It’s been a busy time here at SBDigital, and we’re thrilled to continue that momentum with our latest announcement: the introduction of Carly Neubauer, our new Vice President! We love doing interviews to celebrate changes, so please enjoy our conversation with Carly below.
What drew you to SBDigital, and what excites you most about stepping into this VP role?
I’ve known SBDigital for a long time. I’ve been acquainted with them since their Switchboard days, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for the firm and the work they do. Before this role, I was running my own LLC, Golden Hour Media Solutions, and I’d been having a great time cultivating client relationships on my own. But solopreneurship is a gigantic lift, as anyone who’s done it knows.
I reconnected with Sulli Norris-Cole recently, and we got to talking about what I was working on versus what SBD was building out, and it turned out to be almost exactly the same thing. I had been doing work in the influencer and creator space, and we had the same philosophy about how to bring that to political and advocacy work, which we both believe is needed more than ever in 2026. Having that shared vision was huge. And the idea of having a team alongside me to actually help execute on those ideas was really exciting.
But at the end of the day, it always comes back to the people. I’ve worked at agencies large and small, on the sales side, on the buying side, on the commercial side, and every single time, what matters most is who you’re doing the work with. So when I made the decision to go back in-house at a firm, I knew I had to genuinely love the people. I’m in my second week now, and I can say with complete confidence that I’m glad I trusted my instincts because it is absolutely the case. Everyone I’ve met here is kind, talented, and smart. I’m really happy to be joining forces and building toward something together.
You’ve worked on many campaigns, ranging from Cory Booker for Senate in 2013 to Independents for Kamala in 2024. How has political media buying changed over the course of your career, and what’s the most important lesson you’ve carried forward?
The evolution has been extraordinary, and I mean that genuinely. When I started, broadcast and cable were king. Addressable cable was the shiny new tool everyone was excited about, terrestrial radio was the only audio buy on the table, and digital was an afterthought I had to fight to get added as a line item. We were reaching voters on one or two screens across a very finite number of channels.
Back then, digital persuasion meant display banners and a notification that a friend liked Barack Obama’s Facebook page. Then the programmatic explosion happened, and for years nobody really knew what that word meant, just that buyers knew it made their jobs easier when launching display ads. Then highly targeted video and static ads took over Facebook, and the Obama 2012 campaign showed everyone what was possible when you actually invested in digital. Campaigns started to get hip to it and spend real money. Then in 2016 Facebook was weaponized to manipulate an election, bots flooded the system, and political social advertising changed forever and the wild west got regulated fast.
From there, digital went from scarce to oversaturated to fragmented across every screen, platform, and format imaginable, all within the span of my career. Today we are not buying two screens. We are buying every screen, every format, every channel.
With that growth comes a level of complexity that a lot of buyers frankly are not keeping up with. There are too many people in this space who are not paying attention to inventory quality and not thinking critically about what happens when you let agentic AI fully take the wheel inside these platforms. When you hand Meta or Google’s automation total control without meticulous targeting parameters, exclusion lists, and placement settings, your candidate’s ad ends up in a bot farm or adjacent to AI slop content that would make comms teams lose their minds. While automation can be a powerful tool if used smartly, it is *not* a replacement for a strategist who knows what they are doing.
Creatively, we now know there is no longer a one size fits all format. Voters do not want to see a TV spot in their IG feed. Big TV shoots still have their place, but the highest performing social creative right now is local creators. They are becoming the new creative format on social, and I love to see it because it works. History is repeating itself. In 2010 I was fighting to add digital to the TV buy. Now I am fighting to add creators to the Meta buy.
The biggest lesson I have carried forward is simple: you will always need to be wherever voters are spending their time. That never changes. What changes constantly are the channels, the formats, and the tech. The consultants and buyers who win never stop learning, never stop tracking how people consume media, and never let their clients play it safe. Because if your candidate is not taking smart risks, their opponent is. And that is a race you cannot afford to lose.
A lot of your clients are advocacy organizations and mission-driven brands. What draws you to that kind of work versus traditional consumer marketing?
It’s kind of just ingrained in me. I was a political science major, so it was always there. I’ve always been someone who loves justice and loves seeing the right thing play out. The underdog winning. And advocacy and political work hits differently because of it.
That said, I want to be honest: as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that it’s okay if your work isn’t your entire identity. When I was younger, I felt like everything I worked on had to be deeply meaningful and closely aligned with my values. And while I think that’s a wonderful thing to have, I’ve also since tried other paths. I’ve done commercial work and it’s a lot of fun working on brands you love. When I worked on introducing an accessible luxury Black-owned jewelry brand with zero name recognition during my BerlinRosen days, that was a ton of fun.
