What to Think, Ep. 29: Republicans’ ad tech is paying off

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does anyway. Michael Beach, a cofounder of Targeted Victory, a company that supplies technology to Republican political campaigns, likes to talk about waste — of the advertising variety, that is.

For starters, media markets and Congressional districts hardly match up, Beach told VentureBeat’s Jordan Novet and Kia Kokalitcheva on the What to Think podcast this week. That makes it hard for candidates to advertise to the people they need to reach in order to win races. That’s when hitting up voters and potential volunteers on desktop and mobile devices can become helpful. Targeted Victory can help candidates do that. But if you’re not careful, you could easily pour campaign money down the drain.

“If you look at the most widely targeted race in the country, in Kentucky — in a sense, in a media market — 82 cents on every dollar went into Ohio,” Beach said. “Unless you go and buy a house with, you know, 30 days before the election and move your family to Kentucky, you can’t vote in that election.”

That’s astounding, and Targeted Victory wants to prevent that from happening as much as it possibly can. Judging by the outcome of the midterm elections, in which Republicans won 15 new House seats, eight Senate seats, and 25 gubernatorial races — the approach seems to have paid off.

Indeed, among Targeted Victory’s successful clients for this year’s midterms were Paul Ryan for Congress, Susana Martinez for Governor, Greg Abbott for Governor, Joni Ernst for Senate, Shelley Capito for Senate, and Pat Roberts for Senate.

In addition to hashing out the technology that’s assisted Republican candidates, we talk about:

• how music streaming services have been experimenting with ways to improve recommendations with deep learning
• President Obama’s stated support for Net neutrality
• Microsoft’s decision to open-source its longstanding .NET framework

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Enjoy the show!