Silicon Valley has a saying: Live by the platform, die by the platform.
Translation: If your business relies on anyone else to exist then your livelihood is subject to the whims of that that provider, which can change at any time. Their business is more important to them than yours.
Publishers learned this – painfully – with Facebook’s “pivot to video” which cost, time money and attention. Now it’s advertisers’ turn. And that’s good, news for anyone looking to capture political ad dollars.
Starting in 2022 with Google decision to block the use of 3rd party “cookies” for tracking, data firms used by political campaigns to find and identify voters and ad exchanges which resell Google’s ad inventory to the highest bidder will face dramatic changes in how they do business. Some may not survive.
What Google’s offering in exchange is audience-based ad sales, more formally known as “Federated Learning of Cohorts.” These “FloCs” will let advertisers find groups of Google Chrome users – and, so far only Chrome users – package and sell to them as they see fit. Google will control the grouping, the cohort definition and the access.
So political advertisers will start taking a closer look at “contextual” targeting – buying ads by outlet, by demographics, by location. That’s good news for local news which can offer voter-centric contextual ads. After all, most local news readers are voters.
Another strength local has in this new world? If they’re created – and that’s a big ‘if’ – Google’s political cohorts won’t scale like brand advertising. As the 2020 election demonstrated, while a San Francisco Republican and South Carolina GOP supporter may pull the same party ballots their choices, especially at the local level, will be very different.
So it may be very difficult to create a reliable national political “FloC.” Advantage: local publishers who don’t need these classifications. Bigger advantage: Local publisher who have done the research and are able to tell political and public affairs buyers about their audience.
Publisher are also going to have to agree to the Google cohort sales scenario. They’re likely going to have to work through some new tech changes with Google. But here, too, there may be some good news.
One complaint that almost every publishes has about programmatic sales of political ads: It doesn’t permit creative review. A “political FLoC” might change that – but we have a better idea: Talk directly to political and advocacy effort on a safe secure platform built just for them.
Spot-On has created a new Pinpoint Placement ad buying platform giving publishers creative review, control over their rate cards and the ability to reach political, public affairs and advocacy buyers.
We’ll have more public details soon but if you’d like an early look, feel free to give us a shout and we’ll set you up with a demo.
