“People are desperate to turn digital into television and at the same time, they are desperate to have social be the thing that saves them from the small-dollar apocalypse.”

Andy Barr is Managing Director at Uplift, an agency that provides creative, ad buying, data and software to Democratic campaigns, firms and organizations throughout the country.

Prior to founding Uplift in 2015, Andy was a political consultant, a comms director for a US senate race and a political reporter at Politico and The Hill.

Andy is hyper-focused on creative across platforms and I invited him on the pod to talk to us about the themes he’s seeing, both for his own clients and in general and so much more.

Throughout the conversation, we delved into the importance of platform agnostic content, what’s changing in the industry, how we should be thinking about audience segmentation and reach (versus how we’re currently thinking about) and a whole lot more.

Our interview took place before the California Senate Primary, but as a Californian focused on digital advertising, Andy had an interesting perspective that he shared that is applicable to other campaigns moving forward.

He spoke at length about the importance of data, and respecting the nuance of what digital can and cannot do, and judging it accordingly.

We also talked about Scan, Uplift’s tool for tracking ad spending across Google, Meta and Snap.

Find links and all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com.