How to Win in the Media Thunderdome
Your message is fighting for attention in the most brutally competitive information environment in human history. Attention is finite and content is abundant. Your political communications need to adapt to this reality, and if they don’t, you’ll spend two thirds of your total budget screaming into the void. Or without the metaphor, you’ll spend millions of dollars running ads no one watches.
Political ads are still made and bought as if a captive audience exists. Your ad is not an exciting new movie trailer (and even if it’s shot like one, voters know the difference). For the average voter, political ads are a nuisance standing between the present and the reveal of the masked singer.
So the instinct is to trap the audience: buy the placement they can’t skip, force the ad onto the screen, and count the impression as a mind reached. It’s a comforting idea, and it’s wrong because “unskippable” never meant watched. Anyone who’s gotten up during the commercial break, or scrolled their phone while one played, already knows this. A forced placement guarantees delivery. It guarantees nothing about attention.
At Tavern, we treat every placement as skippable (even when it’s technically not), because to the modern viewer – it is. We build the ads that earn eyeballs, getting the biggest bang for our partners’ buck. Rather than building our plans around the available inventory, we build our media to keep voters’ attention whether the ad is airing on TV, a 30 second unskippable, or 15 seconds they only need to actually watch for 3.
What everyone (including us) got wrong
For years, the political consultants and the campaigns they work on operated on a grim trade-off. Persuasion and virality are historically anti-correlated: things go viral because people already agree and want to co-sign them, not because they changed anyone’s mind. That leaves every leader with a false choice: be earnest and persuasive, or chase clicks and clout.
Our 2025 research, which we’ve since replicated, broke that assumption. There is no built-in trade-off between persuasion and attention. You can be interesting and move people. Boring vs. interesting and persuasive vs. not persuasive turn out to be independent axes. This is distinct from contagious vs. persuasive. That single finding is the foundation of an explosion of techniques we’ve developed to change minds and win votes.
A scoreboard for attention
The skip button is the most honest focus group in politics. Most skippable ads get skipped at the five second mark: the instant that button appears, the viewer is gone. That’s the bar and traditional political communications almost never clear it.
Our ads clear it by a wide margin. In a recent statewide campaign, our best 15-second spot held 45.8% of everyone it reached all the way through. Nearly half, at a moment when the norm is a near-total drop-off. It was the top performer on YouTube across all of the spending in the race.
In that same campaign, our best 30-second spot built on footage of the place voters actually live held more than one in five viewers for the full half-minute, across 330K+ impressions.
That’s the new game: find ways to win attention while smuggling in the message you want to deliver.
One weird trick to win the battle
It turns out that over the course of tens of thousands of video tests, we learned something wild. The overwhelming majority of the persuasive effect came through the audio track: the argument, delivered in voice. The visual track carried far less of the persuasion.
We learned that by holding the audio constant and varying the visual, you can dial attention up or down without touching the argument or the persuasive impact. The result is a visually compelling video wrapped around a tight, persuasive case for a candidate or policy. It sounds like a parlor trick, but it’s really a breakthrough because of the economics of paid media:
Skippable inventory is cheaper and more abundant. Win attention on skippable placements and you deliver persuasive content at a fraction of the cost, without ever running out of inventory. To say it differently – we can generate content that beats the skip, but still pay skippable rates. It’s a cheat code and unlocks so much more budget.
Attention is predictable. The platforms are extraordinarily good at knowing what holds a given viewer. Certain formats, such as the “oddly satisfying” cuts people rewatch on purpose, work again and again. We build reusable templates that reliably win attention and graft top-tier political messaging onto them.
You can win the attention war. Whether you’re buying skippable or nonskippable placements, TV or Youtube, or on any platform where voters spend time, the most important fight is the war to keep their attention. When you combine visuals that hold attention with tight, persuasive audio, you can keep voters from clicking skip, picking up their phones, or walking into the kitchen for a snack.
Our position
Persuasive impacts are shrinking across every political medium — partly due to the sheer explosion of content, partly to the quiet erosion of attention paid to forced placements. We don’t accept that effects have to keep getting smaller. We get in the arena and fight for attention. And we’re learning how to do it better every day.
That position changes everything downstream: what we test, what we make, and where we spend. Premium inventory has to prove it holds people, same as everything else, and every ad we ship has to be good enough to survive a skip button whether its placement has one or not. Voters decide what gets watched. We build for that verdict.
That is our winning machine: one that makes ads people actually choose to watch. Real views turn into real minds changed. And that turns into wins.
Want to win more? Get in touch. And watch our ads here.
