David Plouffe, of the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign has joined the board of ACRONYM, a Democrat digital planning, non-profit organization. The goal is to spend $75 million on digital messaging to affect the 2020 election cycle.

Back in 2016, I remember Hillary Clinton acolytes bragging about the digital campaign the Democrats and the Clinton camp had put together. “Just wait until you see how great it is”, they would say. They say Donald Trump and all of the deplorables as totally analog. Mashable.com even wrote a post “How the Clinton campaign is slaying social media”:

Her team has what may seem like an impossible task: alternately playing offense and defense while channeling Clinton’s message, competing for users’ fickle attention online and translating that into donations, volunteers and voter turnout.

To achieve those goals, says Lowenstein, she knew it wouldn’t be enough to make viral internet jokes. Indeed, behind that breakout tweet is a nimble operation that churns content by the hour.

Trump’s digital messaging guru, Brad Parscale, didn’t brag. He flew beneath the radar and got it done. All of those huge rallies that Trump had, and has, were used to gather all of the digits for potential Trump voters. It wasn’t until a year after the 2016 election that Parscale gave an interview giving his insights into the digital campaign:

“I think I had come from a consumer world for a long time and America and eyeballs were moving to social media in huge numbers, especially on mobile phones and devices. And when Donald Trump asked me to work on the campaign I also knew I had a great piece of product that would resonate with Americans,” he said.

“You want a great product, you want things that resonate with people and make them dance.”

The Democrats have zero intentions of being caught flat-footed again. The Daily Wire posted this about the Democrats’ digital messaging campaign for 2020:

Tara McGowan, the founder and chief executive of Acronym, said that the group has already raised 40% of the stated goal but that $75 million may not be enough to overcome Trump in key early battleground states.

“Trump has upped the ante by spending more than any candidate this early in a general election campaign,” she said, according to the Times, adding, “and right now our side is simply not on the field.”

David Plouffe is expected to help with fundraising and digital messaging.

Brad Parscale sounds like he is ready for Election 2020.

My final thoughts. My husband and I both remember a story for business school. It involved a live advertisement for dog food. Now, generally, they make sure the dogs have not been fed so that they run to the food and greedily scarf it up. In this live ad, the dog would have nothing to do with the dog food as the host talked up the benefits of the food.

My point here is that you can have the best digital messaging in the world, but if your product (candidate) is crap, the dog won’t eat it. Trump was a great product. The Democrats have Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg. The dogs don’t even want to be in the same room with that dog food.

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