @Rise_Suite and going to dramatically increase the pace of evolution from our software business.

@EllenLempres and Alex Mindock have done an incredible job building our individual data products and our data platform Ascend into top-notch software product for the political space. It provides all of its users broader and deeper insights into everything impacting their race and is unique in the volume and breadth of information it provides. But that is decidedly judging it against other products in the political space.

Steven's job (and one at which I can already tell he will thrive) is turning Ascend and all of it's components into a world-class software product for any space.

That means bringing together all of the of the 20+ data sources we currently aggregate with data science and predictive analytics to give our clients a true edge in one easy to navigate and understand UI.

Real intelligence. Actionable insights. True competitive edge.

That's where Rise is going and Steven is going to play a big part in getting us there.

[Rise Digital @Rise_Suite]

We're so excited to welcome Steven Gordon as our Head of Engineering!

Steven comes to us after a stint on the @KamalaHarris race and 9 years as a senior software engineer at @SlackHQ .

[Rise Digital @Rise_Suite]

Ascend just crossed 700 users. We're so glad to see such widespread adoption in the progressive political world and have a lot of cool things coming to make Ascend even better.

https://t.co/fF37hrhmu9

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

We won! Thank you to @C_and_E for the award we happen to judge ourselves by.

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

Everyone in Austin at the @C_and_E Reed Awards just got to learn how smart our @EllenLempres is in person. Ellen leads our Software company @Rise_Suite along with all our data science efforts -- but today she was speaking on trust, polling and the 2024 electorate.

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Our content team is experimenting with a very different approach to digital fundraising this cycle that we believe is going to derisk these programs and ensure much better economics for all of our clients (while also only producing content everyone is comfortable standing behind).

If you're interested in being part of the initial trial group just message me and we'll talk more.

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Very excited to welcome @Lili_McFarlane to Uplift.

She's joining at a fun pivot point for us that we'll be announcing in full soon. We've haven't exactly been hiding what we're up to though.

With Lili and our hire of Ann Bremer last year (as Head of Linear Buying) we're building a best in class integrated ad buying operation. We're doing this not to compete with the old model of political media buying but to help foster a new one.

We're believers in breaking down silos between media, inventing new approaches to planning/reporting and trying to give our clients the best way to win in this new disbursed and complicated media landscape. We're making substantial investments in technology and people to do this and Lili is an extremely obvious fit with this strategy.

Lili is very smart, capable, organized and driven. But she also has the type of mindset and worldview that we value so highly. She's going to do great here and I'm excited to add her smarts and experience to what we're up to.

[Uplift @UpliftTweets]

We're so excited to welcome @Lili_McFarlane to Uplift! Lili comes to us from the the @KamalaHarris campaign where she was Deputy Director of Paid Digital.

She'll be adding her smarts and experience to our ad buying shop and working in our NYC office. Welcome Lili!

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

Super proud of our two companies for being @C_and_E Reed Award finalists

@UpliftTweets for:
- Best Employer
- Best Use of Online Targeting for a Ballot Prop
- Best Online Video (2 mins or under)
- Best Online Video That Never Saw the Light of Day

@Rise_Suite for:
- Innovation in Online Ad Measurement
- Best Data Analytics Solution

[Kevin Kirchmeier @Kev_Kirchmeier]

Campaigning for a number of causes and candidates over the last several campaign cycles has been extremely rewarding. Ready for the next step, I'm launching Vista Strategies - a consulting firm with a focus on fundraising and political strategy. More soon!

[Andy Barr @AndyBarr34]

I keep hearing people repeat this line that the Trump campaign was more focused on streaming over linear television and that's why they won.

And like...as someone in the digital buying business that's a convenient explanation...but it's not true.

On streaming television Harris outspent Trump $119M to $57M and the blue team outspent the red team $293M to $189M. (Team = all campaign, coordinated and IE spending on a race).

On linear television Harris outspent Trump $294M to $234M and the blue team outspent the red team $686M to $606M.

So to recap: Harris outspent Trump by 109% on streaming and 25% on linear. The blue team outspent the read team by 55% on streaming and 13% on linear.

(For both streaming and linear I'm defining the campaign window as 8/1 - 11/5 -- and streaming is modeled off ACR data so it's directionally correct but not exact. If you have issues with that take it up with Congress and make them require digital ads data follow the same rules as linear.)

In both cases the proportional Democratic advantage on streaming was roughly 4x what it was on linear and yet this idea that Trump was more invested in targeted streaming vs shotgun spray linear is pretty pervasive in the why Harris lost discourse.

Now I have very real questions/concerns about the Harris strategy.

First, I've talked to a number of other buyers who described totally unrealistic over-targeting from the Harris campaign (basically the media plan not at all matching what can realistically done with the ad tech) that likely resulted in lower reach than they should have gotten from the same budget with the same target group just because they didn't fully understand what they were doing.

Second, I've heard of (and sometimes observed in the data) pretty obvious errors from their contracted buyers that look like weren't ever corrected (though I will say there is always some degree of error when you're trying to spend a lot very quickly in a complicated way).

Third, the supposed "efficiencies" advocated by FF PAC and others around national buying and hilariously extensive ad testing seem to have always been more compelling academic arguments than they ever were real-world advantages.

BUT this idea that Trump won just because his team was more focused on household-level targeted streaming vs DMA-level targeted linear is kinda blatant bullshit. The idea in general seems to stem from a way too early election post mortem from the NYT that leaned on the Trump campaign's version of what happened rather than actual information.

We need to have real conversations about the correct media mix and all be a lot more educated/open-minded/realistic/etc on how digital and linear can mix together. But let's base those conversations around real information rather than vibes and self-interested spin.

Screenshots on linear and streaming buy data is below (for the campaigns and blue/red teams) all from https://t.co/M2qeNAr9I8

[Rise Digital @Rise_Suite]

We've made some changes to our news section of Ascend so it's easier to sort, analyze, and understand: like that there was a 40% increase in news stories about Trump this week and a 33% decrease in news stories that mention both Trump and Biden. Check it out: https://t.co/lGXrI4OfcF