On chocolate and politics: What CPG brands and political campaigns have in common

As the presidential race picks up momentum, The Current Podcast explores what a political campaigner and a CPG brand marketer can learn from each other. Kyle Yadon-Smith, (the head of digital for the National Republican Senatorial Committee), and Vinny Rinaldi, (the head of media and analytics for The Hershey Company), get candid about marketing politics and chocolate.  Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio. Damian Fowler: (00:01)I'm Damian Fowler. Welcome to this edition of the current podcast.Damian Fowler: (00:10)This week we are queuing up a great conversation between two advertisers who may not on first glance seem to have that much in common. We're joined by Vinnie Ranaldi, the head of media and analytics at the Hershey Company, and Kyle Yadon-Smith, the head of digital for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That said, we thought it would be fascinating to hear what a big CPG brand like Hershey can learn from a major political advertiser like the NRSC. And since this is an election year, what better time to host this conversation. It's been said that every great political campaign rewrites the rules at the same time, CPG brands can now supercharge campaigns with retail data. With all that in mind, let's get to it. Both of you, of course, are focused on reaching those respective audiences, whether you call 'em consumers or voters. I'd love to hear from both of you, you know, on what you think you may have in common.Kyle Smith: (01:09)I was gonna joke, the uh, the biggest thing is, uh, we're both targeting, so we're women I think is our key marketplace. the cycle . Um, obviously that's not the only, uh, demographic that's gonna be key on the political landscape, but, uh, we're gonna be running ads in October and so we're gonna screw up your Halloween marketing. Thankfully you guys do not have a, uh, Georgia runoff this year, so it should be okay by Christmas. And uh, yeah, I think we're gonna be targeting a lot of the same consumers slash uh, voter demographics. So it's kind of, it's, it's interesting how that kind of plays out. Yeah,Vinny Rinaldi: (01:36)I would agree. I think there's more correlation. I think, you know, we're looking at the same content areas to show up in as a brand to sell chocolate as you guys are, to show up and influence somebody to devote one way or the other in those big environments. You know, a lot of how we look to show up is how do we drive seasonality in local markets at a certain store? So you're right in October, believe me, it's probably hot topic number one of like the lead up to our Super Bowl October 31st. There's a serious presidential election happening a week later. Yeah. So how much will that play a role when we're buying, you know, market-based ads? So it is an area, I wouldn't say of concern, but an area that we're certainly focused on of like how do we make sure we're showing up in the right markets during our most precious time of year, but being cognizant of some of the headwinds we might face based on what's happening in real time.Damian Fowler: (02:28)It's interesting, you know, you're sort of talking in a way about competition between say chocolate and political campaigns, but on the other hand there's a sort,Kyle Smith: (02:35)I think we would lose that one if you had to vote on one or the other. .Damian Fowler: (02:39)I mean, of course there's an alignment too. I mean maybe you guys can, you know, get together and cross-reference here.Vinny Rinaldi: (02:45)I mean, I joke as we look at all of the debates leading up to it and one of our products is popcorn. How do we show up and say, get your popcorn ready for all these new events that are happening. So can you bridge that gap and kind of work together? There's a lot of areas of, ofKyle Smith: (02:58)Interest. Politics is pop culture now, right? Yeah. Like I'll never forget, one of the funniest ads I saw was, I think it was Advil, they bought the promoted tweet on the first day of the debate in 2016 and it said, do you have a headache from this debate, you know, by Advil? And I thought that was kind of a fun way to play into it.Damian Fowler: (03:12)What's interesting to me is, you know, in looking at say any given political campaign, how the importance of being reactive in the moment kind of real time is so crucial, you know, for getting those swing voters out to either vote or just to nudge the needle a little bit. And I'm wondering, you know, if that idea of the sped up data-driven campaign is obviously influencing the way CPG brands like Hershey think about campaigns,Vinny Rinaldi: (03:38)I think we certainly use data-driven tactics in a very similar way. And you think back to the last, I guess it's 16 years since the 2008 election, which is crazy during that election when, when President Obama won, you know, it goes a little unnoticed of how he won the tactics he used, which were way ahead of his time in a lot of this, using the data, focusing on different demographic urban