But the difference for me ultimately comes down to this: in commercial work, there is one north star, and it’s revenue, sales, and ROI. If you don’t hit the number, you’ve failed. In mission-driven and political work, yes, there’s always efficiency and ROAS to think about, but you’re not just driving conversions. You’re changing policy. You’re shifting public opinion. You’re winning elections and moving the needle on things that actually matter to people’s lives. That’s what keeps pulling me back.
There’s also something important to say about the media landscape we’re all operating in. What I love about advocacy and political work is that we’re using this oversaturated space for good. We’re not trying to push product. But because voters are so oversaturated by media consumption options, you have to use it smartly. Voters can spot inauthenticity immediately. So the challenge is to use this space for good and use it well.
And I’ll add one more thing: the most enduring and fascinating challenge of this work is attribution. How do you tie what you’re doing online to that offline win? In commerce, the metric is clear. In political and advocacy work, the ultimate question is whether you moved the vote or needle. Figuring out how your digital campaign activity connects to that outcome is one of the most interesting puzzles in this industry. That challenge never goes away, and honestly, it’s part of what keeps this work so compelling to me.
You have experience in co-building a digital advertising practice from the ground up. What’s the hardest part of standing something up that didn’t exist before, and how did you approach it?
The hardest part was making sure we weren’t viewed as just another add-on service. My former workplace had grown from a communications firm into something much larger, and within that world, we were the ads team inside the digital team. My SVP had to build it up from essentially three people, and the biggest challenge was fighting the perception that paid media was a bolt-on rather than an integrated, essential part of most campaign strategies from day one.
So we were doing two things simultaneously. Internally, we were building processes, project management systems, and workflows in real time, formalizing things like making sure people submitted a proper request for a media plan instead of catching us in the hallway and asking for one on the spot. But at the same time, we were running firm-wide trainings, because everyone else at the firm needed to understand what we actually did and why it mattered. What is a display ad? What is programmatic? How does paid media integrate into a client strategy from the beginning rather than getting tacked on at the end?
The key was translation. These might feel like simple concepts to those of us who live in this world, but they weren’t to people who had never worked in digital. You have to strip out the jargon, meet people where they are, and show proof of concept with real campaigns that worked and explain why. Make it tangible. And make the case not just for what digital is, but for why it needs to be in the room from day one.
On top of all that, we had to keep up with constantly changing platform policies. This was a period when political advertising was getting banned on certain platforms entirely, going on and off, sometimes disappearing and then coming back. Staying ahead of that, and keeping our internal teams and clients informed throughout, was a whole additional layer of work. It was a tall order, but I loved it.
In a previous role, you were brought in specifically to bridge the gap between digital and legacy PR teams. What’s your philosophy for getting two very different cultures to actually work together?
It was probably my hardest job to date. And my number one takeaway is: start socially first. Before you can expect any kind of seamless professional collaboration, you have to get people comfortable with each other as human beings. Low-stakes, low-pressure environments: happy hours, team outings, just getting the two specific teams in the same room together without an agenda. At bigger agencies, firm-wide events happen all the time, but you rarely force two specific teams to just sit with each other and get to know each other. That has to happen first. That’s how you build the baseline trust that everything else depends on.
Then, once you have that foundation, I’m a huge believer in small, interactive, in-person skill trainings rather than giant Zoom calls where someone talks at a room or screens for an hour. That’s not how most people learn, especially in a world where we’re all virtual and juggling a dozen things at once. So we did smaller, cohort-style sessions led by experts from both sides, because it wasn’t just about teaching the PR teams what digital is. We could learn from them, too. Understanding their world makes you better at deploying digital tactics within it.
In those sessions, we didn’t come in with a rigid agenda. We started by asking: what do you want to know? What are your gripes? What are the actual pain points of working across these two teams? Because a lot of the friction isn’t about industry knowledge, it’s about process and communication. No question was too basic.
A big part of it was helping people understand just how broad the word ‘digital’ actually is. Influencer marketing, organic social, content creation, analytics, social listening, online conversation shaping: these are not foreign or intimidating concepts. They are communications tools. And once PR teams realized that a lot of what they were already doing, like landing YouTube features, organizing creator coverage at events, or monitoring online conversation, was digital all along, the wall started to come down.
And then the final piece, the thing that worked best, was embedding digital experts directly onto individual PR teams rather than keeping everyone in one central silo. A resident digital expert who sits with a beauty and wellness team, for example, becomes their person. The PR team brings the subject matter expertise; the digital person brings the tactical execution for that specific client. That integration worked.
AI-driven discoverability is increasingly part of your toolkit. How are you thinking about its role in paid media and advocacy campaigns right now?
