The Forecast

Keegan Goudiss (00:00) Today's episode of the forecast gets into the weeds on a topic that I really love and one that's quietly costing us elections, digital ad waste. We've all seen the graphs, millions spent, unclear results, no one really knowing if their ad dollars are going to good use. It's time that we stop shrugging this off. My guest today is Miles Bugby, a seasoned digital strategist with deep experience across the left, from school board races, presidential campaigns. His agency has advised powerhouse clients like the DCCC and Red Wine and Blue. And he's also won an award for helping to pass landmark homelessness services and affordable housing ballot measure in LA County last year. Along the way, he's built eight figure media plans at major media agencies that actually delivered results. He's also an Oregon kid turned read award winning strategist who once got called Mr. Technology. by a seven-figured US Senator. I don't think anybody can make that up. Now he's launching something new, something big, and today on the forecast, we're announcing his next move, the upcoming launch of Receipts, a diagnostic tool designed to help campaigns and causes identify waste in their digital media buys, and finally clean up what's become a bloated and inefficient corner of progressive politics. Welcome, Miles. Myles Bugbee (01:20) Again, excited to be here. Keegan Goudiss (01:23) I want to know the story behind Mr Technology. That seems like a really fun story. Myles Bugbee (01:28) Yeah, so in 2018, I was working for us for Senator Tester and Senator Tester, John Tester, you know, was the only seven finger dirt farmer in the US Senate. You can fact check me on that, but I'm pretty sure that in the history of the US Senate, he's the only one. And one of the things is that he's known for a great sense of humor. And when he would visit the campaign office and talk to staff, would chat everyone up and joke around and gave people nicknames. And one day he came into the room where it the comms director, the research director and me, the digital director. Keegan Goudiss (01:42) pretty sure you're Myles Bugbee (01:57) And he knew the comms director really well and the research director as well had been in his DC office. And I was new to him and he looked at me was like, you're the digital guy. ⁓ Mr. Technology. And, you know, he said it in kind of a joking way, but it was just like, he could peg people pretty well. you know, he was just a, he's a great person to be around. And when you think about authenticity, John Tester personifies that. Keegan Goudiss (02:19) Yeah, I didn't check. assume someone already owns the domain MrTechnology.com because that's like pretty good branding, I would think, to run with. But what did your colleagues say after that? Myles Bugbee (02:32) They kind of laugh they're like, okay, you finally got your nickname, you know, so it was it was kind of a moment where I was like, okay, I've made it on this campaign at least and it was that year in Montana was an incredible experience and we could we could do a whole podcast talking about all the people who, you know, in democratic politics have come up through Montana and learn the art of persuasion and you have to in a state like that where, you know, we needed to win at least 10 % of Trump voters to win reelection. in 2018 and it's just it was a good proving ground for learning how to reach across the aisle and win over persuadable voters. Keegan Goudiss (03:02) Well, I have good news. I looked it up Mr. technology.com. Someone's trying to sell it for $32,000. I feel like you probably. So you know if you have it. Myles Bugbee (03:06) Okay, no big deal. But we'll use the podcast revenue. We'll use the revenue for this conversation to buy that domain. Keegan Goudiss (03:16) Yeah, if anybody wants to advertise on this episode, we will put the proceeds towards my house being able to buy the domain because it would be good personal branding. I'm not sure it's worth that money. I would say that like, you know, in this where we're here talking about ad waste, right? Like they're, uh, uh, um, you know, I'm not trying to make this podcast about like, you know, going after everybody who's done wrong and in politics, because I certainly have made my share of mistakes too. But like there is a substantial amount of business in digital ad waste. And so like you, uh, you know, you I think it's quite admirable. You could have gone a route that many have taken where it you just try to make as much money as possible by pretending you're not taking 80 % margins for junk CPM's and all sorts of other ways. People like line their pockets in this business from from advertising so you could. You could just rip off everybody ⁓ and buy that domain, but you're sounds like you're not choosing that path, so I want to hear a little bit more about receipts and what you're you're thinking. Myles Bugbee (04:13) Yeah, well, thanks again for this opportunity to talk about this problem. I think this is something that's really below the surface issue. You think about how people ⁓ evaluate media. And when it comes to persuasion media, one of the challenges is just the incentive structure, where it's essentially spend down the dollars. You have a budget, and the metric of success is ad delivery. And that's a big problem, because that's where the waste hides. If people don't actually have a KPI, you think about direct response marketing, where If we're trying to bring people onto our email list, the client, the campaign is going to ask, what was our CPA? What's the ROAS? What's the lifetime value if it's a long-term program? There are clear metrics of success. And we don't really have those in the persuasion space. And so that makes it a lot easier to have these delivery-based metrics where people don't actually know what's going on below the surface. And I think about it, my very first consulting engagement, I was in onboarding with a client. the client, at the end of the conversation, I asked her, said, so what do you want to know about your app? programs. Like, what is something that you feel like you don't understand? And she said, I really, at a fundamental level, don't know if our ads are working. And I paused. And I thought, I've been in this business for a dozen years, and no one has asked me that question. And I was stunned by it. And then I thought, OK, well, if we're going to ask the question if our ads are working, the first question we have to ask is, where are our dollars going? And from there, that's where this becomes a rabbit hole, where you start to enter the world of programmatic advertising, the world of digital advertising, what are these walled gardens, what's the open web, what are all the complexities? And I think the big takeaway I took away from it is where there's mystery, there are margins. And to your opening question about, or opening point about, well, you know, there are people out there who can