environments, getting those people to the polling centers, like we're trying to do the same thing during, whether it's a big season or to dry everyday occurrences, like how do you find those pockets of incremental opportunities to grow from the beast that's already there is very correlated to from when President Obama did it to President Trump doing it in 2016 and really becoming a more data-driven tactic on how you show up in those moments.Kyle Smith: (04:26)I mean, it's kind of funny, both Obama in 2012 and uh, president Trump in uh, 2016 both had a actually almost similar data strategy. They're both very digital heavy in from a percentage perspective for their time. And then of course nowadays we actually can't use that data on quite a few platforms. So data's extremely important in the political space. Obviously there's, uh, 60% of Americans over the age of 18 are gonna vote this cycle and a lot of those folks are gonna vote for the same party they've always voted for. And identifying people that, you know, swing back and forth is the key to winning, obviously. And that coalition changes every cycle. For us, it's leveraging the data to inform what that audience looks like so that we can make tactical data-driven decisions, even on platforms that don't let us use it directly of which, you know, is the bulk of the ecosystem at this point. It'sVinny Rinaldi: (05:08)An interesting point. Like we as a big massive consumer packaged goods brand that sells chocolate, has no first party data. We have to talk to everybody. Literally 98% of the um, US population eats candy mint or gum. So for us it's like how do you balance, you want scalability no matter what, but what are the right insights and data points that you utilize when you go to activation? Because if you're trying to find one-to-one in any second and or third party data partnerships in some platforms, not all, you're losing the findability due to some of the privacy regulations that are coming up. So if you don't own the data asset itself in a first party ecosystem, it's a lot harder to deliver that experience. And it's also a lot harder to collect first party data when you're a brand that everyone else sells your product. You're just driving demand through advertising and awareness and driving people to the store. But from a D two C perspective where a lot of that collection can happen, it's a little bit more of a challenge on our end to be able to sell chocolate and collect a data 0.0 for those people.Damian Fowler: (06:08)What's interesting to me about this is according to a study by the Trade Desk with Morning Consult during the 2022 midterms, 75% of all Americans surveyed who say they might vote in the midterms, say they know who they're gonna vote for. So I don't know from a political standpoint, do you market to those people or is marketing always at the margins? You know, are you always trying to reach out to that undecided voter? And I wonder if that carries over into CPG thinking as well.Kyle Smith: (06:33)I actually think this may be a space where things are more similar than they are different. You know, if you've bought Hershey Kisses every year for Christmas and you, your family's always done that and you always, you know, put that in the stalking, you're probably gonna continue to do it until something shifts or something changes. There's pretty high retention, right? In terms of Republicans from 2016 are very likely to be Republicans again, 2024. But things do change, you know, the people will always tell you, they say they know who they're gonna vote for today, but then there could be a new story that drops at some point next year that scrambles everything. You know, it changes people's opinions on issues, it changes how people think about things and we have to react very, very quickly to that and make sure that, you know, if the story's good for us, that everyone knows about it or if the story's bad for us, that we have our point of view out there to, to kind of counter what the information is. It's kind of hard to expect who those people are gonna be or what's gonna trigger that. So I think that kind of leads to the importance of talking to everyone and making sure that you kind of have a broad message out there. But we also know our folks that are, you know, Republican donors donate or vote in every single election that are probably on our team. So it's kind of just, uh, doing a little bit of both.Vinny Rinaldi: (07:30)Yeah, you look at Reese's Peanut butter cups, they have a 64% household penetration. I'm not sure there's any single brand out there that comes as close. So if you think about it, you, you're almost everywhere. So you're constantly speaking to everybody and hoping, you know, in those moments you're getting that incremental gain for a new household conversion and or, or repeat purchaser. So you do want to talk to both. You're also looking at probably one of the more impulsive categories in the world. Chocolate is a grab and go. You're at the counters, you're just grabbing, you don't plan it. So you always have to be, broadly