This election cycle, you may have noticed these types of banner advertisements as you browse the web: ?Romney: Let?s fight for the AMERICA WE LOVE,? or ?Obama: 2012 Starts Now.? It?s not likely these are random ads ? you?ve probably been targeted based on your interests.
When you visit websites or shop for items online, bits of your information and various pieces of data from the sites you visit are embedded in your browser cookies. For instance, if you?re shopping for shoes during the day, later you may come across ads for shoe companies. These cookies help advertising agencies identify your interests and deliver ads you will most likely want to see.
Campaigns and organizations in the political space quickly realized that online advertising could work in their favor, if done right, specifically targeting people whose support they need the most.
Rich Masterson, co-founder and CEO of the right-leaning online advertising platform CampaignGrid, studied the inefficiencies of online political advertising at the congressional level in 2008. He found that even if a campaign bought a choice ad spot on TV, the ad still served millions of uninterested people. The next step was figuring out how to get ads delivered to the right voters with the same accuracy as direct mail.
Masterson says CampaignGrid accessed the national voter file, a public record that listed approximately 180 million Americans in 2008. They wanted to figure out how many voters for whom they could match online data with offline data.
When a listed voter enters her address, phone number and name on an ecommerce site, a dating site or something similar, ad agencies can confirm that she is the same person, that she is a registered Republican or Democrat, whether she voted in the primaries and whether she previously contributed to a campaign.
In the end, the team matched almost 150 million people in the voter file ? that is, 150 million voters that CampaignGrid could engage with political advertising ? with their cookie pool, much like a corporate entity does to target potential customers. As a result, clients no longer needed to serve ads to people who weren?t involved in the political process.
If a campaign bought a choice ad spot on TV, the ad still served millions of uninterested people.
According to Masterson, most political consultants say that Obama or Romney will win the 2012 election by somewhere between 4 and 10 points, showing that the undecided voters and swing voters are the ones to target for advertising.
?That means that if you just advertise to everybody online, then something between 90% and 96% of your ad spend is not targeted to the swing vote,? he says. ?If you just want to advertise to voters, the unfortunate truth is that about 50% of Americans who are eligible to vote, don?t vote. Through microtargeting, we can direct the ads by voter history in specific battleground states or battleground districts.?
But true success really lies in how effective these ads are. Do they actually make a difference in each voter?s decision process? It?s still difficult to tell.
?I can?t give you a specific answer, like X number of impressions leads to Y number of people voting,? says Jim Walsh, co-founder and CEO of progressive online ad network DSPolitical. ?The only way that you can tell that any kind of tactic is working is to look at the polling. And it depends on what kind of online advertising you?re doing when trying to determine how to gauge your effect. There?s turnout advertising, there?s persuasion advertising before that ? so you need to tailor your measures of success to the tactic employed.?
In the private sector, Walsh says that usually around 40 views of a similar ad equals brand lift. In other words, someone must see an ad 40 times before it really makes an impact on him. He said that there?s no reason psychologically why that wouldn?t be true in the political space too, which is why DSPolitical?s goal is repetition.
Masterson explains that targeted online ads can be anywhere between 4 and 10 times as effective as regular ads, or what he calls ?run-of-network? advertising ? and the reason comes down to mathematics. For example, if a campaign spends $100 on a regular, non-targeted ad that reaches 150 million people, only about half are eligible to vote, and roughly half of those eligible actually vote, and approximately half of that pool is either Democrat or Republican. In the end, only about 12.5% of the people reached are those most receptive to the campaign?s ads, so just $12.50 of the campaign?s ad spend is effective. It would be more cost-efficient to target the right people from the start and spend the entire $100 reaching those voters.
But do the right people actually want ads to target them? A July 2012 study from the University of Pennsylvania?s Annenberg School of Journalism indicates that 86% of Americans don?t want political ads tailored to their interests.
Masterson thinks that the study actually raises more questions than answers. ?The U.S. population has become disenfranchised by the political process,? he says. ?That?s everything from negative ads to the lack of confidence. The study never asked voters if they were, in fact, registered to vote and if they voted. So I think from a methodological standpoint, there were some opportunities to improve [the study]. I think it does speak to Americans? reactions ? not so much to political ad targeting but the political process itself.?
Walsh says that he isn?t surprised by the study and that he doesn?t necessarily blame them, since everyone wants to have the ability to make their own judgments about things. However, he says that those who are trying to communicate with the general public ? campaigns, businesses, ad agencies like DSPolitical and CampaignGrid ? have a responsibility to do so as efficiently and with as much of an impact as possible.
Targeted online ads can be anywhere between 4 and 10 times as effective as regular ads
?I think [this study] makes it more likely that relevant advertising is served to individuals, so that they can make their own choices,? Walsh says. ?I think this actually cuts through the clutter of all of the wasted impressions that are out there right now ? they?re just kind of being served to the general population ? and actually engages the right population in a conversation that previously may not have been reached.?
It may be too early to tell how effective targeted online advertising will be in the political sphere, due to its gradual adoption by political campaigns. It?s Walsh?s guess, however, that tests conducted throughout the 2014 midterm elections will really show the measurable effects of online advertising. ?So many folks are actually using [online advertising] in 2012; I think the rest of the market is going to adopt it in 2014. The percentage of money people are spending now will drastically increase, as well. It?s a really exciting time to be involved in this stuff.?
Illustration by Bob Al-Greene
Source: http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/online-ads-politics/
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