command large margins, that's because of asymmetric information. It's because at a fundamental level, people don't understand what's happening. And if they don't understand what's happening, they're vulnerable to being ripped off, frankly. And so that's why I think that transparency and And information is so critical to making sure that we actually have a functioning market and get more value as political and cause advertisers. Keegan Goudiss (06:11) Makes sense. how are you going to visualize this? I'm curious. Obviously, we're doing this as an audio format, so we're to have to rely on our listeners' imaginations. But can you explain a little bit how you'll try to visualize this for people using the platform? Myles Bugbee (06:26) Yeah, so I think think about it like ⁓ the farm to table analogy. So you start with a product that the farmer has. So the farmer has grown, let's say, as a blueberry farmer. And there's a major gap between what happens at the point of where the farmer has raised the blueberries to where you're actually buying a carton of blueberries at Safeway or whatever grocery store. And so essentially, the way this tool operates is we're trying to shed light onto what are what are the missing costs in the middle. So if you typically, if you look at a media plan right now, you'll see CPMs, which to your audience, you have an informed audience of practitioners, but we'll just kind of clarify some terms here. CPM is cost per thousand impressions. So that's the standard that we use for measuring the cost of digital ad impressions. So basically in this case, if we start out with what the farmer is willing to sell it for, if this is the programmatic environment, that would be the deal for. So that's the baseline. So let's say the farmer says, okay, my core price, I'm gonna start at $2. Now if you go to the grocery store and it costs $8, what happened in the middle? If you had bought directly from the farmer, it would be $2, but you paid $8. So that's $6 is the middle. And I'm not one of those people who says every intermediary cost is waste. There's a person in ad tech, Jay Freeman, who uses the banana analogy, which is that on average, let's say 12 cents of your dollar goes to actually the farmer who grew the bananas. Now, You think about it, if you're buying bananas in the Philippines, or buying bananas in Philadelphia and they're from the Philippines, it's not just you press a magic button and they're going to get there overnight. You have logistics costs, have the shipping vessel, you have the trucks, you have the facilities, have the all these different, the person is actually selling it in terms of the store. So you have all these different people who are in the chain who do add value because otherwise you'd have to fly out to the Philippines. But then there are people who are not really adding value. There are people who essentially are just toll collectors. And the whole part of this project is to differentiate between who are the people who are adding value in the ecosystem versus the people who are just taking rents. And if we can cut down the costs that are going to rents, that means more of our dollars are going to buy bananas. And in this case, it's not bananas or blueberries, it's actually reaching voters. And that makes a world of difference because right now, if we don't get our message out in a fragmented environment, we're gonna have a tough time winning these competitive races. Keegan Goudiss (08:43) How are you able to pull in what people are paying versus how much it should cost? Myles Bugbee (08:50) Yeah, it's a great question. So the way I kind of like to start out with is just first principles. So when you're thinking about a supplier, when you're thinking about someone who stands, if we go back to that transaction of like the original producer and the buyer, like who's in between, who are the brokers? What is the additional value that they are adding? And the two value areas are inventory or data. So like, are they actually able to bring more sources to bear that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to access? Like you think about a Costco, right? Like Costco has thousands of products and If you wanted to individually buy each of those products, mean, maybe Keegan, you could do that in your spare time, or one of us could do it, and your audience could do it, but that would be a lot of work. And that's why the whole digital advertising market evolved as it did, because the old model of IOs of going directly to publishers is very difficult to do in the open web of display advertising, where you have, let's say, 40,000 websites in a campaign. I can you imagine the operational complexity of having 40,000 IOs and then having to make adjustments? So the real time bidding, the programmatic auction environment emerged because of the simplicity and how it aggregated scale. But basically the realization here is that when we're talking about something like CTV, there are far fewer major publishers. There are far fewer places that you actually have to buy from. And when you're adding in these middleman fees, they add up significantly. So if you're talking about like a display CPM where maybe the floor price is $3 and you're paying $8, that's a problem. You're adding in $5 in fees. But if you're talking about a CPM in CTV where maybe the floor price is $23 and you're paying $50. Now you're talking about $27 in fees. That's an order of magnitude more in fees. And this is not just a problem that we face in the political space. I spent a lot of time this summer talking to DSPs and SSPs and publishers and also people on Madison Avenue who are traders and understanding how they approach this. And they've run into the same problems. And so back to your original question of how we kind of think about this. I think the key thing is why this comes down to receipts. It's transparency. It's actually understanding the transaction costs because a lot of buyers will go to their platforms and they'll basically get roadblocks. You know, they'll say like, we can't provide this or we're going to provide it to you, this data to you in a format that's very difficult to analyze. We're going to drown you in data. And that's why it's so important to cut out the clutter and focus on the key data points that are able to help illustrate the cost waterfall. And when I talk about the cost waterfall, the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA is a trade group for commercial advertisers. And they started doing a programmatic transparency investigation in 2023. And the first report they found had 36 cents on the dollar actually going to working media. So I'm just going pause there for your listeners. Like if you're thinking about a transaction and only 36 cents, not like, we, agency took their cut. That's 64 cents that's gone. That doesn't count when you have all the kind of upsets or all the markup. Keegan Goudiss (11:28) Wow. Myles Bugbee (11:42) know, a