WASHINGTON, D.C.-The most exciting aspect of the 2016 political cycle for Matthew Dybwad isn’t candidates’ foreign trade policies or medical histories. It’s programmatic television, which in his view is complicated to execute now but by 2018 will be considerably more friction-free.
Dybwad, the Head of Politics & Public Affairs at global advertising software platform TubeMogul, has been involved with the tech side of political marketing for about 15 years. So he’s seen the progression of tactics adopted by political marketers that are becoming second nature to many brand marketers.
“Whereas it used to be search and banner ads, now we’ve gone into mobile, social, connected TV,” Dybwad said in an interview earlier this month at the Beet.TV summit on politics and advertising. Meanwhile, “The lines between digital and what people think of traditionally as television continue to blur.”
In addition to his role as an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, Dybwad co-founded a K Street startup called CRAFT in a Capitol Hill carriage house. The reason he joined TubeMogul “is because I saw that they had really nailed the convergence piece between what we think of traditionally as TV and digital,” he said.
Looking forward, he foresees the eventual availability of software “that any lay person can realistically pick up, understand and utilize to plan media buying across every channel in a coordinated and strategic way that really helps nail reach, frequency and measurement.”
While programmatic TV, with its mix of local broadcast, local cable, national MVPD’s that “are very hard to wrangle together” remains a logistical challenge for political marketers, that’s what sparks Dybwad’s interest.
“I really think the most exciting part of this is programmatic television,” he said.
The future will see political marketers buying television through online software. “I think that’s going to be a reality probably in the next election cycle. By 2018 I think that’s going to be widespread,” Dybwad said.
You are watching videos from Beet.TV politics and advertising summit presented by OpenX along with Intermarkets. Please find additional videos from the series here.
