With a life-long passion for business and politics, 2017 MSU alum Tim Briseno has found his place working at a digital political marketing firm in Washington, DC. His interest was sparked early on by political and business television shows, visits to the Jackson County Republican Headquarters and learning about history and government in school.
Now Tim lives in Washington, D.C. and contributes to history at digital political marketing firm, Targeted Victory. Working as an Analyst on the Ad Operations team, he acts as a strategic digital political advisor to help campaigns track ad performance, optimize ads for effectiveness and advise clients on advertising tactics.
The Ad Operations team oversees any and all advertising operations. They publish ads across networks and work to continuously improve metrics and efficiency. In short, they oversee all of Targeted Victory’s advertising.
On a day-to-day basis, Tim consults with client services teams to advise strategic marketing techniques and does political consulting for various campaigns and clients. Every week, Tim meets with different teams to review metrics on live campaigns.
When starting a campaign, the team puts a lot of effort into the initial planning and brainstorming. With help from the client team, they create a unique strategic media plan that helps to define goals and set baselines before the campaign begins. “We believe that creative, audience, context and user experience must all work together to achieve an effective ad,” Tim says.
The last 10 years have changed dramatically in terms of political marketing. In the 2004 election cycle, no one had ever used digital before, partly because Facebook wasn’t created until 2003 and Twitter until 2006. Obama and his campaign team were the first to effectively use the Internet to market a politician.
The Obama campaign communicated with the public differently than almost any politician had before. It was through social media that Obama’s campaign was able to receive direct feedback from people on the issues that troubled them most.
In 2009, after seeing the use of online digital political marketing in their defeat, a group of Romney campaign staff from the 2008 campaign decided to band together and create one of the first Republican digital political marketing firms, Targeted Victory.
Since then, Targeted Victory has helped pioneer and has seen new trends in the digital political advertising world. They saw early on that digital was the future of elections and campaigning so they worked to grow as a credible political information source.
Today digital campaigning has “completely taken over.” Tim says, “The Internet blew the doors off of mass marketing. Until recently, we never had the capability to directly see politician’s thoughts in real time as tweets or posts. “
One of Tim’s favorite things about Targeted Victory is being in the middle of everything. He enjoys seeing what is happening in the country throughout real time and then having the power to work with client teams to adjust advertising messages, or even create new ads, in response to the current political climate. Since getting hired in February, Tim has placed almost half a million dollars in ads.
Tim has married his two loves– business and politics– into a career. While majoring in political science and minoring in marketing at Missouri State, he was able to visualize the importance of politicians marketing themselves. He was passionate about learning what drives people to engage in advertisements, and how ads grab attention. Now, he is able to practice this every day at Targeted Victory as he works on campaigns for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Mitt Romney and others.