Parscale’s Digital Savvy Paved the Way For Trump’s Road to the White House
Several years ago, Brad Parscale found himself faced with the biggest challenge of his marketing and advertising career: get Donald Trump elected president.
Little did he realize that he would become Trump’s secret weapon and engineer the biggest political upset in U.S. history, with Trump knocking off established Republican politicians in a bruising primary season before defeating Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated to run for President and the presumptive favorite.
“We needed to connect with millions of Americans for someone who had absolutely no established political campaign structure,” Parscale told the 500+ executives yesterday at the American Financial Services Association’s 35th annual Independents Conference and Expo in Fort Lauderdale. “The other candidates already had those political organizations in place from other campaigns.”
Parscale, whose career started by making cold calls to design and sell websites back before the digital and social media revolution, in 2016, was named Digital Director for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign, where he was responsible for developing, implementing and managing all facets of the entire campaign marketing strategy. He was recently named the Campaign Manager for Donald Trump for President 2020.
“The 2020 campaign is going to be a giant marketing show,” he said. “And we have years to prepare for it, not just a few months.”
Using the three pillars of Marketing and Advertising: Audience, Creative and Distribution, Parscale said Facebook was the way for him to connect Trump’s message to millions of Americans through the social network’s affinity tools.
With those tools, he could target certain demographics in certain states or regions of the country with Trump’s messaging. As a result, Parscale said, the Trump campaign placed 5.9 million digital ads vs. 66,000 digital ads placed by the Clinton campaign, a staggering marketing advantage.
Parscale’s uncanny digital savvy enabled him to orchestrate, from behind the scenes, Trump’s string of primary victories and his eventual knockout of Clinton in the general election. Parscale was interviewed at the AFSA conference by Brad Noel, Executive Vice President, Director of Branch Operations, Republic Finance, and the newly-elected chair of AFSA’s Independents Section.
April 27th, 2018
