Spotlight Blog
Google, The Government and The Rest of Us
A few months ago, Spot-On did its usual post-election forecasting and predicted some rough roads ahead of political ad buyers and tech platforms. We may have understated things. First, take a look at this story from Bloomberg. Facebook, it seems, changed the technology underlying its political targeting – making it more difficult to find users who easily surfaced in prior election years. Somehow, they neglected to tell anyone. It’s not your imagination. Fundraising on Facebook isn’t what it used to be. And it’s not coming back. Now, take a look at the lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice and eight states have brought against Google. This is hard look at how Google dominates the ad tech world and uses that domination to its benefit. The ad tech world likes to say that it buys and sells ads the same way that Wall Street buys and sells stocks. But Wall
Oh, What a Year
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
The Last Dance?
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
Many Voters, Multiple Solutions
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,
Direct Dial Deals
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
The Year – No, Week – Ahead
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
Separate, Maybe More Equal
The time has come for political advertisers to demand different treatment in the digital buying space. In the analog world, political campaigns enjoy special treatment that brand advertisers don’t. TV stations set political rates for candidate ads. Election-oriented mail is red tagged by the post office. But in the digital arena, political is just another brand silo – and an intermittent one at that. So all the problems that have plagued automated programmatic ad buying – fraud, black box placement, misuse of targeting data, malicious and underhanded behavior – also affect political sales. Now, before we dive into why political needs its own digital marketplace, let’s state the obvious: There are two kinds of political campaigns. Presidential and everything else. Presidential campaigns are the types of ad campaigns that digital ad platforms understand because they are like brand campaigns. They represent millions of dollars in spending; they occur in a
Waste Not….
There may be no better indication of the rising cost of digital advertising than a little missive Google sent out earlier this month to its ad buying customers. In a number of countries that are taxing digital ad placements, the big ad firm will be adding surcharges to cover those increases. Sounds pretty standard, huh? Lots of things are taxed. Yes, but things that are taxed are generally money-makers. Governments may be stodgy, hind bound and in love with their own red tape but like everyone else, they know how to follow the money. These days, digital ad sales is a big business and the tax man wants a taste. Google’s tax dilemma underscores a reality: the super cheap CPM (cost per 1,0000) is fading into history. All Spot-On can say is “Good Riddance.” One of the dumber ideas floated for political campaigns was the notion that search advertising offered
When The Circus Left Town
Looks like Google’s first attempt to shut down the circus known as “ad tech” was more clown car than Big Top. After months of saying that cookie-based ad targeting – used to support voter file matching – was going away, the tech giant pushed that transition back by almost two years. Google’s substitute, something called a “Federated Learning of Cohort,” will not be implemented until late 2023 – if then. It’s not often that a big company reverses a much-ballyhooed announcement, creating a dramatic and irreversible change in its primary marketplace. But that’s what Google has done with its announcement that it will continue to allow so-called cookie-based ad targeting through 2023. This has absolutely nothing to do with the political ad market. Its collective worth – maybe – $2 billion – is not enough money for anyone outside of Google’s DC-based political sales team to worry about. But, there
The Wonderful World of Colorful Data
It’s late. It’s likely to be questioned for the next 9.5 years but – finally – the 2020 U.S. Census data is getting kicked out for review and analysis. The re-allocation of Congressional districts got the headline but lots of folks are digging around on more granular data. The results are interesting. The tables and charts filed on the Census website under the very sexy title “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2020” were the first to get this treatment by the Washington Post which summarized the findings for us English majors. Here are some highlights: Under 30’s voted in larger numbers than ever. Participation in the 18-29 cohort is up to 2008 (Obama) levels. This is looking like a trend. Asian Americans turned out big-time. This was a spike, hard to know if it’s a trend. African-American turn-out was highest in ‘swing’ states and up overall from