Ads target mobile users,
Campaigns use ZIP codes or aim at mobile devices
Online political advertising, the newest form of voter persuasion, is challenging the oldest — direct mail — by becoming more like it: targeted to voters, if not by name, by gender, age, where they live, what they’re interested in and what they’re curious about.
Campaigns have long combined publicly available voting data with information culled from magazine subscription lists, merchant loyalty programs and other commercial data to create mailing lists tailored to reach, for instance, moderate-income women voters with children or men over 50 whose hobby is hunting.
An online ad isn’t addressed to a voter by name. But it is rapidly becoming just as targeted, thanks to political media companies that match voter data with an online trail of “cookies” computer users generate when they go online.
“The Internet has come a long way in the past few years in terms of being able to target folks effectively,” says Vincent Harris, who directs online strategy for Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
Campaigns can target online ads by ZIP code or even more specifically, by aiming ads at every mobile device in a given area. During the Iowa primary, the Rick Perry campaign used this technique to blanket the campuses of Christian colleges with ads, Harris said. The Gingrich campaign did the same with college campuses in Alabama, and before the Florida primary, it ran ads on Facebook targeted by users’ ZIP codes.
Campaigns have already been using social media and online tools for fundraising and volunteer mobilizing among supporters. Now they’re pursuing uncommitted voters. “Now we’re seeing a lot of campaigns look at (online advertising) to shift opinion,” says Rob Saliterman, Google’s head of Republican political advertising.
Political campaigns will spend an estimated $160 million on online communication in the 2012 election cycle, ac- cording to media research firm Borrell Associates. That’s a fraction of the $5.6 billion that will be spent on TV advertising and by far the smallest category of advertising. But it is a big increase over 2008, when campaigns spent $22.2 million on online ads.
Much of that increase came at the expense of direct mail budgets, says Rich Masterson, a founder of Campaigngrid, a Republican company in the vanguard of online political targeting. “Direct mail may be the first victim of addressable digital media. ... It just makes too much sense not to do it.”
“You’re talking about a real shift here that’s going to be very rapid. Whoever can figure out how to deliver those swing voters can really name their price,” says Peter Pasi, digital consultant for Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign.
Although a campaign can send voters direct mail addressed by name, privacy law prevents them from doing the same online. Instead, a company such as Campaigngrid gets consumer websites that assign visitors unique user IDS called “cookies” to match their cookie lists with voter files and send the information, without names attached. That creates an anonymous mailing list with rich information about voter interests.
Such “cookie pools” are being developed by political consulting companies such as Precision Network on the Democratic side and Campaigngrid and Targeted Victory on the Republican.
The ads are run through digital giants such as Google and Yahoo and show up on a targeted user’s screen. (The number of times an ad appears is limited to avoid what Masterson calls “the creepiness factor” of apparent cyberstalking.)
The cookie pool is “the secret sauce,” says Tim Lim, president of Precision Network.
Political online targeting is only in its third election cycle and has a long way to go before it equals the detailed information campaigns have built up over the years for mailing lists.
Commercial mailing list developers “have been putting together data on households for so many years now that they do have very specific information on every household,” says Alex Skatell, digital director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I just don’t think that information is there yet as far as the cookied information.”
But they do have speed. Campaigns face increasing challenges with direct mail as postal rates rise and the U.S. Postal Service plans to close thousands of post offices to cut budgets. That could mean longer delivery times for direct mail campaign literature — compared with the online world, where ads can go up on the Web in hours.