In a political campaign, the calendar is a dictator. Election Day will not move because the presentation needs another round of comments. The audience gets a vote. The rival is actively trying to spoil your plan. Then, at a fixed hour, the scoreboard lights up and excuses become decorative. This is a harsh way to work. It is also the central product of The Messina Group.
Jim Messina founded the firm in Washington in 2013 with two former campaign staffers, in a borrowed office with no windows. He had just managed Barack Obama's 2012 reelection, a campaign remembered for joining field organizing, testing, digital media and data into one operating machine. The new company did not simply offer campaign advice to more campaigns. It carried the machine into pharmacies, fitness apps, court settlements, corporate mergers and policy fights.
The proposition is easy to miss because the ingredients sound familiar. Public affairs firms know government. Communications agencies know stories. Data shops know audiences. Media buyers know inventory. Management consultants know frameworks. TMG's bet is that a consequential fight rarely respects those departmental borders. A message without distribution is a memo. Data without a decision is a dashboard. Access without public support can evaporate on contact with politics.
“Our guidance must be actionable and prescriptive, not merely descriptive.”The Messina Group on international campaign work
The moment the newspaper disappeared
The cleanest illustration comes from a legal notice, which is not where one normally goes looking for suspense. In the Takata bankruptcy, TMG's legal-media company, Signal Interactive Media, was retained to help notify more than 110 million potential claimants around the world. The plan was enormous: 73 domestic and international print outlets, more than 60 countries, 21 languages and a $2.1 million print publication effort.
Then the first thing failed: the medium. Hurricanes knocked out newspapers, television and radio in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where hundreds of thousands of possible claimants still needed to hear about the settlement. A traditional plan could no longer reach a traditional audience.
Signal changed its mind because reality had changed the channel. It moved to a bilingual paid digital campaign using search and display advertising. In 17 days, the notices generated more than 16 million impressions in Puerto Rico and another million in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The interesting achievement is not that digital ads exist. It is that the team treated the delivery mechanism as expendable and the outcome as sacred.
That distinction travels. When Strava's public heatmap exposed patterns around military locations, Greenbrier Partners, TMG's crisis communications arm, set up a war room at the company's headquarters. It handled the immediate media cycle, then helped move the response toward product changes, stronger privacy protections and a relaunch. When Express Scripts threatened to cut PillPack from its pharmacy network, TMG mapped the people who could change the outcome - insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and other influential stakeholders - and worked the connections and message. The firm later pointed to PillPack's eventual Amazon acquisition as the larger arc, though no outsider should confuse one adviser with the whole cause of a sale.
A company assembled like a campaign
TMG now looks less like a single consultancy than a coalition with a shared field office. Greenbrier handles high-stakes communications and crises. Amplify, co-founded with AL Media, buys political media and offers a competitive tracking system called Big AL. Signal applies audience research and advertising techniques to legal notice. Segal Communications, acquired in 2021, added consumer technology and lifestyle work. In 2024, TMG made a minority investment in Global Counsel, a policy advisory business with reach across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The firms said their aligned network represented roughly 150 people when the deal was announced.
One fight, five connected jobs
The customer list explains why the coalition exists. The firm's pages name technology companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber, Instacart and Strava; health businesses including PillPack and CaptureRx; nonprofits including the U.S. Soccer Foundation; political parties and national leaders; and companies facing regulation or transactions. TMG says it advised Quantum Energy Partners during the roughly $5 billion sale of Tug Hill and XcL Midstream to EQT, coordinating outside advisers and adding political and communications judgment to a process already full of lawyers and bankers.
This also explains where the company sits in the market. It is not merely a lobbyist, because it may buy ads, conduct opinion research or run a digital program. It is not merely a public relations firm, because the objective might be a regulatory outcome or a closed transaction rather than coverage. It is not a management consultancy, because the work often includes execution under public pressure. Clients appear to pay consulting and campaign fees; the company also builds value through stakes in specialist businesses. Its rates, investment terms and valuation are private.
The part worth stealing
Readers do not need a war room or a former presidential campaign manager to borrow the useful bits. Start by writing the outcome in a sentence that can become false. “Improve awareness” is fog. “Reach the people eligible for this settlement before the deadline” is a job. Next, identify the people who can actually move that outcome. They are rarely identical to the largest audience. Then connect research, message and distribution so that each can change the others.
The portable campaign
- Name a finish line, a deadline and the people whose behavior matters.
- Put research beside the people making creative and spending decisions.
- Test several messages cheaply before one message becomes expensive.
- Measure the behavior you need, not the metric that looks best in a meeting.
- Pre-authorize a pivot, including who can move money and how quickly.
TMG's own analysis of 2022 Senate advertising made the testing lesson wonderfully concrete. The firm found that John Fetterman's campaign ran many variants and spent about $2,500 per Google ad, while Mehmet Oz ran far fewer ads and averaged more than $21,000. Cost per ad is not the same thing as persuasion, and TMG said so. But variation creates chances to learn. The point of data is not to prove that the plan was clever. It is to expose which part is wrong while there is time to replace it.
There are conditions where this approach fits poorly. Campaign intensity can exhaust a team when the work has no real deadline. Message discipline can flatten a complicated truth. Targeting can create blind spots or ethical risks, especially when sensitive personal data is involved. A regulatory fight cannot be solved by narrative if the product itself is unsafe, the law is clear or the evidence is bad. And a consultant cannot supply legitimacy that a client has not earned.
The goal is specific, the audience can be mapped, time matters and leaders will act on new evidence.
The objective is vague, the institution cannot move, measurement rewards vanity or communications is asked to disguise a product problem.
The permanent race
The Messina Group began with a curious act of translation. It took the habits developed for a singular democratic event and applied them to institutions whose clocks are murkier and whose scoreboards are disputed. Thirteen years later, the firm's expanding roster includes creator strategy, AI transformation and data science alongside the older arts of message, field and media. The tools keep changing because the audience keeps moving.
What remains is the campaigner's suspicion of permanence. Today's best channel can go dark. Today's comforting story can become tomorrow's liability. Today's stakeholder map can be scrambled by one regulator, acquisition or storm. The practical advantage is not predicting every disruption. It is building an organization that can admit the plan lost before the mission does.