Over the past few months, using some new online tools, editorial outfits across the country have started to parse lots and lots of publicly available data.
Here in San Francisco, the Chronicle, has created a new data reporting team. It’s regularly serving up stats, graphics and analysis for COVID vaccine rates and other info.
The New York Times Upshot has been doing a lot of political data analysis. They’ve parsed out election maps and voter info from 2016 and 2020, looked at trends and how they’ve changed and taken a deep dive into partisan divides in Congressional districts. This past weekend, they served up an intriguing map linking candidates for NYC Mayor with donation patterns.
Not to be outdone – hey, they’re owned by an Internet billionaire – The Washington Post is parsing out census and voter data.
Yes, you say, that’s editorial. Not sales. What’s that’s got to do with me?
Quite a bit, as it turns out.
There is a direct line from all the talk you’re hearing about “first party data” and these editorial projects. Sales can use the same technology to find out information about its readers and then sell those insights.
This is particularly true for political ad placements. Most political advertising is locally focused. Geography is everything. So the outlet that can show depth of knowledge about a set of voters in a specific place can profit. And you can run basic analysis in-house.
Let’s take the NYT or WashPo analysis of voter trends. That’s both census data and other publicly available – in other words free – info that can be loaded up on a spreadsheet. Those sheets can then be used to compare with other, maybe private information like subscriber addresses or concentrations within zip codes.
So, using a similar comparison, an SF Chronicle sales rep might call up a mayoral candidate and say “Hey, looks like we have really great online readership in the Inner Sunset neighborhood, where you don’t have many donors. Can we interest you in a geo-targeted ad placement?”
Combine this with the new interest in contextual ad placements and you’ve got a wining pitch.
Spot-On’s Pinpoint Placement ad buying platform will make it easy to reach buyers interested in these sorts of insights – at no cost to publishers. Our platform automates direct buying and allows publishers to review creative and provide statistics and insights about their readers.
Want to know more? Drop us a note and we’ll hook you up with a live demo of what we’ve built.