taking that you're talking about. So that's just like, that could be even worse. And what they found is that CTV is prone to this. And it's prone to this because you basically have a lack of knowledge about all the components of the supply chain. And then another piece of this is, so we're talking about like understanding the cost component of it, but it's also, we actually delivering ads to the right people in the right places? And this is like a foundation of... digital advertising, the illusion of precision. Ariel Garcia talks about this. She has a wonderful nonprofit called Check My Ads, where they're trying to be an industry watchdog on this. And she says, essentially, we've oversold a lot of these targeting capabilities. And so there is, in my ⁓ conversation with people, I found out that there is ⁓ major DSP that has not done a good job of updating their IP to GeoMatic. And so if you're using IP addresses in terms of figuring out where people are with CTV, because you're not using logged in data for depending on the apps that may not have that information. What they found is that they were looking at 30 to 40 % geo leakage. And so what that means is that if you think you're running your ads in New Jersey, 30 to 40 of those ads might be running in Illinois. And if you're running a statewide campaign in New Jersey, what good does that do you if you're reaching people in Illinois? So there are some big issues there. Geo leakage bots. This is something which Keegan, you probably in your vast experience in digital space heard about bots. it's something that kind of I think keeps keeps people up at night. I don't know if you've seen that video of like a bot farm in a developing country and it's like, you see all these things that are happening there and it's kind of dystopian and something out of like Black Mirror or Silicon Valley. I Silicon Valley actually had an episode about this at one point. And so these bots, like they thrive on capturing traffic. You have domain spoofing that goes on where people think they're buying one thing and they're getting another thing. And again, all these factors are happening below the surface. And if people aren't getting the receipts, then they're not knowing what's actually going on. And that's the big point of this project is to shine a light on what's going Keegan Goudiss (13:40) I love the name. Her seeds is a great name for exactly what you're talking about for the reasons you're saying. So good job on the branding there. I. You know you're mentioning bots. It reminds me I think it's like 2012. I think it was maybe 20, but I think it was 2012 cycle that like right after the cycle there was all this stuff that came out on how awful the bot farm and how much money was lost. And I remember for the first time since I had been doing this like. you know I started working digital ads like 2005 and you know it was I used like the first iteration of Facebook advertising manager and still just as buggy as it was back then but. I remember having all these conversations with our clients after we spent all this money and like well how much of this was like real it was the first time anybody had asked that I was actually was like it made me feel good because it's something that we cared about. You know there was a. There was someone who works in the space then. His name rhymes with. Bim, Dolch that you used to tell me back then. Well, no one cares about buying junk inventory as a quote. What are you talking about? Like that? Yes they do, and he's not in the space anymore, at least on our side. But you know, like I I was like relieved because after that cycle people actually start asking questions about. bots and then like double verify and all of the other ones started like getting more popular. DSPs had to start including that still doesn't work ⁓ like they stole despite everything that's being done. Add impressions are are getting served. ⁓ And they're being clicked on by bots. I think it's impossible to get rid of entirely programmatically is my perspective, but there are good buyers like you and I. Or me in the past. I'm not doing it right now, but like you and others that I know who really put in the extra effort To make sure it's good inventory and then I you know, I grew frustrated Last last couple years of my ad buying career and that it felt like a lot of the Client spending the money didn't care anymore They didn't care about like higher CPMs like you know so I had my own firm and then I was at trilogy and I you know to trilogy's credit they they very much did and still do care about like not taking obscene margins and being very transparent on ad buying because they feel like that's a selling point for for for them when pitching and I agreed then I still agree with them on that and like it was. somewhat depressing because there were a lot of clients who were who were like not caring about CPM's. It's pretty easy to tell. Like I would tell folks I'm like, well, they're saying they're only going to take a 3 % margin. Well, that's because they're taking a 3 % on top of someone else taking 20 % off top of someone else taking like maybe even more percentage points. So like let's compare the CPM's, but it didn't really. Interest people the way it used to. So I'm curious, like do you think this is a way to get people to start caring about? the costs again. ⁓ You know, like what what about the platform is going to get the people with the money to want to make sure that they're spending it more effectively? Myles Bugbee (17:00) Yeah, there's a lot to unpack. There are some great points. And I think that what you're talking about in terms of it was great that people were asking those questions in 2012. And I think they need to be asking these questions now more than ever, because pixelate put out a report and they basically analyze inventory. And they found that as of Q2 2025, 18 % of CTP inventory in the United States is IBT. So that's invalid traffic. And that's that could basically be outright misrepresentation of the inventory could be outright fraud. And if you were going to go to the grocery store and you were to buy five boxes of cereal and one of them was empty, would you ask for a refund? ⁓ I think as advertisers, we think about what are we trying to achieve? Like TV traditionally has been like the sort of has been in the bird dog seat. It's like the first share consultant. And now TV is becoming digital. If we look at the data streaming past linear for the first time this summer. in terms of total viewership. What is the most watched channel on television? YouTube. I mean, I think about this like the mainstays of television are sports, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy. And now you can watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy the next day on streaming. And by the end of this year, pretty much every major sport will be available in some form on stream. So we've gotten to a point where a lot