speaking, making everyone aware of subtly nudging that reminder message to almost everybody.Damian Fowler: (08:08)Given that then, you know, does that mean a lot of your campaigns tend to be about, you know, just brand awareness kind of up there at the top of the funnel? And then how do you use channels to nudge the consumer? How, how does that work? ,Vinny Rinaldi: (08:22)In very basic theory, yes, we are a very big awareness brand messaging strategy to have fun. You know, we lean heavily on the voice of Will Arnett, which is the voice behind the Reese's commercials. So like, it is that probably where, but then you have, whether it's a limited edition or a seasonal environment or some other area where you wanna be a little bit more focused, where you would lean into some sort of targeting capability, whether it's a retail based target, third party, purchase based target. How do you use all those levers to take some of the spend and be focused while the majority of your base spend is reaching that broad awareness of the entire population?Kyle Smith: (09:00)Yeah, I think that's where, you know, I'm a little bit jealous of Hershey's and you have all this institutional brand ID and I'm, we're jealous of the starting point, especially, you know, I'm working on the, I'm working on senate campaigns this cycle. The NRC, we only have really two incumbents, meaning like people that are already senators running for reelection, again, Ted Cruz and uh, Rick Scott in Florida, they kind of have a really strong starting point they can focus on more, just reminding folks that kinda like you, I feel like you guys do every site or every year we're Hershey's, we're Reese's also. I'm jealous you get will learn that, but we're we're, we're Reese's what we are, et cetera. But then on our side we have a separate project of a lot of new candidates that no one's ever heard of that frankly haven't held elected office. And you have a year and you know, three or four months to make their name Id as close to a hundred percent with the voter base as you can. If uh, Trump were president it was 2020 and everyone kind of knows who these guys are. It is kind of more similar I think to the annual, uh, yeah, candy marketing. But this, this year it's uh, we have to start from scratch. It's like you guys introducing a new brand, I feel like, or a new skew of, uh, of, you know, Hershey's, Reese's, et cetera.Vinny Rinaldi: (10:00)We just launched uh, Reese's Caramel Cups and it is like launching a completely new thing even though it's part of the Reese's family. Yes, you're gonna have those loyalists try your new product, but can you attract new consumers into an already built brand because of a new introduction of caramel into a peanut butter cup? You have to find those new pockets of opportunity to not lose your base or not have them switch completely and keep that cycle growing with new consumers.Damian Fowler: (10:26)One of the things that's happened, uh, in the last couple of years, we talked about, you know, what happened in the last four years is the kind of rise of, there's much more inventory out there for streaming platforms, connected television, and that connecting the dots up with, you know, other channels. I wonder if you could both sort of talk me through a little bit of how that, the maturing as it were of CTV has changed the way you go to market and think about connecting up big awareness plays on CTV to, you know, lower down the funnel to more performance driven tactics.Vinny Rinaldi: (10:56)You know, as I go back to what I said earlier, the proliferation of content everywhere has certainly opened up the purview of how to show up, how to be everywhere. You know, for me, when I think about the connected TV landscape, what I love about it is the ability to buy prime time at any time. When you sit down at eight o'clock or nine o'clock or 12 o'clock or 3:00 PM it doesn't matter. You're accessing whatever content you wanna watch in that moment. So in my opinion, when you buy this way, you've got primetime moments at all times. That person is decided they're gonna sit down, they're gonna, you know, watch whatever it is that they wanna watch at that given moment.Vinny Rinaldi: (11:47)And that's your moment as a brand to show up and that's how we look at it. And then when you take that holistic approach to those primetime moments, how do you then use the controllability of technology to control, reach and frequency? So if I know that I'm talking to this person in 12 different platforms, well I don't want my frequency to be a 40 on one of 'em. I want to control that and keep extending reach. If I get enough reach, my household penetration should go up. If that goes up, my sales are going up, we're winning share, we're reaching more consumers, like that's our end goal. So being in as many homes as possible is actually impossible if you're buying on 40 different IOs or platforms. So then when you think about consolidation and the value of bringing somebody from an awareness building tactic and streaming or on the big screen all the way through