About Us

If you want to win a campaign you have to move fast, your moves have to be right, and every one of your ads have to do the most important thing: actually move voters. Historically, there’s been a tradeoff between being right all the time (a data-driven evidence based approach,) being fast enough to seize the moment (an opportunity driven gut and judgement based approach,) and being persuasive (running ads that actually work). 

With our technology, we’ve rejected that tradeoff. At Tavern, we’ve built the intelligence to say yes to both evidence and opportunity, combining them into the ultimate winning machine. 

We start with a single decision that a campaign will face and use best in class technology and analysis to:

  1. Try every possible approach across a wide range of situations.

  2. Evaluate what worked overall and by situation.

  3. Feed the data into a system that learns from trial and error.

  4. Do it incredibly fast

  5. Make the most persuasive ads in the industry.

This lets us come to the right decisions faster, it makes us smarter because every test we run makes our next test even more effective, and ultimately it allows us to write, produce and place the most effective ads in politics. The more you test across more situations, the more the machine learns. The smarter the whole system gets. Our customers today inherit tens of thousands of trials and enjoy world-class campaign communications from the first day they work with us. 

Since we started, we’ve assembled more data on what persuades voters than anyone in the world. And we’ve taken on more and more big problems in politics with this framework. Our goal is to improve and automate every skill-based role in politics so that our customers win at an unfair rate.

To make the system described above, we have three layers of technology: each one is designed by a real person who has poured their brain and heart into their part of the machine. Here’s a blurb about some of the great people who lead our team:

Matt Lackey, CEO

Matt is our founder & CEO. He doesn’t design experiments or write models any more, but he wrote the first version of our measurement and inference infrastructure. He’s spent his whole career in politics focused on how we get to the right answers even when good data is scarce; which is exactly the skill early Tavern needed to cold-start the compounding intelligence. He worked on Secretary Buttigieg’s presidential campaign in 2020, President Obama’s campaign in 2008 (in Indiana!) and bounced around technology, advocacy, and philanthropic organizations in between.  

Justin Burchard, CTO

Justin has spent more than twenty years in progressive political technology, ultimately building the infrastructure that allows Tavern to run thousands of experiments and learn all the time.  He served most recently as CTO of The Movement Cooperative and previously as Head of Data Research at Civis Analytics. As a consultant, he led signature initiatives for the AFL–CIO, including building its political data warehouse and the live reporting and dashboarding layer that ran on top of it all.

Jessica Reis, Head of Research + Strategy

Jessica brings the campaign strategy layer to Tavern’s research + strategy, working directly with our partners on how to win races and change public opinion. She brings two decades of high-level experience in opinion research, message development, and campaign strategy, and  previously served in leadership roles at Bully Pulpit International (BPI) and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR). Jess advised the Biden-Harris campaign on their counter-disinfo strategy, she has worked on presidential-level races outside the US, and she’s counseled leading brands on reputation. Jess speaks Spanish, is originally from Minnesota, and has personally conducted research in 25 countries around the globe.