of those ad dollars are necessarily going to move towards streaming and digital just because the media consumption is happening that way. So I think, and I'm curious on your thoughts on this Keegan, is that people have ignored the bot problem because it's been limited to display ads. And display ads aren't the workhorse in media plans. So people are like, that's just 10 % of my budget or 5%, and I'm losing 20 % of 5%, and that's 1%. And they're not as concerned about it. But if you're losing 20 % of 30 % or you're losing 20 % of 50%, suddenly those are real numbers. so it's the bot problem. It's the fees problem that you're talking about. And one of the you're talking about, Does inventory matter? This is something I'm very passionate about because in the political space, we are not selling sneakers. We're not selling things that people inherently want to buy. The people who are trying to persuade or mobilize are the people who are ambivalent. There are people who are cynical for good reason. They're jaded about a process where politicians who they feel like are not listening to them and caring about their communities. Or they're people who are ⁓ maybe they haven't voted before and they need to be informed. These are hard to reach people and they're not actively seeking out that information. Like commercial advertisers are offering a value proposition when it's relevant to a person that they're willing to engage with. But we have to pull people out of their shells to deliver that information. And that's why repetition is so important. But the problem is if we're delivering ads to the wrong people, we're delivering excessive repetition to a small number of people and not getting it to the people who we need to reach, the hard to reach people, that means that we're missing out on pockets of voters. And you think about demand side platforms. Demand side platforms are fundamentally dumb pipes with sophisticated software. They're only as good as the guidance that you give them. And oftentimes, they are trained to deliver based on how they fill out budgets. So they are going to run ads to people who are easier to reach, have, you know, they're watching more television, they're interacting with more of these platforms, they're going to run ads with people who there are more impression opportunities. But oftentimes, like we're trying to reach that nurse who's working three shifts. you know, we're trying, she has like, you she's watching a show at 2am to decompress after a really long day. Like that may be a harder impression to get. Like a lot of times, like the kinds of voters that we need to reach are people who are resistant to our message or hard to reach. So that's why that inventory quality matters so much. And this is kind of a clunky metaphor, but I think about it like if you have a foggy mirror and you hear that like aurora borealis is out your window, you're probably going to grab a towel and clean that mirror so you can go see aurora borealis. But if it's a foggy mirror and it's a rainy day, are you really going to clean that mirror so you can look at the rain? And unfortunately, what we're trying to do is we are trying to sell something to move hearts and minds with people who are resistant to that concept. So we have to work harder and make our dollars work. Keegan Goudiss (20:47) Well, on on inventory in particular, you know, from working in Montana, and I'm sure other states that are smaller, it's it's even more challenging in in smaller populated areas, like, you know, having done work in Alaska, it's like, oh, man, and trying to spend as much money as possible. And this is often like, you know, I tell people, I don't feel like waste comes from from in the intent to commit fraud. It's just that like Political advertising is always spend as much money very quickly because it takes forever to get the money in and to spend it and it's always very late and there's only like three weeks to try to reach all these people with the the message you think is gonna work And I wish I could change that approach. I don't know how you know, I and I don't think it will change much because just it's just human nature we wait until the very end to try to To spend money wait till the very end that people care and and like so you know you you know like in Montana and other places it's like really really hard so often you are as a buyer. You're faced with a tough decision of do I? Am I only going to buy stuff that is very very premium and I'm very sure versus like how much do I dial back the controls to allow for other inventory that could be useful but also could be wasteful. Myles Bugbee (22:10) Yeah, I think that's a really important point in terms of how we do that waterfalling, like the prioritization. Like you're not going to be able to just run on premium inventory. And also from a budget standpoint, you want more repetition. And if you're just running on really expensive inventory, that's a limiting factor there. But as part of this process, I've talked to people who, there were basically cases of agencies that were buying in open exchange, which is basically the Wild West, where there's a lot less information about what you're buying. You might have multiple sellers, like I don't know if people in your audience like beer. Some people like hops in their beer. Nobody should want hops in their programmatic advertising because an additional hop means it's another person who's taking a bite out of that transaction. And you add that up, SSP selling to other SSPs, all these layered fees, the fee stacking logic, it can get to a point where bottom barrel inventory is being sold for premium prices. Used Coral is being sold for a Cadillac price. And that's a real problem. And so I think fundamentally, you when we're thinking about how this market operates, I keep coming back to transparency because at end of the day, yes, buyers are in a pretty constrained situation because they have a short period of time to spend a lot of money. That's why it's so important to know what you're actually buying. And that's why there's an economist, George Lake Ekerlof, who wrote about the lemon market problem, which is fundamentally that there, when you go to a used car dealership, the used car dealer knows more about the car than you do. And so if you're in a situation where you're just like, hey, this car looks great and the guy you know, in the colorful suit sold me on the story and then you drive off a lot and some of the wheels fall off. That's a problem. And especially in our market where we have very short activation windows, we don't have time to check. Like, was that, did it meet the specs? And so having kind of that knowledge about what's actually going on, asking the hard questions is so important. And it's something which all advertisers up and down the ballot can do. And that's why I think that, you know, where I'm hoping this is going to go is not just building a diagnostic tool, but also