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Donald Trump is changing this year’s polit-ical campaign game for the entire field, butsuper PACs, yet again, are influencing itin ways that could affect races for yearsto come. Ever since the Citizens United

Supreme Court ruling opened doors for donorsto give unlimited amounts of money to influenceelections and political campaigns, super PACsand the consultancies serving them have chore-ographed a delicate dance around regulationsthat prevent them from coordinating on cam-paign strategy and messaging.

Federal Election Commission rules ban ven-dors from working with party committees orcampaigns and their related political actioncommittees when developing communicationsif information about campaign plans, projects,activities or candidate needs are shared. That’swhere silos, firewalls and “Chinese walls” comein. The terms are used interchangeably by con-sulting firms that work with political campaignsand organizations when asked about the possi-bility of illegal coordination between campaignsand outside groups.

And it’s no surprise the question has comeup this election season. While many technolo-gy, data and media vendors (from media sellerslike Google to software firms such asNationBuilder) and data sellers (includingAristotle and L2) have always worked with amultitude of rival campaigns and groups, thenumber of companies providing strategy con-sulting to campaigns and the PACs supportingthem appear to be on the rise.

Cambridge Analytica, a British firm aggres-sively seeking both political and corporateclients here in the U.S., works for both the TedCruz campaign and a cohort of PACs supportingthe Texas senator using variations on the name“Keep the Promise.” Known for a unique formof voter segmentation that targets ad messagesbased on personality traits, CambridgeAnalytica is funded by hedge fund managerRobert Mercer, who last year donated $11 millionto Keep the Promise, according to the Center forResponsive Politics. The company also workedwith Ben Carson’s presidential campaign.

Jeb Bush’s now-defunct campaign and superPAC Right to Rise were also both working withtwo of the same analytics firms, Deep RootAnalytics and Digital Core Campaign (DCC).DCC, a voter data and technology firm found-ed in 2015 by former Facebook senior engineer

and Republican National Committee technol-ogy chief Andrew Barkett, stopped workingwith the Bush campaign sometime afterSeptember 2015, but continued working withRight to Rise until the end. Deep Root, whichhelps clients plan media strategy and buys,counted the Bush campaign and Right to Riseas clients until the former Florida governorcalled it quits in February.

Campaign Solutions, Deep Root Analyticsand Cambridge Analytica stress that they dedi-cate separate staff and implement technologicalbarriers to prevent information and data shar-ing between clients that are prohibited fromcoordination.

“We have taken this responsibility very seri-ously as we are ethically bound to keep informa-tion and tactics private,” said Becki Donatelli,president of Campaign Solutions, which ranJohn McCain’s digital campaign in 2008. “Thecampaigns we work with trust that their teamis working at the highest level possible to deliv-

er excellent political advice and strategy, andeach one of them has received my personalassurance that separation within our companyis my highest priority.”

Deep Root and Cambridge Analytica declinedto comment for this story, but CambridgeAnalytica CEO Alexander Nix told Ad Age previ-ously that the company separates staff workingwith each account physically and electronicallycordons off data and systems to comply with FECrules prohibiting coordination.

“It’s all part of why we have a firewall inbetween our data sources,” said Paul Westcott,director of marketing and communications fornonpartisan 40-year-old data firm L2, which hassold data to the Donald Trump and BernieSanders campaigns this election. “It’s totallywithin bounds.”

And it’s a necessity created by supply anddemand.

Super PACs have grown smarter and moreintegral to the political campaign process since2012, when most of them were one-trick poniesdedicated to buying TV ads. Today there aremore of them, especially on the Republicanside, and their mission is more complex as theyconduct data-driven voter targeting and door-to-door canvassing.

“This cycle, there were more campaignsBY KATE KAYE

High demand for data,digital make firewalls the

order of the day

DON’T CALL IT

COORDINATION

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OT H E R T H A N T H E F A C T that Dracula is tremendously well-groomed for a guy who can’t see himself in a mirror, the weirdestparadox of vampirism holds that a bloodsucker can only enter yourhome if he’s invited.Remind you of anyone? ¶ In courting the fringeover the past 15 years, the Republican Party effectively sent DonaldJ. Trump a formal invitation.Trump has now scrawled a few mono-

syllabic insults (“Sad!” “Dumb!”) on the creamy, heavy-stock RSVP cardand let himself in, immediately draining the lifeblood of the establishment.

In keeping with the somewhat tortured metaphor—the essential Trumpiness of Donald Trumpall but demands a certain rhetorical self-indulgence—the GOP now faces the task of plunging a stakethrough the heart of its presumptive nominee. Mitt Romney gave it a whack last Thursday, deliv-ering a speech in which he characterized the front-runner as a “phony” and a “fraud” whose ulti-mate legacy as president would be wholesale ruination. But the media, too, now finds itself anx-iously fiddling with the garlic.

