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The 2012 election cycle marks the first time digital directors have a seat at the senior strategy table, and Zac Moffatt intends to keep it that way.
Zac Moffatt is digital director for the Romney for president campaign. In 2009, te cofounded the Republican digital consulting firm Targeted Victory, which worked on Marco Rubios Senate campaign. A former associate chief of staff to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Moffatt also served as the RNC's director of political education.
C&E: How has online strategy evolved on your side of the aisle over the last four years?
Zac Moffatt: You can only be successful as a department if you have a seat at the table and you're considered a core, day-to-day member. The difference between the Romney campaign and the McCain campaign in 2008- the digital director here is a senior staffer, which is the same level as a political director or a communications director. That means you become a proactive member of the team, as opposed to a reactive member. If I spent the entire day focusing on what every other department wanted us to focus on, things would look very different. We've been very fortunate between Matt Rhoades, Beth Myers, everyone else and the governor. We have the resources necessary to be successful and the staffing necessary to be successful. From a data perspective, we've sat down and tried to determine what we learned in 2008 and made it a data-first component, but had a standard, centralized data management platform that powered everything that we did. So everything got fed into one location, and all of our online targeting determinations are based upon that. Standardization allows us to create alignment from our mail programs to our phone programs to our volunteer programs to online. Historically, they probably would be more siloed; you're always pulling lists and compiling lists, and that would become very problematic.
C&E: Any bumps along the way in integrating digital so fully into the campaign hierarchy?
Moffatt: The execution was always going to be the challenge because this is the first cycle. Every time we write an organizational plan, it's not like we can go back to...