Dems face ‘creative crisis,’ says Obama technology guru

The digital strategist for President Obama’s two presidential campaigns says Democrats are facing a “creative crisis” in ad making and online fundraising. 

Joe Rospars, who also founded Blue State Digital, said the sheer volume of ads and fundraising pleas that campaigns are able to produce is eclipsing the “quality, veracity, and cohesiveness of the content.”

{mosads}”While you may be able to get something accomplished through sheer volume of terrible content, people are tuning out and getting angry at the content based on something more than volume,” Rospars wrote in a Time magazine op-ed on Sunday. 

Just as one example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) sent at least 10 fundraising pleas on Sunday with titles such as “Boehner GONE,” “Quadruple-Match Unlocked!!!” and “Obama (straight from the heart).”

Both the DCCC and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have continuously outraised their Republican counterparts this cycle.

Despite the noise in the 2014 cycle, Rospars said he sees one glimmer of hope in Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) online strategy. 

“Over time, I suspect that the churn-and-burn approach to online fundraising will be bested by the respectful, playful, urgent approach of organizations like Franken’s,” he said. 

Rospars sees the “carpet-bombing of terrible TV ads” as worse than the deluge of fundraising emails campaigns are churning out. The Obama campaign model of “relentless testing and optimization” seems to have fallen away this cycle, he said.  

Rospars said 2016 campaigns must hire operatives with the right mixture of creativity and political judgment to prioritize the maxim: “Don’t be lame.”

“Our staff would dream up endless variations and approaches to inspiring someone to click and donate,” he said. “But we didn’t just throw anything at the wall to see what stuck; there was a creative filter applied to all that experimentation.”

Republican ad content is just as bad, he said, though the online pitches are not as frequent because the party relies more on big donors.