building questions, having conversations with practitioners so we can develop standards in our space, because the market is evolving quickly. And if we don't actually ⁓ basically empower people with the right information to ask the right questions, it's very possible that more people are going to be, you know, taken for a ride at the used car dealership. Keegan Goudiss (24:16) Very true. ⁓ So do you think that like the the target user for this is is buyers or people who are like holding the writing the checks from these organizations? Myles Bugbee (24:28) Yeah, so I ideally would be campaign managers. would be organizations ⁓ to ask these questions ⁓ because the way I look at this is that right now we sort of have caveat emptor, you know, buyer beware. And I think it needs to move toward caveat vendor tour, which is seller beware in the case of like the information burns shouldn't be on a campaign manager. If you're a campaign manager, you hire an agency specifically because you don't want to handle this. Like you have a million other things to do. Anybody who's ever worked in a campaign knows that campaigns are just basically totally, it's your all hands on deck, you've got a million priorities and a campaign manager, I mean, their job, they have to manage the candidate, they have to manage the staff, they have to manage themselves, they have to manage the donors, they have all these different responsibilities, the staff, all these things. So this is not a burden that should fall on them. We need to build as a community standards in terms of how we vet inventory, how we vet vendors, how we think about the process and really make it so that people know what they're getting because You think about mail. I was talking to a mail consultant who said, there will be 20 people who look at a mail piece, but nobody ever asked me which post office we dropped off the mail at. And when it comes to TV, we as digital consultants have like a complicated relationship, so to speak, with linear TV. But the thing we can say about linear TV is that because of FCC rules, they have to report how many spots are bought, the cost of spots. Like there are requirements in terms of those logs. We don't have that paper trail. We don't have that transparency in our space. And I think if we do that, what it's going to do is it's going to reward the people like yourself and people who do it, who've done it the right way in their career. And then people who, frankly, it's a small number, but people who are not adding value or people who are not doing it the right way will be exposed by that. And I think that's going to be how a market can better operate. And I just think that's going to work out better for everyone if we reward the people who are doing it the right way and then bring transparency to the space. Keegan Goudiss (26:18) Totally. I applied your effort. ⁓ I'm curious, like, how do you think... How do you think, so I agree with you, the premise of the audience you're going for, I'm curious, how do you get good actors in the space telling others, some of which may be your competitor, right? Because you also do buying as well. Do you have a strategy for getting other good actors in the space to prop up what you're doing and maybe using that as a resource when they're talking to people about plans? Myles Bugbee (26:48) Yeah, that's a great question. So I think about it, was talking to a person in this space who describes digital advertising as a complex system. And so you have a lot of different actors with interests. And the way I look at it is that there really aren't heroes and villains in this narrative. The only villains would be the outright fraudsters. And they are, to be clear, like a very small section of the market, very small section. But to me, it's people who are constrained by the incentives. Like you were talking about in terms of you're buying in Alaska or buying in Montana, you can't always buy premium inventory. There are limits there. And so what I'm hoping is that we can align incentives and move toward collective action because collective action is critical to solving problems. We have to move past this zero-sum mentality and move toward a positive-sum mentality. And so my hope is that we can create a working group of practitioners who are interested in cleaning up the ecosystem and getting better value for their clients. Because as you were talking about an example like the trilogy, they have an in-house media buying team. They have people who are smart. They have people who are doing the work and being diligent. And things like, and that is the model that we should be moving toward more cases of people who are actually saying, look, look, this isn't cheap. There isn't an easy way to do this. Like I wish there were, but there's not. And it's, are people who will conflate the walled gardens to these demand side platforms in the open web. Like if you operate in demand side platform, you have to get an owner's manual. Like you've got to actually understand how this operates. And I'll give you an example. The Republicans, there's a Republican firm called Image, a digital firm that put out a study a couple of weeks ago, a white paper where They basically cut the number of suppliers from 30 down to one. And you know what happened? The CPMs dropped 10 to 15 percent. Reach actually increased. So they improved, like they reached more people. Frequency was stable and they cut costs. So when people say like, this is too good to be true, you're telling me I can save money and get better value. I'm telling you, the Republicans have already done it. And I think as a space, we can't afford to fall behind. Like right now, we are living in the worst case scenario. Like if I had to think about, you know, the environment that we're in and the fact that we are completely out of power and the last day out of power we seem to have is pushing back on a gerrymandering Texas in California, which is great that we're doing that. But that's just that's totally defensive. That's not offensive. And all of our rights and freedoms are under attack right now. We have to do this. We have to make sure that we are controlling the thing that is in our control. And I think about this like the zone of control. I had a friend who sent me this, the Stephen Covey graphic of things you can control, things you're concerned about, things that are out of your control. This is something that's in all of our control. We can do this better and it can make a real difference. Keegan Goudiss (29:13) Yeah, you know like ad vendors. Everybody's in the from the publisher side DSP side. ⁓ They all like to talk and gossip and one of my favorite things is when like you. Whenever I talked to young girl buyers and they asked me for advice, I'm like the best piece of advice I ever learned was. Be really kind and helpful to. You the vendors like right like you're not always gonna be able to give them business but like be transparent