Interview With Brad Parscale, Controversial Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager

During the Days of Communication in Rovinj, Brad Parscale, no less, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s Campaign Manager, addressed the communications industry experts. After his talk, Davor Bruketa, Chairman of the HURA (the Croatian Association of Communications Agencies) Board and Creative Director at the Bruketa&Žinić&Grey Agency, had an exclusive one-on-one interview on the stage with Brad Parscale, asking him questions interesting to everyone in the room, including the media and digital experts.

Watch the entire interview here. The registration is free.

The controversial campaign run in 2016 is still a topic of lively discussions. It triggered many dilemmas about the use of personal data available to advertisers over social networks, Facebook in particular. Parscale was a Digital Director during the presidential elections of 2016, but in the aftermath of the election results, he was recently promoted to an overall Campaign Manager.

The Future of Data-Driven Advertising by Brand Parscale

In Rovinj Parscale had a talk entitled: “The Future of Data-Driven Advertising” addressing the opportunities offered by skilful data management, which he believed had been decisive for the victory in the U.S. presidential elections.

Parscale revealed that by skilful target group segmenting they had managed to impact the decision of undecided voters and to attract their votes that had been crucial for the election victory. He highlighted that real time data and social response over digital channels had facilitated the formulation of political messages in an unprecedented way for a campaign.

Parscale underlined that it is wrong to have separate teams working on content creation, data collection and target group identification. It is essential to have cooperation and data-based decision making. Parscale said that the data obtained over digital channels had been given to creative people in charge of content creation and in turn placed to the users to take note of their response. He pointed out that 5.9 million different advert versions had been created for the campaign. All content was fed into a database and by machine learning new insights were gained that were useful to the creative team. He specified that 150,000 ads had been created on a daily basis and that they had constantly learned as much as they could.

He said that the presidential campaign he was in charge of had been special because the communication had been based on digital channels, i.e. on the data collected over digital channels affecting the communication management in all other segments.

Davor Bruketa about the Interview

Davor Bruketa said the following about the interview: “I believe that we have been given the answers to the questions we were all interested in. In fact, many might wonder why such a controversial speaker like Parscale was nominated. It is because the Days of Communication is a festival presenting the current global practices in the communications industry. Our aim is to enable our peers to have a discussion with and ask questions to those individuals who create global trends, no matter whether they agree with them or not. We cannot ignore the fact that they have an impact on the industry.”

“With virtually 20 years of experience in digital media strategies, Brad Pascale is today CEO of the Parscale Strategy company engaged in political consulting and digital media for Fortune 500 biggest U.S. corporations,” said Dunja Ivana Ballon, Director of Days of Communication and Festival Programme Director and went on to say: “We believe that the biggest success is to allow colleagues to have a discussion with the world leaders who dictate the trends in our industry, and that’s why I’m proud of this year’s list of speakers for the Days of Communication which is definitely the strongest ever.”

Source: HURA
Photo: Matija Habljak/PIXSELL