Bakari Seller and Wesley Donehue
Meet the the Guys Behind the Campaigns
03:43 - Source: CNN
Charleston, South Carolina CNN  — 

There are a lot of Americans who might want to give the people who make political ads a piece of their mind.

In South Carolina this week, they’re giving them awards this week.

“Essentially what we do is reward the year’s best political campaign work. From the television advertisements to the direct mailers — all of those things that annoy multitudes of voters across the country,” said Shane D’Aprile, co-owner of the magazine Campaigns & Elections, host of the Reed Awards and Conference, held in the heat of campaigning for the South Carolina primaries. Award winners will be announced Friday.

The seventh annual conference, named after Stanley Foster Reed, the founder of the publication Campaigns & Elections, celebrates campaign work for races to the White House as well offers a town hall for campaign professionals to gather and trade ideas.

CNN went to the event with Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative turned political commentator, and a camera crew to see what’s in store for campaigns of the future.

“It’s been great to do this in the atmosphere of a presidential campaign ” D’Aprile told CNN outside Charleston’s American Theatre. Across the state, Republican candidates held more than a dozen campaign events on the same day as the conference.

The draw is the access to the experts.

“We had a number of consultants who had worked on some major races in ’14 and ‘15 talk about some of the lessons they learned in terms of traditional and digital media, television integration, television to digital — that’s a huge topic for 2016,” D’Aprile said.

Campaigns are increasingly having to target voters in new ways, giving rise to a new class of young political consultants and even candidates who are changing the way successful campaigns are run. Check out the results in the video above.