Answer extracted from the Pod Save America podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How do political consultants play a role in perpetuating outdated digital strategies?
Political consultants create structural financial incentives that discourage innovation — producing 20 tailored digital ads instead of one TV spot eats into their profit margins, forcing a choice between paying bills and winning elections. This conflict of interest locks campaigns into outdated strategies, which is why Priorities USA built an in-house team insulated from those pressures.
The Profit Motive vs. Campaign Victory
Consultants typically work on commission or retainer models tied to total ad spend. When a campaign consolidates money into fewer, more sophisticated digital campaigns, the consultant's fee shrinks accordingly. This creates a perverse incentive to fragment spending across more placements — generating higher billable hours and management fees — even when a consolidated approach would be more effective.
The problem deepens because consultants lack skin in the game on election outcomes. A consultant profits whether the strategy wins or loses; a campaign's survival depends entirely on results. As Danielle Butterfield explains in the episode, this misalignment has calcified American political advertising into routines that prioritize consultant revenue over voter persuasion.
Priorities USA's Break from Consultant-Driven Models
When Butterfield joined Priorities USA in 2017 as Digital Director, fresh off the Hillary Clinton campaign, she negotiated to build an entirely in-house team. The mission was explicit: focus purely on innovation rather than outsourcing to consultants driven by profit margins. That structural shift allowed the organization to experiment with platform-specific creative, to compress creative timelines, and to test approaches that would have seemed too risky or low-fee under traditional consultant arrangements.
Under her leadership as Executive Director, Priorities USA evolved from a traditional presidential super PAC into an organization anchored in digital research, infrastructure, and innovation across multiple election cycles. The in-house model removed the financial conflict: money spent on research and data doesn't pad a consultant's commission, yet it directly sharpens campaign effectiveness. This detail — the deliberate construction of an organization designed to escape consultant incentive misalignment — sits at the heart of why Priorities USA has become such a consequential player in modern political advertising.
"Nine out of the ten top YouTube ads in 2024 were just 30-second ads that ran on TV first. We are quite literally practically taking 30-second ads that we run on TV and then putting them on YouTube and expecting people to watch them — and that is quite literally lighting money on fire."
Danielle Butterfield — Executive Director of Priorities USA. Joined the organization in 2017 following the Hillary Clinton campaign, where she served as Digital Director before negotiating to build an in-house team insulated from consultant incentives. Under her leadership, Priorities USA transitioned from a traditional presidential super PAC into a digital-first organization focused on research, infrastructure, and innovation across election cycles, operating independently of consultant-driven fee structures.
The quote illustrates the concrete cost of consultant inertia. When the top-performing ads on a modern platform are simply recycled 30-second spots designed for television, it signals that nobody is truly optimizing for digital audiences — they are optimizing for what is easy to bill and what has historically worked. Butterfield's point about "lighting money on fire" is not hyperbole; in the full episode, she details how Priorities USA's research uncovered the exact voter segments these TV-to-digital conversions fail to reach.
See also
Why is running TV ads on YouTube a failed strategy for Democratic campaigns?
Nine out of the ten top YouTube ads in 2024 were simply 30-second TV ads repurposed for the platform, wasting resources because digital audiences have different expectations and engagement patterns than television viewers.
Did Democrats close the digital spending gap between 2016 and 2024?
In 2024, Democrats actually outspent Republicans two to one on digital advertising, so the spending gap is no longer the problem. The real issue is how ineffectively the money is deployed across platforms and audience segments.
What is Priorities USA and what has its mission become since 2016?
Priorities USA evolved from a traditional presidential super PAC into an organization focused on digital research, infrastructure, and innovation to reach voters that traditional campaigns struggle to engage effectively.