Insider learned that Chris Cowlbeck, IBO USA CVO was attending the MediaPost Political conference and had a few questions as the season unfolds.  There’s also an IBO webinar Thursday that will touch on this at 1pm CST.  If you’re an independent and like to attend, send an email to Becky Smith becky@IBOUSA.org for a link.

Chris, this is a heavy political year with significant advertising potential locally, regionally, and nationally. How are you seeing things come together from the Speedway this year?

We’ve come to recognize from the successful Biden Ice Cream campaign a couple of years ago that from the national perspective, politics is very regionally localized.  We have a good shot at further success with our member sales teams in place, if we at IBO HQ do the heavy lifting both for the campaigns and for the IBO members.  Many of our 300-member companies have great relationships with their state and local teams and can provide billboards to them, and most are happy enough with that.  However, most of the regional campaigns are challenged with creative demands and the multitude of sizes makes delivery at scale with sharp intense bursts before elections, generally difficult for us as a class.  Digital online, mobile and TV therefore take a large portion of these buys, but our approach to programmatic, mobile devices, and LED trucks can streamline this with one point of contact and coordinated creative targeting.  

What are some of the upsides of participating in political as a part of the larger Speedway efforts?

It’s been harder in the past to meet some of the campaign needs of creative, targeting, and timing, but now our demand side seats and access to creative tech tools enable us to do a lot of this much easier than before.  Now rather than just let the budget move away, we can take advantage of the great relationships that our members have with their campaign locals, and deliver broad, effective, and streamlined deployment on scale throughout their region, not just to their own inventory.  Our co-op model also enables us to share the benefits of our efforts with the local teams that assist as handlers and communicators.  The demand side has much more profitability inherent, and our tactic is to deliver campaign value, believability, and accountability, along with speed and effectiveness, while being able to have the local media owner benefit….win, win, win.  That’s what politics is all about!

Knowing the Speedway is typically politically agnostic, how do you handle the bias that is always prevalent in political campaigns?  

That’s complex, yet simple.  When our members generate local contacts, this self-regulates some of these concerns.  However, when the reach is further than their footprint or originated by another with a different political perspective than their targeted inventory, we completely allow the media owner their right of freedom of speech and decision not to run any creative or campaign that may run into approval issues with publicly traded companies in some instances.  This is an advantage for us as a footprint and is part of the educational process when talking with the campaigns.

How do you see IBO members getting more involved in the boots-on-the-ground efforts to land regional political ad spends?   

Most campaigns have been spending a bulk of their money elsewhere and we’ve built programs in several of the areas that help OOH be successful on a regional level with our footprint and traffic metrics.  The Speedway can provide programmatic demand side spurts on ANY digital screens along with mobile device targeting as well as event-focused LED trucks, all while coordinating the various sizes, creative demands, and analytics reporting. All members need to participate in our IBO political effort is to call in and make the introduction to the budget makers for the campaign, and we will handle the rest – they don’t even need to be actively involved with our Speedway either, although it helps with digital guaranteed deliveries.  Our team does all the coordinative, creative, contracting, and invoicing work and the media owner will manage the contact relationship.  We will also be collecting up front. 

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