00:00He went to Jubilee. He did the CNN town hall. He would go to Fox News. He'd go to MS
00:07Now. He'd go
00:08to Midas Touch. There's a lot of false choices sometimes in this industry. And I think people
00:13will say you have to choose between earned media or paid media. But when we set out to win this
00:21race, we were setting out to break the longest losing streak in American politics. Speaking of
00:26Senator-elect Tallarico, he has obviously amassed a remarkable online following. However,
00:34he also went everywhere to make the case for his candidacy. I remember seeing him on Joe Rogan.
00:42He went to Jubilee. He did the CNN town hall. He would go to Fox News. He'd go to MS
00:50Now. He'd go
00:51to Midas Touch. What role did earned media play in your campaign? And how vital do you see it being
00:59to helping Democrats be able to go and compete in some of these other places like Florida?
01:05Yeah. I mean, it's crucial. I think there's a lot of false choices sometimes in this industry. And
01:10I think people will say you have to choose between earned media or paid media. But when we set out
01:18to
01:18win this race, we were setting out to break the longest losing streak in American politics.
01:23And so we knew we had to do everything. We couldn't take anything for granted. We couldn't write anyone
01:30off. We had to go everywhere. We had to talk to everyone. When we launched the campaign,
01:36most Texans didn't know who James was. And we had to introduce him to 31 million people over the course
01:42of the last 14 months. And so we did a really aggressive earned media strategy on social media,
01:49but also through the press and simply showing up in people's communities. We actually saw in our
01:56internal polling before we started paid media, the earned media we did in the first two or three
02:02months of the campaign, move the race by double digits. And that's something you don't typically see.
02:08But what we were able to do was really break through in a way that, you know, like Guy was
02:15talking about, made it so that people knew James as a person and knew him deeply. Because in today's
02:21world, we're used to knowing people at a different level. People are on social media all the time. They
02:26know things about celebrities and they want to know their elected officials. And so paid media, you know,
02:32we spent probably $100 million on paid media in this election. But if we didn't have that base of
02:39earned media support, where people knew James as real values and felt like they knew him as a person
02:45and could discredit the lies about him on TV and on the texts and mailers that were being sent all
02:52around the state by the richest man in the world, we would have never been able to make it through
02:58that.
02:58So I think, you know, it was just really crucial to do both, to be able to get the reach
03:03we needed
03:03through paid and to give that depth through the earned media to make sure that we got him there.
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