Ah, the hype.

There really isn’t anything quite like a Silicon Valley generated hypefest and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence technology – most famously in its ChatGPT and (for images) Lensa AI iterations – is as one Silicon Valley pundit put it “a Netscape moment”.

It is a dramatic departure that points digital communication and information storage, processing and distribution in new directions.

But we don’t know what those directions will be quite yet. Just think, if you’re old enough to remember the first time you saw the Netscape browser, did you honestly believe it would evolve into Facebook?

And, of course, the importance of what Netscape started – the ability for anyone to use the Internet, not just a bunch of folks who understood the ins and outs of Pine and Berkeley Unix – was not understated at the time.

Marc Andreessen, the guy who created Netscape, is now an Silicon Valley legend. Smarter people than the one typing this newsletter hang on his every word. His venture capital investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z to insiders – get the little engineer’s joke?) backed Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft and a host of firms you’ve never heard of but which have changed how you conduct business.

In 2011, Andresseen wrote “Why Software is Eating the World” an essay with a lot of smart predictions and observations that have been borne out – many of them by companies his firm has funded. Lately Andreessen’s been writing about AI. 

But in a twist that shows just how much things have changed since 1995, Wired magazine editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield took Andreessen’s essay apart and came up with some smart ideas about how AI hype serves a not-so-obvious purpose for those outside the Silicon Valley insider investment circles. For starters, check out the list of A16z’s investments in that tech.

As a result, Lichfield’s essay, “Mark Andresseen is (Mostly) Wrong This Time” is worth your attention because it does a fantastic job of explaining AI in terms that are understandable to folks who don’t know the ins and outs of Java, C-Sharp and Python.

Here’s Lichfield on how ChatGPT (a Large Language Model) works (emphasis added):

“Large language models (LLMs) are statistical inference algorithms. They predict the next likeliest thing in a sequence of things, such as words in a sentence. They produce what looks very much like human writing because they’ve been trained on vast quantities of human writing to predict what a human would write.”

Which gives you an idea of why political folks have taken to AI a whole lot faster than they did to almost any other digital technology. It’s a machine that apes the behavior it has observed. And AI has observed far, far more than any one person and it can find patterns in those observations that may not be obviously or speedily available to living breathing humans. But it’s horrible at nuance, it’s as creative as your toaster – if your toaster could generate text – and it’s got no sense of irony.

So, let’s get this out of the way. There will be AI-generated campaign ads, AI-generated social media posts, AI-generated music, speech and who knows what else. Some of it will fool people and much of it will be published via automated channels where AI’s fellow machines rule the roost. So, it’s inevitable that there will be a big to-do about political campaign disinformation and platform credibility between now and November 5, 2024. This is likely to raise – again – the questions of how political ads are bought, sold and reviewed in the digital world – a conversation that has been neglected for far too long.

Lichfield points out one overlooked fact: AI machines are built by people. They can be trained and restrained by the people who build them. And that’s worth remembering.

Because AI is going to be used. It will come in real handy for finding stock images – and manipulating them. It’ll make it a lot easier to come up with talking points – and it will pull a few of its own out of thin air. It will build field and media plans and suggest buys and neighborhoods that you didn’t consider – and that might include The Daily Planet and a list of the Fabulous Five‘s home addresses.

So the limitations of what AI can – or should – do will be fairly obvious. But that doesn’t mean it can triumph.

One good tool for political folks worried about “deep fake” AI-generated reels and images is this very nerdy consortium created to authenticate images used in the public domain. You know, like campaign ads. It’s something that the American Association of Political Consultants might find useful as a tool to authenticate the images they are creating.

Other ideas include clear and stated policies like the ones Lichfield has outlined for the magazine he runs.

At Spot-On, we’re spending our time thinking about how those processes can be corrupted, misfire or create havoc and what we think needs to be done to make sure that the ads we deliver aren’t machine-generated nonsense. But we’re going to look – and look long and hard – at other uses because we think its the boring backroom stuff that will, over time, make political AI a technology both a boon and, if it’s not carefully managed, a curse.

Our first step: Walk away from the hype.

Social “media” sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?