about why you can't don't blow them off don't ghost them you know it's like. No shortage of ⁓ of people I've worked with in the space that are like they think that well they have the money and they can be jerks to the vendors. ⁓ Because they it's it's their budget and the vendors have deal with that but the vendors all talk about who's being jerks to them and who's not and I would say that they are like. much more liberal with the gossip when you build a good relationship with them versus treating them like like shit and ⁓ One of the things I heard like very consistently across the board was that like last cycle, the Republicans did much better than Democrats on ad buying, which was pretty sad because I remember when we were much better than them and it is a pendulum, right? Like in my experience, you know, there was a period where everybody was like raving about George W. Bush's field program and Democrats were like, oh, we need to like take this seriously. And we got much better, maybe fell behind again. this last cycle also, but like just focused on digital advertising, it does feel like the Republicans are weirdly much more focused on less waste. ⁓ So like, do you think that there is a way to get Democrats caring more about this? ⁓ Beyond like showing them receipts? Like are there other things that we can be doing to get to get folks like Realizing the level of this problem because I know it's a big problem. You know it's a big problem. Part of the reason why I wanted to have you on is to help try to broadcast that message. It's big problem and I'm curious to hear like. Well, do you think we can do to make sure people realize that we've fallen behind and we're actually part of the big reason why we're losing? Is this disadvantage on on on advertising that we have on the left? Myles Bugbee (31:32) Yeah, I love that question because I think just to kind of go back to the origin point on that, like the Bush campaign ran an incredible field program in 2004. But that was because the Al Gore campaign and the AFL-CAO and organized labor across the board did an incredible job in 2000. And we almost won that election because we were able to have this tremendous field program. And Karl Rove studied that and he said, OK, you know, we need to catch up. We need a 72 hour program because we fell behind. So to your point, Democrats have fallen behind. There is an efficiency. Keegan Goudiss (31:47) Mm-hmm. Myles Bugbee (32:02) gap right here and we need to close that gap. And I have gone to conferences this year, you know, when you're a political consultant, you'll go to like the pollies, you'll go to the reads, and people are very social. Like we're in an industry, you have conversations, you talk to Republicans, and Republicans talk about things like incremental reach. And Keegan, I can't remember the last time I had a Democratic consultant talk to me about incremental reach. Like they're thinking about where is the next next voter that we can actually communicate with. And if you're a Democratic consultant, go listen to Zach McCurry's podcast. He recently talked to ⁓ Adam Wise, who's a Republican media buyer, incredibly smart guy. He worked with the Dave McCormick campaign. Dave McCormick beat Bob Casey by 15,000 votes. And what was the McCormick campaign doing? They spent 30 % of their media budget on live sports. They were finding random wrestling matches. They were finding wherever it took to get their voters because they did in-depth studies of who are the people who are voting for Trump but were undecided or might roll off down ballot. And they found those voters and they use the media strategy to get the kind of repetition they needed with those voters. And I think that's a big reason why Dave McCormick is a US Senator today and why the Republicans didn't win Wisconsin and didn't win Michigan because in those states, they didn't have that same kind of sophisticated process. And if you don't think Republicans are learning from that playbook, I was at one of these conferences and I talked to a person involved with the campaign. He's working with John Boone's operation and they're going to be helping SLF. And so the point is Republicans are going to be learning from this stuff. They've already published a report showing that 15 % savings they've achieved in one efficiency lever. There are, I found six different efficiency levers. And so really as a question of will, are we gonna fall behind? And in campaigns and elections, it's a game of inches. Like we're not talking about massive margins. We have elections that are decided by thousands of votes, hundreds of votes when it comes to really close races. And the House of Representatives might come down to a single seat. I mean, we see this with what Trump is doing going state by state, these Republican legislatures, shaking them down, begging them. to draw Democrats out of their lines. And so if we lose the House by one seat, if we lose the Senate by a few hundred votes, and that is the margin of effectiveness that we missed because we didn't cut down on the waste, I think that's on all of us, and that's why we have to take action. Keegan Goudiss (34:07) I thought about this for many years. ⁓ I feel like it's been long enough to share this story publicly. It may have somewhere else before. So I think everybody had pissed off by sharing the story publicly as long since moved on or decided they're still mad at me and doesn't really matter. So I like I always think of in this situation 2016. ⁓ We worked various campaign worked really closely with Facebook back when Facebook cared about political ads been. Myles Bugbee (34:22) you Keegan Goudiss (34:32) because when everything took off and we were just like, everything we were doing was turning to gold thanks to Bernie's message. I like to say that there was all this magic that we were doing ⁓ to make it happen, but it was really just like we knew how to deploy digital tactics in a moment when people were really energized and captured that energy and turn it into other actions. We were rapidly scaling as quickly as we could. Facebook, of course, was happy to help us spend more money on on their platform, you know, back before it was called Meta. And they eventually like were embedded. They never liked us talking about that because they were nervous. They couldn't offer that elsewhere, but they knew that they had offer on both sides, right? So Trump's campaign had like Facebook embedded, Bernie's campaign had Facebook embedded. Hillary's campaign said, no thanks, we know what we're doing. And actually they didn't. They made like a lot of mistakes and I, you know, like both publicly and privately tried to point them out. Just on Facebook, right alone. And it was just like I get it like there's a lot of ego and you don't like other people telling you how to do things better. And I certainly think in life on a macro level, not just an ad buying in general, like we all have to figure