a funnel and having that control allows me to unlock more business outcomes than any media measurement can give me.Damian Fowler: (12:42)I'm wondering if what the equivalent of business outcomes are in the political ad marketplace.Kyle Smith: (12:48)Um, well if we win.Damian Fowler: (12:51)I thought you were gonna say that. Kyle Smith: (12:52)Yeah, I, I , I think, uh, I actually think this is where also uh, you know, the candy and CPG world in general is, it's pretty similar to political land is um, our outcomes also a little bit impulsive. I remember standing in line, you know, to vote for the DC City Council with a few of my coworkers before and we were all talking like, who are these people? , you know, it's like we don't know who anyone we're voting for. It's kind of funny. And then you kind of re look at 'em real quick. You remember like stuff you've heard or mailers you've gotten and you make a decision that you have one day to do that or one month to do that. And that's our moment. That's when you get your conversion. That's kind of how I'd compare the two there. I think from a high level perspective, we have the exact same problem in politics, especially with linear, where we have very high frequencies against some audiences sometimes.Kyle Smith: (13:28)And when you're talking to one group of people 70 times, you're, you have less money then to talk to the rest of the folks who may not be very heavy media consumers. So having an ever-present point of view across not just linear but also digital, I think that's something that our party especially is gonna try to get a lot better at this cycle. It, it's interesting to me that 20 12, 20 16, I think, and Vinny told me if this is wrong, I think the corporate world almost looked at politics and was like, wow, they're doing some really cool stuff. We have to figure out what they're doing. I think that's kind of taken a step back a little bit now that we've gotten into the, you know, we have to target older Americans 'cause older Americans are more likely to vote. And I think now as older Americans, habits have changed quite a bit from 2020 to 2024, it's forced both political parties to kind of adapt a little bit after frankly the corporate world has uh, to what the new landscape looks like.Damian Fowler: (14:11)You know, speaking of different audiences, are there different channels for different audiences? Kyle, when you said, you know, reaching older Americans or all older voters, I'm wondering if that's still like a linear play now or if that's completely, am I just stereotyping a whole demographic?Kyle Smith: (14:26)Yeah, well I watch Wheel of Fortune every other night, so I, I maybe I, maybe I'm breaking the demographic there. . Yeah, I, I think linear is still the utmost effective mass reach, uh, mechanism for folks 55 plus, especially broadcast. It's pretty easy to get over 75% reach across that audience, uh, with a couple of weeks of linear buys. What I will say though is even older users are starting to shift pretty substantially. Especially, you know, in the last couple of years when I used to do my YouTube pitches, I always told, told the story of my father-in-Law who is a huge Elon Musk fan and watches a lot of documentaries about him on YouTube. And I would walk down one day and he's like an hour or two of this documentary that some college kid put together about, about how he's making rockets or whatever. They do a penetration across all the different age groups. And I do think that we're gonna continue to see a shift away, especially from cable time spent on cable and towards the streaming services, whether it's YouTube or or more of the down funnel servicesVinny Rinaldi: (15:15)As I stated earlier. You know, we reach everybody with a mouth. So every demographic needs to play a role in our media, both strategy spend, investment strategy, that's everything. Kyle, you kinda hit the nail on the head. It's what's happening between those environments is what's the shift what we're seeing. And I think the industry's seeing more and more, if you remove live news and sports from linear consumption, you're gonna see a drastic drop off in actual consumption habits. But you know, when you think about the purchase power right now, it shifted a little bit into the millennial group who are the bigger purchases, which is 71 million US people. We talk about Gen Z a lot. It's like, oh, they're the up and comers, they're people we have to talk to, but they're, you know, the people we don't have to spend that much time on, they're 68 million of them. So they're almost equivalent to a millennial generation. So we're gonna just wait for them to become purchasers. And I think that's a miss. So you've gotta show up in the moments or platforms that those consumption habits are happening by demo and then show up authentically to that audience so it's not, forget about one versus the other. It's how do you repeat the holistic picture across every platform and then deliver a communication strategy that resonates with those different audience groups. That's how we're