CBS Corp. President-CEO Les Moonves last week told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media& Telecom Conference that the high drama and low high jinks of the GOP race has been a boonto the TV business. “You know, it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.That’s all I have to say,” Moonves said. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. It’s amazing.”

While Moonves chuckled, his remarks also conveyed ambivalence. That may have been informedby his political leanings (Moonves is an inveterate Democrat), but there was also a suggestion thatthe candidates aren’t exactly attending to the “better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln once said.“I mean, they’re not even talking about issues,” Moonves said. “They’re throwing bombs at eachother, and I think the advertising reflects that.”

Advertising so far is actually of secondary importance to the Trump campaign, which hasbeen gifted with a staggering load of free media. According to TV news trainspotter Andrew Tyndall,the Donald has accounted for nearly one-third (327 minutes) of all the election 2016 coverage onthe Big Three networks’ evening news, while Hillary Clinton is a distant second (121 minutes), andMarco Rubio (22 minutes) and Ted Cruz (21 minutes) are almost afterthoughts. Ad spend levelsare predictably inverted: Team Trump has invested a negligible $12 million since April 2015, whileClinton’s campaign and supporting groups have ponied up $41 million. Jeb Bush and his allies some-how thought it prudent to spend $80 million on advertising, which works out to $20 million foreach of the four delegates he picked up. (Sad!)

If the Trump campaign isn’t buying much advertising yet, it’s still helping networks sell adsto everyone else. The average delivery for the first 10 GOP debates was 15.8 million viewers, a 10thof a point better than what TV’s top comedy, “The Big Bang Theory,” draws each week. That’snearly double the turnout for the half-dozen Democratic debates; with an average draw of 8.53million viewers, the Clinton-Sanders jousts have reached the combined audience of HBO’s “Gameof Thrones,” “Vinyl” and “Veep.”

The promise of a series of autumn Trump-Clinton debates has network bosses tenting their fin-gertips à la Mr. Burns. Despite the fragmented TV audience, such a showdown conceivably could out-draw the record 80.6 million Americans who tuned in for the Reagan-Carter salvo in October 1980.

For all that, the media finds itself in much the same pickle that traditional Republicans are nowin. The bellicose GOP front-runner may be good for business, but at what cost? When reportersare ejected from Trump rallies for posing questions, when photographers are throttled andslammed to the floor by the Secret Service, when the front-runner roundly dismisses membersof the press as “scum” and “bimbos” to the cheers of thousands, the shadow of the vampire is castover the First Amendment. The stakes, in both senses of the word, are high. Donald Trump sucks.

MARCH 7, 2016 • 19ADVERTISING AGE

COMMENTARY

than there are qualified digital firms toexclusively help them, so those of us thatwere large enough firewalled and siloedoff teams that were dedicated to one par-ticular campaign or another,” said Ms.Donatelli.

When Dave Mason was an FEC com-missioner from 1998 to 2008, he heard alot of questions about what constitutescoordination. Now senior VP for compli-ance services at Aristotle, which offersdata and technology services to clients onboth sides of the aisle, he suggested, “Thesuper PACs may be looking at this andbelieve that they’ll still get some kind ofbenefit by, in essence, fishing in the samepond; there are synergies because they’redoing things in a similar way, even ifthey’re not sharing information.”

The GOP came under fire in 2014 bythe American Democracy Legal Fund, anorganization with ties to the DemocraticParty, which alleged in a complaint filedwith the FEC that the RNC, along with itstop data partners, large right-wing superPACs and a slew of GOP midterm candi-date campaigns, was swapping voter infor-mation illegally. The FEC confirmed itreceived the complaint, though it appearsthat the case has not been closed.

Beyond the coordination issue is theappearance of old-fashioned conflict.How many competitors can one firmwork for?

The number of 2016 GOP candidates,along with a bevy of super PACs, createdhigh demand for consultancies that in thepast may not have risked working with acandidate and his or her PAC.

Digital firms Campaign Solutions andTargeted Victory, which in the past plant-ed stakes with individual presidentialcampaigns, have taken on multiple GOPpresidential candidates as clients thistime around. FEC reports show that thiselection, Campaign Solutions hasworked with the Bush, Cruz, MarcoRubio, Lindsey Graham and Scott Walkercampaigns. Targeted Victory, whichheaded Mitt Romney’s digital efforts in2012, has served the Bush, Cruz, Rubio,Trump and John Kasich campaigns. Inmany of those cases, it appears that thefirms have not provided strategic serv-ices to all their presidential clients;rather, they provided technology foronline fundraising in many cases.

The trend is happening to a lesserdegree on the Democratic side, wherejust three primary candidates havealready been whittled to two, and one ofthem, Bernie Sanders, does not have asuper PAC.

Blue State Digital did a small amountof work with both Martin O’Malley’sand Hillary Clinton’s campaigns in 2015,though Ms. Clinton’s campaign appearsto have used the firm for technologyservices rather than strategy consulting.

Republicans and the media invited Trump in.Now what? BY ANTHONY CRUPI

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