Facebook’s made itself more difficult to use and less reliable for targeting voters. NextDoor, LinkedIn TikTok, Spotify and Reddit either ban election-related ads or have broad policies in place that allow them to reject ads as they see fit.

So what’s a small to mid-size campaign to do?

First step: Reassess how you look at these platforms. Rather than focus on “media” think about the “social” part. Concentrating on the “media” aspect of things encourages campaigns to buy ads in bulk to “flood the zone” which is almost impossible online, anyway.

Instead, think of platforms as extension of field outreach. Platform are a good way to send volunteers – with keyboards, not clipboards – to talk to their real friends and virtual neighbors. Some folks talk to lots and lots of these friends and neighbors – they’re what campaigns are now calling “influencers” which is a fancy word for someone who like to tell other people what to do.

There’s no question that social part of social media scares most campaigns because it’s putting messaging in the hands of folks who may not be on 100% in agreement with the campaign. And many influencers will make mistakes. They can focus on their agenda, not the campaign. Or they just flake.

But those deviations are part of the social aspect of these platforms. When users talk about ‘authenticity’ they mean the ability to deviate from the norm, to show flaws, to admit mistakes. It’s part of genuine engagement. Which means influencer support can give a campaign a real boost.

But no campaign can run entirely on social media. Influencers may be powerful but their reach is limited – online and in ‘real’ life.

Paid digital media has a role to play these efforts. But the places where smaller outreach efforts want to do business are limited by budget. Regional media outlets which dominate local news in many places and the large automated trading desks have minimums and are often not very savvy about political outreach, especially at the local level.

Spot-On runs a lot of these local campaigns and we’ve come up with a solution to campaigns, across the board – if they can join forces on spending.

Our Virtual Slate Card makes it easy for consultants and media buyers serve these smaller outreach efforts more effectively. It works like a mail slate card – with a few technical differences. After all this is a digital ad buy.

Unlike mail or television advertising, digital buys can be combined across campaigns when the contract is signed. So a consultant or media buyer looking to place ads for a state Senate race, a mayoral contest and a city council races in the same or adjacent communities can pool resources for digital placements. Instead of three small buys, they have one medium-sized buy with three sets of targeted creative.

Spot-On uses its Pinpoint Persuasion platform to automatically guide us in telling outlets where ads should run. We make sure the right ad runs in the right district on an outlet read in that community. So the senate candidates ads run in the zips for that district, the mayoral candidate’s ads run citywide and the city council race is targeted to that campaign’s relevant neighborhoods. Spot-On tracks the ads by each campaign to make sure everything’s in compliance.

Virtual Slate Card puts ads in front of folks who may already be influencers in their communities, reinforcing social media messaging and helping keep influencers on track. Since more than 60% of news site readers are voters, it’s a safe bet that some of them are already social media mavens. Your message is reinforced. It’s also matched to earned media.

This isn’t the only innovation Spot-On’ working to deliver. We’ve got more in the pipeline. But if you’re gearing up for municipal and state house races this fall, give us a shout, we’ll walk you through the ins and outs of Virtual Slate Card and give you a preview of what’s in store.

We’ve had another election, so it’s time for Spot-On to put on its political reporter spyglass to look (and share!) what we see as important trends for media consultants and buyers.

Parties May Not be Dead, But They’re on Life Support

The number of voters who refused to affiliate with one party or another is now about the same as the number of voters who identify as Republicans, according to BallotPedia. This has implications for legislating – as we’ve seen in the U.S. House and Senate – but also for the party infrastructure that determines what gets on the ballot.

There are lots of arguments over whether these ‘none of the above’ registrants lean Democrat or Republican, but they seem beside the point. The bottom line is that these voters don’t like what they see with both parties and are opting out.

That’s why…..

Ticket-Splitting Is For Keeps.

Voters who don’t select a party when they register are, by definition, not loyal to one party or another. This year, they liked Democrats for the most part (but not entirely).

Next year? Who knows. That’s why….

Donor Domination is a Problem for Parties, Not Just Candidates

Donors with specific causes or concerns have outsized power because the role that the party would play in collecting funds, selecting and vetting candidates or looking and arguing at how ballot measures affect turn-out, can’t be enforced. In a world where campaigns can raise a significant portion of money from people with specific agendas, the threat that a donor will “take my ball and go home” is more of a threat than ever.

