No. You are not hallucinating. It is not Sunday evening and yet Doomscroll is in your inbox!

Well, sort of.

Welcome to Doomscrolling With - a new series in which I corner smart people in the GOP campaign ecosystem and force them to answer my questions about data, digital, fundraising, advertising, and whatever else I happen to be hyper-fixated on at the moment - like inboxing (jk jk jk).

Doomscrolling With will start as surprise bonus editions that will make appearances from time to time. No set cadence or schedule. It’ll show up basically like a donor with max-out-kind-of money: not often enough, but always welcome.

What should you expect? Think less formal Q&A and more casual back and forth with cool people who really know their stuff. And this week, I’m pleased as punch to announce we’re talking with someone who really, really knows his stuff: Michael freaking Beach.

Now let’s get to some scrolling.

First of all, who are you and what do you do?

My name is Michael Beach. I’m the co-founder and CEO of 1903 Group, a holding company that buys and builds data and software businesses focused on political and public affairs. Before that, I founded Cross Screen Media, which builds the software agencies use to plan, buy, and measure TV advertising across streaming and linear. Earlier in my career, I co-founded Targeted Victory and worked at the RNC.

I’ve spent two decades at the collision point of media, data, and money, trying to figure out where attention is going next, and helping campaigns get there before their opponents do. I also write State of the Screens, a weekly newsletter on the battle for attention across TV and streaming, and wrote a book on the same subject called Screen Wars.

With 1903 Group, you seem to be bringing a lot of different technologies under one roof to help campaigns reach the right voters. Does that reflect where the industry is headed? Is the future less about having the best individual tech stack and more about making sure every piece of the voter contact ecosystem is connected and sharing data?

Our goal at 1903 Group is simple: make life easier for our customers. The area of focus is voter contact, and we take a wide view of it: everything from paid media (TV advertising, etc.) all the way to field and digital (relational organizing, texting, etc.).

We built an incredible data and software stack with Cross Screen Media, and we see a massive opportunity to connect it to the other parts of the voter contact puzzle. That’s why the portfolio looks the way it does: audience data, a voter CRM, offline and online activation, all designed to talk to each other.

To answer your question directly: yes, that’s where the industry is headed. Best-in-class point solutions still matter, but the edge has shifted. Ten years ago you won by having the best individual tool. Now every campaign has access to good tools. The campaigns that win are the ones where the data actually moves between them.

Ok so on that note, let’s talk org chart. For the most part, campaigns still have a digital team, a field team, mail consultant, TV buyer, and data vendor. Every one of those groups has its own priorities and goals - is that model becoming outdated? Five years from now, do campaigns still have separate digital and field directors - or are we moving toward one person overseeing voter contact across every channel?

Yes and no. Digital has certainly moved into a central role in every part of the campaign (raising money, turning out voters, etc.), but the silos are growing faster than the overall progress.

Some political groups try to solve this with central data and technology teams. That can work, but only if it’s permanent infrastructure. If it scales up and down with the election cycle, it will fail. You can’t rebuild the plumbing every two years and expect it to work by crunch time.

That’s why I think many of these problems ultimately get solved by the marketplace. A company like ours can build cross-functional infrastructure and maintain it every year, not just in even years, because we have a commercial reason to keep the pipes connected. Campaigns are temporary. The infrastructure underneath them shouldn’t be. So five years from now, campaigns may still have separate digital and field directors, but the winning ones will have those teams working off the same data.

Field teams collect an incredible amount of information that digital teams often never see or use - and the reverse is true as well. What opportunities are campaigns missing because those two worlds are still operating separately?

There’s a significant amount of overlap between the voters we’re trying to raise money from, turn out, and convert into activists, but we silo those activities off to different teams. The same person can be a $25 donor, a turnout target, and a potential volunteer, and on most campaigns that means three teams, three budgets, and three contact plans that never talk to each other.

Part of this is an org chart problem, but the lack of a unified CRM across field and digital is huge. If a field program learns something at the door, that information should change what every other channel does next. Today, on most campaigns, it simply doesn’t.

Let’s connect this back to advertising. If digital teams start getting better voter data from their field programs, how should that fundamentally change the way they’re buying ads? Or put another way: If someone answers a door knock at 2 PM on a Saturday and says they’re undecided… how quickly should that change the ads they’re seeing online?

The honest answer to your door-knock question: it should change their ads within a day, and the technology to do that exists right now. The bottleneck isn’t the ad platforms. It’s that the door-knock data never makes it out of the field program.

One thing I’ve been obsessed with at every stop (the RNC, Targeted Victory, Cross Screen Media) is the cost per incremental vote. Take a campaign’s entire voter contact budget and divide it by the incremental votes it actually creates, and it can exceed thousands of dollars per vote. Once you understand that, a whole new range of tactics starts to make sense.

For example: in 2024, our data showed that roughly 12% of persuadable voters in the presidential battleground states never saw a TV ad, linear or streaming. If a campaign is spending $500M on persuasion, it makes sense to break $60M out and reach that group any way possible. In the past, if you asked for $60M to run alternative tactics (texting, paid doors, social ads) against a small subset of voters, you’d have been laughed out of the room. Once a campaign sees the data clearly, decisions that once seemed crazy become obvious.

If better voter data ultimately leads to smarter media buying, what does that mean for the future of programmatic? Where do you see it evolving over the next few election cycles?

The impact of programmatic grows every day, and streaming in particular offers a fundamentally different setup. Linear TV spent a decade promising addressable advertising and never delivered it at scale. Streaming is addressable by default: household-level targeting, impression-level measurement, and programmatic pipes are built into the medium. For campaigns, that means the voter file can finally meet the TV screen directly.

Over the next few cycles, I’d watch two things. First, more premium TV inventory, including live sports, becomes available programmatically, which erases what’s left of the line between a “TV buy” and a “digital buy.”

Second, the definition of TV keeps expanding. Podcasts are a great example: the majority of podcast consumption now includes video, and podcast time on TV screens is growing enormously. Once a podcast is watched on a television, it’s streaming TV inventory. It gets targeted, measured, and bought like TV. Programmatic is how all of that new inventory gets connected to voter data.

What’s one assumption campaigns still make about paid media that you think won’t be true five years from now? Or maybe…Tell me what you think the biggest mistake is that campaigns are still making when it comes to advertising?

We’re fortunate that the overwhelming majority of our customers are extremely smart and forward-looking. Back in 2017, they saw the advantage of bringing all forms of TV advertising together under one plan. The next challenge is integrating the largest part of the voter contact budget (TV advertising) with everything else, so campaigns can make decisions from a central data source.

The biggest mistake bad media shops still make is being siloed, whether their view of the world is dominated by linear or by digital. That problem was solved years ago. The smart shops have already moved on to the next frontier.

Thanks for doomscrolling with us, Michael!