What brands can learn from Trump’s media strategy
Fact: Trump has beaten the Democrats and other Republicans in the most important elections in the world. Twice. This time round by a considerable margin. To add insult to injury: when it comes to money spent on media, the Harris team outspent Team Trump six(!) times.
You may not like it (for the record: I don't). But the result suggests that Trump had a better media strategy.
Which begs the question: what did he do right? Where did team Harris go wrong? And perhaps more interestingly: what can brands learn from Trump’s media strategy? Let’s find out.
Efficient and effective
First, let’s talk media budgets. Here are the hard numbers: Harris spent just under $1.4 billion on media, Trump spent $227 million.
To put these figures in perspective: Harris spent less than Nike's $4.8 billion annual ad budget, but more than Apple's $800 million. Trump’s budget probably doesn’t make it into the top 100 advertisers. So his ad budget wasn’t that 'bigly' or 'huge'.
For any media plan, the one that gives you the most bang for your buck is the most efficient one. The one that gets you the best end result is the most effective plan.
Your North Star Metric judges the best result. In this case, that would be ‘deciding votes.' You need to have more of those than your competitor. So there’s no discussion: Trump had the most effective plan. Again, for one-sixth of the price. Which makes his media plan by far the most efficient one as well.
The winning media mix
As an outsider, you can't judge a plan without knowing the specific KPIs for each part and every media type of the campaign. What we can do, however, is look at the media types used by the two candidates. Here’s where it gets interesting.
The graph above compares the actual dollars spent on the different types of media. It illustrates how painfully big the gap in spending is. To see how the candidates spend their budgets, we show their media investments as a percentage of their total budgets next to each other.
Now here things get interesting. Both candidates spent 60% of their budget on TV and Digital (Meta and Google). But while Kamala clearly bet on TV ads (45% of her entire budget), Trump put most of his money in digital (35% of his budget). Trump spent a bit more on print and out-of-home ads. Kamala preferred events and campaign materials. Both spent a similar percentage (10%) of their budget on ‘other media.'
An obvious conclusion seems to be that digital outperformed TV. However, Kamala spent $210 million on Google and Meta. Trump spent 'only' $80 million. So while she focused on TV ads, even on digital she outspent Trump 2.5 times. Read: we may assume Trump had the better media mix. But it’s definitely not telling the whole story.
So what is the bigger picture?
Before we go on, I need to warn you: here’s where speculation creeps in. What follows are educated guesses. They are based on common sense and over 20 years of experience in running and evaluating campaigns, including some political ones. To give these guesses more substance, you need access to the campaign dashboards. You must know the initial briefings and look at the campaign material.
It’s the Creatives, stupid!
I once co-presented with Hugues Rey for a common client, Chiquita. He was there for the media agency, I worked for the advertising agency. I will never forget how he described the role of the creative material in a campaign. He said: “its main goal is to beat the (media) rate card.” He meant: the creative’s role is to get better results out of the same campaign setup. While this is a very media-centric approach, he’s right. In the end, good creative assets turn a good media campaign into a great one.
Or, as ad-legend David Ogilvy put it: “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
Here’s why. You can run identical campaigns, on the same media, for the same budget, targeted at exactly the same people in a similar period... and still have very different results.
The difference? The creative materials. As in: the commercials, the posters, the visuals, the words.
Some visuals make an impression; others we don’t even notice. Some commercials convince, most don’t. Assuming paid media influenced the result (for $1.4 billion, you'd expect that, right?), you can conclude Trump had better ads. As in: they were more convincing. The creative material alone could explain why Trump's digital campaigns outperformed Harris'.
However, that can’t be the whole story for the entire campaign. It doesn’t explain the difference in factor 6.
One guy and a microphone beats Foxx, CNN & CNBC
Immediately after the elections, Prof Scott Galloway wrote an interesting article. He argued that podcasts had decided these elections. Although that seemed like a huge exaggeration to me at first, consider the figures.
Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast once. Joe Rogan's episodes average 11 million views and 16 million subscribers. At the moment of this writing, people have watched the video of the interview on YouTube 52 million times. Trump also appeared on the the best watched news show on Foxx, to reach 5 million viewers. The most popular news show on CNN reaches about a million viewers. CNBC doesn’t have a show that even comes close to that.
An appearance on Lex Fridman, who focuses on tech, gave Trump 7.3 million more views. As a semi-regular listener of Fridman’s podcast, I listened to his Trump interview. (Personally, I thought it was the best Trump interview I’ve heard so far. Mostly because I couldn’t tell whether Fridman was a Trump supporter or not. That created a refreshing dynamic. It became less predictable.)
Kamala appeared on Call Her Daddy, a podcast that got her almost 1 million views. All the Smoke, another podcast, got her 700 000 views. Those figures look pale compared to Trump's views. But, they are the best she could get on CNN and CNBC. She only appeared on Fox once. Predictably, the host, Bret Baier, was hostile.
Back in university, we learned that Kennedy won the election from Nixon because of one TV debate. Kennedy looked strong and virile, while Nixon, who had refused to put on make-up, was sweating and looked unsure of himself. There is little debate about how Trump used Twitter to bypass the 'mainstream' media to get elected the first time. This time, he has made effective use of podcasts to his advantage.
Also, he leveraged the power of X again. Trump has 95 million followers. That's over 4 times Harris's 21 million.
An old truth (and tons of research) says that Word Of Mouth is ten times more effective than paid advertising. In the age of social media and podcasts, it means this: organic reach is far more influential than paid reach.
Conclusion
By comparing the spent budget to the result (votes), you can conclude that Trump had the best media plan. It was both the most effective and the most efficient. In terms of media-mix, his focus on digital over TV seems to have paid off. It also suggests he had the best performing ads.
However, this only tells a small part of the story.
The bigger take-away is that Harris’ campaign should have invested way more effort in non-paid media. Though Harris outspent Trump six to one, Trump crushed her in organic (non-paid) reach. He reached 4 times more people on X and over 70 million via 2 podcasts. Team Harris reached only 1.7 million people with her 2 best performing podcasts.
And if I were a brand, and I had a story to tell, I would make (appearing on) podcasts a top priority for 2025. That might take some effort. But it might pay off.
Bigly.