out how to both offer and take criticism sometimes ⁓ when we're all in the same common goal of Defeating fascism or or or something else right like you know it's like hey if we're on the same side and maybe we could like listen to each other but the walls go up and like when I was trying to tell people like hey you're messing things up maybe you should work with Facebook that wasn't taken kindly when Facebook was like we could help you they're like no thanks we don't need your help but they actually did I'm not saying Facebook is perfect certainly not now and not back then either but they did help us a lot and they helped Trump's campaign a lot and it was like always something that bothered me because I'm like, imagine if they had just taken the help. What would have happened differently just in that one little level? And maybe that would have made the difference in Wisconsin or other places. So I'm curious though, like what you think as you're rolling out receipts, like how much can you work with? Like some of the vendors want to help. Some of them don't mind waste because they want to make more money too. Like what's the balance that we can find there in terms of working? with the publishers on helping raise awareness on hopefully on the left, but both sides because they have to be nonpartisan. Myles Bugbee (37:06) Yeah, so I spoke to an SSP that worked a person in SSP who works with very closely with publishers and they told me that the publishers didn't get the political bump last year. And I was like, okay, well, what does that mean? And they were saying, well, a lot of these big publishers didn't see the expected increase. I was like, well, why is that? And well, let's think about it. Well, there are margins that come into play. There's subpar inventory that's being invested instead of going to premium publishers. There are any number of explanations. And there was a Mike, I think his name is Mike O'Sullivan. who recently sold his company to Tradesky. He posted a case of like one intermediary that took a 62 % cut below the surface. No one even knew about it. And that means that those dollars aren't going to the blueberry farmer. We were talking about the beginning of this conversation. They're not going to the people who actually are creating the goods. And I really do think the publishers are our allies in this case. Like the publishers are the people fundamentally who are the ones who are producing the content or they're the ones that are hosting that content. And I think that building those relationships is very important. The OEMs that have unique inventory rights, the VMVPD, so like the slings of the world, the Fubus, know, the YouTube TVs, a lot of them, if you have the goods, like, I know it's kind of silly, but like RBs used to have the tagline, we have the meats. Well, you do you have the goods? You know, do you have the inventory? And if you have those, the digital meats, then those are people that we should be working closely with. And if people don't have those meats and they don't have unique data, then the question is, what is the value that they're adding? And I think a lot of times, frankly, the value they're adding is convenience. And I use the analogy of like Uber Eats. By the end of this call, your listeners are really hungry. You're like, this is a talk about food. Did you eat breakfast today? Yeah. So I would say on that is like, you know anybody, I mean, we've all ordered delivery, but do know anybody who orders delivery for lunch and dinner 365 days a year? That's essentially what we're doing when we work with entities that are basically off, that are charging huge convenience premiums. And so I think we have to think clearly about. Keegan Goudiss (38:37) I'm getting really hungry, I'm gonna have blueberries, meat. ⁓ Myles Bugbee (39:00) There are cases where we may need to order delivery, like, hey, it's close to the election and we need additional scale. But I think being thoughtful about it is going to be very important. And so that's why working directly with the people who own the actual content and then only really using the delivery when we need are just two simple ways that we can cut down on fraud and cut down on costs. Keegan Goudiss (39:19) So say I start an organization, a pack, you know, we'll say Americans against Nazis seems like a good name right now. And I am able to raise like millions of dollars. How do I use receipts? Like what's, I, is there gonna be website? Like how do I access this data and how do I like make sure that the ad buyers I hire are going to pay attention to it? Myles Bugbee (39:47) Yeah, so there are two twofold. So one, this is a diagnostic tool based on ranges. There is no true database of full forensic information. is based on conversations. It's based on audits that I've done. And it's going to give you kind of like a baseline so you can build your own benchmarks. But the idea here is if you get a media plan, it's like, you know, here are these publishers, it's $50 CPM. And you're wondering, OK, how much my dollars are actually reaching voters? This is going to give you a rough baseline that you can work with. And then from there, we're adding in questions that you can ask your vendors. And these are questions as part of a partnership, where you are able to work with them to make sure that they are advocating for your interests, which the best agencies do. But you have to make sure the incentives are aligned. Like I come back to, this isn't like a good, bad situation. This is just, you have the right incentives in place? And so what I'm hoping is that this is a tool where you can basically say, if I'm paying $70 and it's a general market buy in Pittsburgh, ⁓ $7 CPM. Okay, that seems a little bit high based on the benchmark data. Why is that? Is that because of auction pressure? Like do we see a lot of bid density? If you're paying $70 in Pittsburgh on October 25th, and there's a competitive Senate race and competitive governor's race, okay, that may make sense. But if you're paying $70 in February of an off year, what's going on? So really, it's a tool to help people ask those questions. And the goal is that they can be more informed consumers and then get better value for their Keegan Goudiss (41:13) ⁓ And so like I, in my hypothetical organization, I just like, we'd reach out to you and be like, I need your help with this plan to, to like, can you provide some data points? Myles Bugbee (41:23) So basically in the concrete, it's a great question. So in terms of the concrete thing, you basically, it's going to act like a calculator where you can just type in those, that information, and then it's going to give you like, this is the expected range. This is the working media percentage. So we think of your dollar, going back to that example, 36 cents on a dollar. Well, based on the data that you provide, it looks like it could be anywhere between 30 cents and 60 cents of the dollar or 50 cents going to