And those agendas can often be at odds with what the party as a whole or the electorate are interested in seeing happen.

As a result…

“Nationalized” Campaigns are Often Backfiring

Democrats thought they’d chase Sen. Susan Collins out of office. Didn’t work. Last year, it was Stacey Abrams’ second attempt to become governor of Georgia. Sarah Palin got the back end of this one this year. So did Senate hopeful Hershel Walker.

In all of these cases, voters decided which candidate had their best interests at heart. And instead of looking at the money spent or arguments made by outside groups spending lots and lots of money, many of them voted for the candidate, not the overwhelming party cause.

That’s the high level stuff. Here’s some nitty gritty that dovetails with some of those observations.

Warning: It’s not Good News.

Tracking Voters is Going to be Far More Difficult.

Spot-On heard from a number of clients about poor results from programmatic ‘voter-matched’ ad buys. Click-through engagement rates were in low single digits on campaigns all across the country. This trend is likely to continue down and to the right.

Why? Privacy settings are taking effect with voters. Swing voters like the ones profiled in the NYTimes ticket-splitting pieces are well off enough to own iPhones and other Apple devices, and they’re smart enough to deploy the heavy duty privacy settings on those devices. After all, that’s a key part of Apple’s marketing.

The privacy wave has been a subtle erosion that seems to have accelerate over the past year. Here’s one vendor’s (somewhat self-aggrandizing) take on what may happen moving forward.

There are other reasons that tracking is going to get harder. Looking at 2024, Google has said it will replace its tracking technology with less invasive methods. And then there are more and more laws about digital privacy. Four states joined California in enacting laws that cut down on tech platforms’ ability to track users. And more than 20 states considered – but didn’t pass – similar bills.

Pressure on Tech Means Less Clarity for Political

Big Tech is in for another rough year in Washington and on Wall Street.

When the President calls you out, you’ve got trouble. Across the board, Big Tech Management is going to be even more distracted by threats from falling stock prices and opinion pieces like the one President Biden recently published in the Wall Street Journal. Big Tech is going to look to satisfy The Street first and lawmakers second. That’s especially true of political go-to’s like Google and Facebook (aka “Meta”). The Atlantic had a great summation of the challenges late last year, and the Washington Post has this take on Biden’s op-ed, both of which are worth a read, especially for the sections on user privacy.

Our take: If you thought you were on your own last year – just wait. And make no mistake, what happens with Google affects ALL ad exchanges and platforms. It’s that big.

Oh, and as a sideline that should disturb anyone who paid double-digit CPMs last year: it’s becoming increasingly common knowledge that the digital ad ecosystem is built on known and acknowledged fraud. That’s not going to help Big Tech with regulators and lawmakers, not one bit.

So, What’s to be Done?

There’s a year’s worth – okay, six months – of time here for digital ad buyers to think about 2024. We’ve seen what’s not working in 2022, and what that says about what to expect in 2024.

One, streaming video is likely to be more powerful next year – and hopefully better organized. It’s also going to be a good tool to reach upper income, better educated voters like those who swung the 2020 and 2022 elections.

But there are going to be other ways to reach that crowd. Long time readers of our newsletters know Spot-On pushes ads on known, trusted local news sites ahead of programmatic. We do this because we see how that process works and we know real-time-bidding for remnant placements gives short shrift to sporadic ad buyers like political. We know that “anonymized” voter data costs a lot and doesn’t perform better than straight geo-targeting – especially in this new, privacy-conscious world. By contrast, we see accountability, transparency and high reader engagement on local news sites.

We’re also seeing growth at the local news level, with new products and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what political buyers need. And yeah, we helped. We’ll continuing our work with publishers who are interested in reclaiming political dollars because more and more of them are getting serious about how to do that. And we’re not tired of telling political ad buyers that local news does a good job of reaching voters, providing accountability and impact.

Want to know more? Give us a shout. We’ll fill you in on the best ways to reach local news sites, quickly, easily and efficiently.

