Did you know that if you, like me, donated $100 to Ossoff you also probably contributed $10 to pay incompetent consultants, including Canal Partners, MVAR Media, Mothership and Anzalone Liszt Grove Research, to develop the losing “I am against government waste” tv ads and platform? While you might have heard about Mothership and how much it got paid for Ossoff’s perplexing yet successful fundraising email and digital program, you probably haven’t heard about Canal Partners and MVAR Media who got $7.50 of your $100 for making and placing the campaigns unsuccessful TV ads. These are the – now richer - consultants who spent $50 of your $100 developing, testing and placing Ossoff’s banal TV ads on local TV (the $7.50 is how much they got paid for making and placing the ads).
The bios of these folks from Canal Partners, MVAR Media, Anzalone Liszt Grove and Mothership make it clear – these are the same cadre of losing consultants who also advised Clinton and others to try and win more GOP suburban votes with milquetoast messaging – based an outdated focus group model - rather than get our own base. They are also the ones pushing the idea that a candidate’s story can still overcome partisanship and policy in the new political environment (IMO , the data is clear, it can’t).
Go look for yourself at the expenditure numbers – Pro Publica has helpfully posted the FEC filing for the Ossoff campaign’s expenditures here for the period from April 2 to May 31 pre the runoff election. Yes this doesn’t include what they spent in June or before but I’d guess this gives a pretty good picture of what was spent. Note, I’m assuming that Canal Partners got paid a fee equivalent to 10% of the buy, closer to what media firm used to get (media firms got about 3 to 5% in the Presidential) because of the nature of runoff Congressional campaigns. The consultants in this case charge more because the candidate, managers etc are all relatively inexperienced in handling this kind of money (and hence often negotiate worse deals). I’d be happy to be corrected if someone from Canal Partners, MVAR or the campaign would disclose the actual percentage paid (or if another Kossack can do better research) but, until they do, I think this is a reasonable estimate to go on. Note, media consultants like MVAR also often get a cut from people like Canal Partners so it’s hard to separate them out (which is why I lumped them together). MVAR and Canal together made – I’m estimating from what I saw in these filings – millions on the TV buy for Ossoff.
I don’t know about you but I’d like Markos, David Nir and Daily Kos elections to lay down some ground rules going forward – along with Act Blue – for when they fundraise from us before paying for more consulting that loses campaigns and wastes our money. Maybe they can ban our money going to the bad consultants. Or require that they use better research and methodologies for developing campaigns. Or forbid campaigns to spend any money on TV until they figure out how to do it better. Daily Kos is now supposedly a kingmaker – let’s start acting like it.
Yes, there is a waste problem that needs to be addressed in our political system but unfortunately it is tied to how too many candidates and their campaigns spend $ given to them by progressives.