working towards showing up across every platform.Kyle Smith: (16:34)And that's what's, that's so interesting to me. It's like the purchasing power in our world is a little bit different. You know, like in terms of voter people that actually vote, well one kids under the age of 18 cannot vote. So there's zero purchasing power. And I, I know that, I mean at least when I was in marketing school they, they taught us about how kids do have purchasing power, uh, when it comes to telling their parentsVinny Rinaldi: (16:51)They have influencing purchasing powerKyle Smith: (16:54)But in our world, you know, the, if you look at the millennial generation, you have a much higher voting percentage than it was 10 years ago. But it's still not anything close to 55 plus glad that we have the purchasing power in the millennial generation now though.Vinny Rinaldi: (17:06)I think it's that 13 to 18 group that's so key for us. As I said, the influencing power, everything, especially in our category, has become on demand. So I have the ability at 13 to use mom and dad's credit card tied to a DoorDash account and I'm gonna gain for the next five hours and I'm gonna order a bunch of things from seven 11 as we move into the future, five to 10 years from now, most of that generation will become now the voters but they don't wanna leave their house or they don't wanna go outta their way to go do something 'cause everything has come so easy to them by using a phone. How does the voter landscape change from either written ballots or in person to a truly secure ability to vote and get more buy-in into voting for a generation that is very used to just opening something up and hitting a buttonDamian Fowler: (17:59)We're throwing to the future here. Yeah, I mean Kyle, I dunno, what do you think, uh, do you think we're gonna get to that point?Kyle Smith: (18:04)I think Covid kind of changed the voting rules in a lot of states that make it easier to vote. I don't know if we'll ever get to the instant gratification level until, you know, maybe 50, a hundred years from now when we're voting on a blockchain and you get a vote coin and you spend it somewhere or something like that. So the convenience factor matters a lot and then it changes by state and almost by locality, right? If you live in a rural area and it's hard for you to get to the polling place 'cause it's a 10 mile drive versus it being half a mile down the street when you're dropping off your kids to school, that could make a difference as well. So it really just depends.Vinny Rinaldi: (18:35)I think that's really interesting because each state is adopting their own voter rules sounds very similar to each state adopting their own data privacy rules instead of thinking of a national basis and actually simplifying the ease for everyday people to utilize something. It's fascinating that we all continue to live by state, by state governed rules that are drastically different than just a national governing body to allow us to have a centralized ruling system to use, whether it's data privacy or voter rights. It's just, it's funny to watch that correlation between our two worlds.Kyle Smith: (19:09)Even sugar taxes, you know, some of the cities, I don't think it's gone after candy quite yet. True. But the uh, you know the Bloomberg rules around like the taxing soda and stuff and I think Philadelphia did it and then the sales increased outside of the Philadelphia like urban area like substantially for all those stores because you're able to get cheaper stuff. But that's interesting.Damian Fowler: (19:26)Kyle, you mentioned harder to reach audiences and I want to ask both of you, you know about that and how the programmatic marketplace makes it possible to reach those harder to reach audiences. I know at the top we joked about suburban housewives but you know, how granular can you get,Kyle Smith: (19:43)What is it 95% of people watch video whether it's linear or digital. So that does get you to a pretty high threshold the way I approach it. Like we have to deliver messages very quickly, right? So that's why I think you see political really lean into linear a lot 'cause you could get that mass reach in a day if you're buying the football games. Like if you're buying, you know, primetime on across all the all four networks and you have a presence there, you're gonna get to 50% reach pretty quickly. I think the hard part is honestly the other 50% on CTV and making sure that you're distributing that message to the person the one day a week they happen to be watching ad supported Hulu and they're not watching Netflix for example. That's where it gets more difficult. Having the centralized approach, making sure that you're maxing out the non-linear household reach if you're already buying a lot of linear is, is the hardest and most important thing that we have to do. We'll have maybe eight to 10 messages per candidate that we run and we want all eight to 10 of those messages to be seen by as many people as possible and we don't have as much time. I wish I had, you know, one or two month long