If you’re reading this, chances are good that the majority of your digital ad spending this election cycle has gone through what are known as programmatic ad buying platforms. After all, most political ad dollars are being spent that way.

But this may be the last cycle where the freewheeling no-holds-barred programmatic market serves political as though it’s just another brand silo.

The omens have been building for a while. First, there’s a lot of conflicting messaging in the marketplace. Hulu’s ban on ads with guns or any abortion-related messaging is one indicator. So is Spotify’s decision to not take political, as they once said they would. Some platforms review creative. Some don’t. Some allow micro-targeting using voter data linked to other information. Some do not. Facebook won’t take ads immediately before the election. Everyone else will.

No one likes this system. And until the money spent on digital political ads got real – it’s about $1 billion this year – no one much cared. But that’s changing.

This study from the University of North Carolina’s Center on Technology Policy follows a look by the New America Foundation in 2018. In both cases, former employees at digital platforms – in this case Facebook – authored white papers showing how programmatic ad buying is rife with confusion, chicanery and chaos. Put another way: It’s not just Facebook anymore.

So what’s next? More than ever, it depends on the outcome of this year’s election. If Democrats manage to hold on to the U.S. House, it’s likely that the election reform package known as the “Honest Ads Act” will be passed once again and headed to the U.S. Senate. If Democrats increase their majority in the Senate, the bill is likely to receive a much warmer reception than it did in earlier years.

The sorts of reforms envisioned by the bill, as it was written, are also easy to slip into any sort of Big Tech break-up legislation. They’ll also fit nicely into laws designed to protect consumer privacy. That’s three bites at the regulatory apple.

This is all bad news if you’re counting on the voter match targeting you’ve been relying on to actually reach voters. But it could be good news if Congress realizes it can create the ability to target voters responsibly.

As currently written, privacy laws will make that all but impossible. Big Tech break-ups will continue to hamper the ability of those companies to watch users move from one suite of products to another (say, Apple TV to iPhone or YouTube to search). The result: Campaigns’ ability to follow and target voters – already weakened – falls apart entirely. As of right now, there are no carve-outs for political targeting, mostly likely because elected officials have no idea how their campaigns find voters online.

Spot-On has long advocated for the segregation of brand advertising from political ad sales. That’s how political ads are handled by TV stations. It’s how political mail is treated by the U.S. Post Office. And it’s probably what most members of Congress think happens with their digital ads. Actually digital segregation of political ads buying and selling could allow campaigns to use the data they have about voters – they data they use to send mail and decide on TV placements and field outreach – to better effect. A system that uses voter data that’s independent and sealed off from use by brand advertisers would mean political target of digital could become more effective, reliable, safe and secure.

Here at Spot-On, we’re not just talking. We’re walking. Our Pinpoint Persuasion platform is coming soon. We’ll have targeting by election district and zip code. And lots of census and other data. We’re ready for the future.

Are you?

Here at Spot-On, we focus on strategic implementations while our clients dictate strategy.. But also we read a lot and this piece in the New York Times about how campaign should talking to different voters – maybe the ones that aren’t easy to find – hit a nerve.As the authors point out, it’s hard to reach rural voters. One, bandwidth is not evenly distributed across the U.S. That makes it hard to use this year’s media buyer silver bullet of choice – streaming video – to reach their TVs or laptops. And since incomes in that part of the country are usually lower than on the coasts or in urban areas, mobile phones often have plans with data caps.

Besides, most of the tracking done on the web is for people with incomes to spend on goods and services. If the Internet is a shopping mall and you’re a shopkeeper, you want to catch the attention of the lady with the Platinum Amex, not the guy who pays cash and haggles. That tilts any sort of targeting away from lower income households, young people, those with spotty financial records or recent arrivals who may not be native English speakers or have long U.S. credit histories.

In other words, the exact people that savvy political campaigns want to reach.

The good news is that there are changes in the ad marketplace that will help political and advocacy campaigns. For many strategists, this may sound like old news, but the idea behind a multi-platform approach with an emphasis on context for your ads is gaining traction with the brand ad crowd.