actual paid media. Here are the questions you can ask. And the goal is for these small and mid-size organizations that they can take that to their agency and they can ask these questions. And look, if people want to work with me, great. But bottom line is, I'm not going to able to service the entire market. And that isn't the goal. The goal here is to make sure that we are getting more value out of this as a space. And that at the end of the day, most of the people that I've talked to who go into this business, who are political consultants, actually want us to win elections. And so I think that there is a deficit of knowledge. And if a tool like this can help spark a conversation and shift the incentives in the right direction, then I think it would have been a success. Keegan Goudiss (42:19) What I'm curious like part of what I'm getting is like anybody in the public can use this like like are you going to do anything to like people on the right going to be looking at this too like is it public facing website or is it more just like you know you're you're going to vet who has access to that. Myles Bugbee (42:33) Yeah, and you know, I'm going to be I'm going to be frank here and say that's something that I've struggled with. And if you have advice, we can turn this into an advice session as we close here is that I've been debating whether there's something where we should have people log in and it's through like an organization where we can kind of vet that like the analyst Institute, basically, we have to log in to access it versus like broad access, because I don't want to be a deterrent. But I also don't want to be a situation where the only people end up using it are the people who want to roll back our rights and freedoms in this country. So, you know, it's a it's a tough balancing act. And I'm still figuring it out. So if you have have thoughts, I'd love to hear. Keegan Goudiss (43:04) I would invite our listeners to also, ⁓ Miles, is there a good way for people to contact you who listen to this? Myles Bugbee (43:11) Yeah, please. It's a long email address, it's miles, m-y-l-e-s at persuasionandpixels.com. also on LinkedIn and always happy to chat. Keegan Goudiss (43:21) Yeah, so definitely encourage everybody listening this also reach out to miles with their take on it. I agree it's. It's it is a tough choice, because the easier it is to use it. Arguably more people will take advantage of it, which we want, but also I could certainly see a scenario where a bunch of Republicans are using your work to help their plans and not us in the left or leg. I don't need that. They're still making the same mistakes. Hopefully that will happen. I think I would. I would if I were you, I would. I would I would do something like the analysis to have it have it gated like you know request access for username and password so there's at least some validity and if someone's like hi I'm Jane Doe at gmail.com maybe you can be like hey Jane like just curious who you're working with before you can Myles Bugbee (44:09) If they're at like an email domain like stevenmiller2028.com and like, sorry, I really don't want to use this tool. Keegan Goudiss (44:16) I just think like the most ironic thing to me is that ⁓ like the Republicans are the ones who are who are like like they built like their entire movement on grift. ⁓ And I will say that there were some stories with the Trump campaign like there was like a whistleblower. I remember last last cycle that came forward saying there was some analyses that were set up and there were some questionable things like moving money. So it's not like it is ⁓ not happening on their side. ⁓ I think it's more just like they're like, OK, well, like, you know, the the the grift is happening with cell phones and gold bars. And like, you know, once we collect all the money, we're still going to try to spend it well on reaching our people to then grift them further is maybe just a slightly different look on how you grift people. Whereas our side is not intentionally always grifting, but like we certainly don't care enough about the waste right now. And so I would argue that like that As you roll this out, it might be something you look at making it easier for people to use and and and seeing like, well, is it a bunch of IP addresses in red states using this? You know you could evaluate that too. ⁓ Miles, I really appreciate you coming on. This is really fascinating. I I. I am. Is there anything else you want to share about receipts or or perhaps about like what you think we can do better on that buying? Myles Bugbee (45:31) Yeah. Keegan Goudiss (45:45) on the left right now. Myles Bugbee (45:46) Well, first of all, Keegan, thank you so much for this forum and opportunity to share this with your audience. I think the big thing I would hope to convey to people is that this is a solvable problem. I think a lot of times people look at problems that frankly are complex and they require a lot of different actors to coordinate their actions. And you think that's just a lot. We can't do this. But this is something we can do. And as you point out throughout this conversation, we've adapted before. the other side is adapted as well. And that's what campaigns and elections are all about fundamentally is we are constantly learning and finding incremental improvements. And this is an area where we have fallen behind. And I think we need to be honest with ourselves. The first step here is to realize that we have fallen behind and recognize that this is something that we can take action on. And it's something that may make a difference in close elections. So I think if we're not asking the hard questions, then we're missing a real opportunity to make gains here. Keegan Goudiss (46:32) perfectly said that I also I'm hoping people listening to this aren't going and being like well this is why we should just buy more TV because that's not the solution either. I have had interesting conversations before with people in the space where like well like I feel like everybody's watching YouTube now so like we should just spend everything on YouTube and to your excellent point on incremental reach like it's just buying YouTube and broadcast TV is not the solution either. Myles Bugbee (46:58) Yeah, we have to fill the whole pie. And if you look at the Nielsen gauge data, it is so fragmented now. YouTube has a lot of value, but it's gotten a lot harder to reach people now because they're all over the place, which is why we have to do this the right way. Keegan Goudiss (47:09) sure. Well, here's to doing things the right way. I'm hoping 2026 we see some improvements on that that front and I look forward to hearing more about how receipts goes. I can't wait to hopefully use it for some of my own work down the road and ⁓ yeah, let us know how everything goes miles. Myles Bugbee (47:27) Excellent. Thank you so much. enjoy this conversation. Keegan Goudiss (47:30) Have a great day, meet you.