campaigns that I could run behind these things to get that reach number, the incremental reach as high as we possibly can. But in reality it's, it's seven to 10 days. We just have to maximize thatVinny Rinaldi: (20:46)For Reeces. Again, reach everybody, everybody with a mouth, everybody wants to buy a Reeces, great. But then I go again down the portfolio, you've got variety brands in York peppermint patties, almond Joy, mounds. And so like how do you take those with much less spending power and find those pockets of opportunity? You know, for your, give you an example for York, one of the really cool unlocks we found was the snowbird effect sales actually increased 'cause York leans very heavily 55 plus really 65 plus and you see Northeast sales in the summer skew higher and then southeast sales skew higher in the winter and you're seeing the people as they move the consumer habits follow with them. So how do you heavy up in those markets during the seasons? So when you don't have a large bucket of money to go spend as a brand, you use data and insights in that way to be like really targeted hyper-focused on winning those key occasions for that consumer. Because again, at the end of the day you can only stretch a budget so far if you want to grow a business.Damian Fowler: (21:51)Fascinating that. So just to wrap it up, I guess I wanna ask each of you one question, you know the same question Kyle, what do you wish you could take from CPG land and Vinny, what do you wish you could take from political?Kyle Smith: (22:03)For me it'd be like two things. Like I think the permanence of the institutions. You know, you have the same kind of folks that'll work in marketing, the same agencies that run things for years, if not decades. Sometimes that makes it so that you have a lot of like earned experience and a lot of, you've gone through all this several times, you know what works, what, what doesn't. And I think kind of an informed approach every time politics is, you know, you have to start from the bottom and you build something up and then election day happens and that institution basically doesn't exist anymore and you have to start all over again for the next two years. So that'd be the first thing. And I think with that comes the advantages of being able to have more predictability. We don't have a ton of predictability in politics.Kyle Smith: (22:37)It's tough to know what my budget's gonna be. It's really tough for me to know what the news cycles are gonna look like next year without kind of that knowledge going in without knowing how much money you have, it makes it harder to do long-term planning. That's where I'm a little bit jealous of CPG land kind of wish, you know, knowing what your budget is a year and a half out I think would be awesome in our world if we were able to say that with certainty. But you know, it makes us scrappy and it makes it so that sometimes it's better than you expect and you get to have fun with it and sometimes it's a little bit worse and you just have to be smarter than the other guy.Vinny Rinaldi: (23:02)I would say almost the opposite in a way because I feel the marriage of branding and performance is so important to not separate the two, but to bring them together and the agility that the political landscape moves with is actually a blessing in disguise. Pricing aside the hyper target ability, the ability to show value really quickly is something that we lack because we don't own the end game. So like there, there's a part of that that's like, okay, well if you can be that hyper-focused and get a really quick outcome, how do you build that into a small percentage of your spending in the overall portfolio to be super agile, super hyper targeted, really focused on market analysis and then correlated to sales or in your case outcomes from an election. That to me is super exciting. It's something that we sometimes strive to do. You know, we used to have this motto that we're still trying to build out, but like, act like a CPG, think like a D to C, we don't own the end game, but how do you think really agile but come with the power of being a CPG. So I think what you bring to the table from a political landscape gives us just a little bit there to think about of like being super fast, nimble, and agile in a marketplace that changes so fast.Damian Fowler: (24:17)And that's it for this edition of the current podcast. We'll be back next week. The current podcast is produced by Wonder Media Network. Our theme is by loving caliber. The current podcast team includes Chris Brooklier and Kat Vesce. And remember,Kyle Smith: (24:30)If you're talking to one group of people 70 times, you have less money than to talk to the rest of the folks who may not be very heavy media consumers.Vinny Rinaldi: (24:37)Act like a CPG, think like a D to C.Damian Fowler: (24:40)And if you like what you hear, subscribe and leave a review. Also tune into our other podcast, the current report as we round up the week's biggest marketing headlines from across the open internet. I'm Damian and we'll see you next time.