“Digital can be used very effectively to introduce an idea, but one of its strongest benefits is frequency and delivering a message multiple times to create familiarity. When you build that familiarity in association with a specific partner, some of the trust that their users have in that brand can rub off on yours. This is valuable if you are trying to build or rebuild your brand.” – MediaPost

Sure sounds like a political ad buyer, doesn’t it? Substitute “partner” for TV station, and you’d think it’s 1988 all over again.

Part and parcel of this so-called new way of thinking is the idea that buyers need to look at multiple platforms for discrete chores.So savvy buyers aren’t spending their digital dollars in one place, figuring one platform works on the Internet the way their local cable operator does on TV. Instead, brand buyers are starting to parse out tasks based on a platform’s strengths.

For reaching folks who aren’t easily targeted, almost nothing beats a direct ad buy on a trusted local news site.

This particularly works for segments that campaigns are anxious to reach this year – rural Americans, African-Americans and those who have a preference for news and communication in other languages. Recent U.S. arrivals and lower-income households read local news more, according to a Pew Research survey. Most of the people regularly reading a local news site are voters – that’s been repeatedly verified with surveys on all sorts of sites across the country.

Direct buying doesn’t rely on income or financial behavior to find engaged viewers; its strength is that it covers a county, city or town – the very place where voters are centered. It’s the ultimate context play: ads about current events (elections) surrounded by similar editorial (news stories about campaigns, current and local events.

Plus, there’s the security feature: Know where your ads run, how much you paid and how they performed. Oh, and for the most part, those performance rates will put your targeted programmatic buy to shame.

Spot-On has seen a lot more emphasis on direct buying this year. And since we’ve been preaching the value of direct for some time, we’re gratified by the shift.

Wanna learn more? Send us an email and we’ll tell you about how we put video on small rural news sites, the fabulous click-through rates we see on new stand-along journalism sites and how we think the shift to direct buying helps campaigns prepare for a year of massive upheaval in the ad tech marketplace.

Well, well, well, it looks like the rush to access publishers’ advertising inventory directly – without going through the black boxes called programmatic ad buying – appears to be getting traction.

Or at least lip service. More and more players in that world, from Google on down, seem to acknowledge that programmatic ads hurt news sites, particularly local news sites which don’t have and never will have the scale and reach of national platforms.

This is important for political ad buyers. It means that some firms will be able to access the ad placements they want on key publishers with more certainty. But it also means change in the market could wreak havoc for smaller or episodic buyers.

Spot-On doesn’t put a lot of faith in Google saying it no longer wants to control every aspect of digital ad buying. They didn’t get to be a trillion-dollar company by playing nice. Nor do we think that buying scenarios like the ones spelled out by Trade Desk for its Open Path offering are going to help political ad buyers very much. Open Path feels more like a challenge to a new weakness in Google’s ecosytem and market dominance.

Still, we think there are several trends here to notice – just not the ones being touted from the rooftops. And yeah, we do think they’ll have an impact in November.

So, let’s start with Google’s ideas about allowing advertisers to target their ads based on their perceived interest in topics users explore on the web. This strategy is more general than the cookie-based targeting political advertisers rely on to match voters to ads. And it raises a question. Is a reader interested in political subjects nothing more than a political insider or influencer? That’s not a swing voter; that’s the base. And what about lag time? Google’s idea uses hindsight and elections – and the events leading up to them – can change fast.

Then there’s the big ad agency race to claim control over quality advertising. Putting aside Trade Desk (which is hard, it’s as big a player in the market as Facebook or Google), other agencies are trying to secure high quality inventory on known outlets for their own by cutting access deals with publishers to replace cookie-based tracking. The result is that the market is in danger of being split between the “have access” and “want access.”

Here’s the take from DigiDay’s reporter:

“Put simply, fewer third-party cookies means less granular data and the less there is of that the fewer people advertisers can track and reach in the open web.

“The more this happens, the more divided the market will get: on one side there will be a larger portion of high-quality ad inventory powered by first-party data and consent; on the other side, there’s a long tail of poorly targeted impressions far more susceptible to fraud and manipulation.”