AI discoverability is essentially SEO for the modern era, and honestly, the two are becoming the same thing. It’s what you’re seeing when you type a question into Google and a paragraph answer appears at the top. We’re all interacting with that every day. And the question for our clients is: how do they show up in those spaces, and how do we shape that?
The way we approach it is by making sure that the content a client or candidate has out in the world is constructed so that large language models can pull the right information and surface it accurately. There is a very fine line between strategically shaping how a client appears online and misinformation, and we will always stay firmly on the right side of that. Everything has to be accurate and factual. But within that, we want real control over the narrative. That means coordination across every channel: what’s on the website, what’s on social media, what’s going out through earned media, what’s in articles being written about them. If we have an earned team in the mix, we make sure the messaging is cohesive all the way through.
One area campaigns consistently underinvest in is the website itself. Campaign websites tend to be optimized for fundraising, with donation pushes and video, which is great, but the issues pages and substantive content get left behind. Keeping those current and comprehensive is now an AI discoverability issue. That’s what large language models are going to pull when someone searches for your candidate.
The honest challenge is budget. For smaller campaigns, this kind of investment can feel out of reach. But for larger statewide or national campaigns, AI discoverability is one of the most important things they are not thinking about right now.
And honestly, one of the things I care most about is making sure nonprofits and mission-driven organizations, especially those representing underserved communities, have a voice in this new AI-driven search landscape. When people turn to Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity to learn about a cause, what shows up tends to be the organizations with the biggest budgets shaping what gets amplified and deemed credible online. The good news is there are targeted, cost-effective ways to change that, and this is work that can scale to almost any budget. Getting these organizations into that conversation is something I am really excited to work on.
You’ve worked across paid media buying, influencer partnerships, SEO, and PR integration. Is there one discipline you’d say is most underestimated by clients, and why?
The biggest shift in how I think about this work is that creator networks and organic social cannot be a campaign season purchase. They have to be built. The right did not win the organic social battle in 2024. They won it over years, investing in creators and communities long before any election was on the horizon, and by the time ballots were cast, that trust was already baked in.
That is the model. A 24/7, 365 organic presence. Candidates showing up consistently in the communities they want to represent, through voices those communities already trust, long before they need a vote. What moved voters back toward Democrats in the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey races was economic concerns they could feel in their daily lives. Cost of living. Affordability. Those issues hit completely differently coming from a trusted local voice in someone’s feed than from a polished TV spot.
I still see resistance on campaigns in real time. But what I care about is making sure we are not just catching up. We need to be building something durable that lives beyond a single cycle. Because that is exactly what the other side did. And it worked.
What’s one thing you’re hoping to build or change in your new role here that you haven’t had the chance to do yet in your career?
The core of everything I’ve done has been digital advertising. That’s been the through-line across my whole career, even as the landscape has changed dramatically. Influencer marketing is genuinely a newer territory for me. I only got into it seriously in the last year, largely on the commercial side, and that experience taught me a lot about what to do, what not to do, and how to think about translating those lessons into the political space. Honestly, commercial influencer work is oversaturated and not very fulfilling for me. The goals are too narrow. But learning it got me really fired up about what influencer work could look like when you use it for something that actually matters.
I want to take everything I’ve built across digital advertising, team-building, and working across disciplines, and apply it to growing what SBDigital is doing in the creator and influencer space. Working with Jae Masino has already been awesome. She has already taught me a lot, and together we want to create something that gives campaigns and organizations access to creator infrastructure they have never had before. The goal is to take Vox Pop to the moon. Stay tuned! 😉
Last question, and this one is important: Do you have any theories about what Beyoncé’s Act III is going to be, and when she’s going to release it?
Okay. I am a self-described delusional member of the Beyhive, and I will own that completely. Here is my theory, which I have already shared with several colleagues and will now put firmly on the record, which is a risk I’m willing to take.
Beyoncé released Act I on July 29th, 2022, a new music Friday. She released Act II on March 29th, 2024. The only Friday in 2026 that falls on the 29th is this month, May 29th, which is also a new music Friday and falls exactly two years after Act II. She has released an album every two years. That’s my prediction, and I’m sticking to it. My only concern is that this theory has gotten a little too loud across the Beyhive, and she’s going to see all of it and decide we’ve gotten too cute and change the date just to remind us who’s in charge. Which, honestly, is completely fair. But May 29th is the date, and if it’s not May 29th, it’s because we outsmarted ourselves.
As for what Act III sounds like, I’m fully on board with the rock theory. Tina Turner is her number one idol, the queen of rock, and there are nods to Tina throughout Act I and Act II, in the styling, the visual presentation, the references. There’s a lot of purple throughout, which is very Prince. And she’s called herself Black Betty, which is a rock song. The clues are all there. I am ready. You will absolutely be annoyed by me from me the moment it drops.