So, if you regularly run high profile national campaigns – if your clients are victorious presidential campaigns or Super PACs, you’ll be fine. The rest of political ad buyers may well be out in the cold. No targeting, no access and precious little inventory to snap up at the last minute.

There are some things that Spot-On likes about this trend. We have long maintained that political and advocacy advertising has no place on blind programmatic exchanges. No one’s happy with the current situation. Buyers don’t know where their ads are running; sellers don’t know who’s buying or what the ads are saying. And compliance with the law isn’t equitable.

And we’re stepping in to do our part. Starting this week, we’re opening up our Pinpoint Persuasion Automated Direct Buying platform to customers. Our introductory offer will be in your email shortly. But if you hate lines, feel free to give us a shout. We’ll give you access and information about more than 4000 local news sites across the county, as well as let you search by zip code and election districts. And that’s just for starters. We’re loading up census and other data as fast as we can think of ways to use it.

So, beat the crowd. Get an account and start buying political ads on Pinpoint Persuasion, a platform built by political people for political people.

About this time every year – Spot-On sits down and thinks about the year ahead, gives you our take on what’s happened and what’s likely to be popping up on our political ad buying radar.

We started this year’s naval gazing back in early December. And, well, we got distracted. Being caught in a bad version of a good movie – Groundhog Day – is frustrating. Our usually clear crystal ball is pretty cloudy.

So this newsletter has a few predictions along with some pointers to folks we read – and you should, too – to stay on top of things as they change. Because they will – and fast.

First up, it looks like the Census Monkey Wrench is going to be less distracting that initially envisioned. Maps are getting drawn pretty quickly and candidates’ assessments are coming in just as fast. We’ll have some lawsuits but not the coast-to-coast conflicts many anticipated.

As a result of Frances Haugen’s revelations about Facebook’s user tracking, it feels as though Congress will pass some sort of privacy legislation particularly in regard to children. Legislation that protects kids can be put to all sort of other uses, of course, so further limitations on targeting technology – the stuff that can be used to target voters – may become law.

Facebook’s post-Haugen decision to join the ban on voter ‘micro-targeting’ looks to be the last shoe to drop in the “will they or won’t they take political ads?” debate that many platforms are having. There are some who disagree, of course but with a month to go until buying starts in earnest, it’s feeling pretty quiet out there.

Now, ‘pretty quiet’ isn’t the same as ‘nothing’s going on.’ There is a lot going on in a volatile environment which is why we’re going to point you to some on-the-ground sources who track activity that’s going to affect political ad sales.

First up, our friend Katie Harbath, formerly of Facebook, who’s started a regular newsletter, Anchor Change, dealing with policy and politics around online political speech. You should subscribe. Harbath’s got a specific point of view as a former Fb employee and its Republican Party liaison. She’s well informed and candid.

On Twitter, Jason Kint, head of the trade group Digital Content Next is obsessed with all the lawsuits against Facebook and Google and privacy issues. The man has a thing for court documents. He reads them whole so you don’t have to. Much of what he talks about is good background for how the platforms see political engagement of all sorts across their companies.

For news and straight-up analysis, Spot-On’s go-to is the ad trade news site DigiDay. They’re tracking developments and changes in how first party data is used and collected, changes in privacy laws, the death of cookie targeting (which makes voter targeting all but impossible), and the rise of alternative user ID solutions. All of these will have bearing on how political advertisers can operate.

So, three points of view and some trends. Now it’s time for the Spot-On year ahead – a big change for us and one we think you should know about.

Spot-On’s Pinpoint Persuasion ad buying platform is going live to a handful of our customers this month. We’ll be opening up to new clients in the Spring with an eye on the June primaries. Our offer is simple: We’re giving political ad buyers a much-needed alternative to programmatic advertising’s black box infrastructure.

We have the latest census maps for all districts – state and federal – matched to the local outlets that serve those districts. You’ll be able to pick where your ads are running, get creative uploaded and approved and – with the push of a button – know those ads have been delivered to those outlets, safely and securely. You can get feedback on your creative AND real time reporting for your campaign.

Pinpoint Persuasion is build by political people for political people. You’re not a season event with us, you’re the only event.

Interested? Email us and we’ll get you on a free, no-strings attached demo.