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 Street has a lot of rules and a lot of people watching them. Ad tech – not so much. So government lawyers are looking to put a few rules in place.

Looking at the ad tech “ecosystem,” the DOJ worries that since Google controls the technology that publishers use to manage and sell their inventory, it might – might – set conditions that let its customers get preferred terms compared to others. Lawyers are concerned that since Google owns the technology platform that dominates the ad auction business, that maybe – just maybe – Google could manipulate the auction process to its benefit. And, of course since Google’s technology is used to purchase ads, perhaps the firm would be skewing purchasing decisions in its favor. Perhaps.

It will take a while for the lawsuit to unfold. But there are two precedents that are worth noting given how the DOJ actions might affect Google, and by extension, every other ad seller and platform.

The one that’s bandied about most frequently by the antitrust crowd is the break-up of AT&T, which was an equipment company and a transmission company when the government stepped in with lawyers. It took a decade to settle the DOJ case that created what were once known as the “Baby Bells,” and once it was settled, the company’s affairs were overseen by U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene, who managed the company’s compliance with a lengthy and detailed consent decree. He kept that gig for 14 years.

The other example, a bit more recent, is the DOJ action against Microsoft. Like AT&T, it dragged on for years, and while Microsoft sort of won and didn’t have to break up, it was on the short end of some epically horrible press. The trial, the press and the legal oversight combined to encourage Microsoft to back away from its consumer business to focus more on corporate clients – often to its detriment.

In other words, government lawsuits have knock-on effects. They distract management. They cost lots of money and at some point – like now – changes in product development need to get a “what if” from the lawyers. That gets amplified for political ad buying for one simple reason: it’s a very small part of the ad tech world. As a result, it’s more vulnerable to neglect. And neglect of the small stuff is the first thing that sets in once the lawyers take over.

Take the much-discussed changes that Google has said it will make to tracking users and doing away with ‘cookies’. The current version of that project has come under criticism from folks who say that – wait for it – the current design controls user information to favor Google. Hmmm. Maybe they should consult with antitrust lawyers on this one? Or run the risk of seeing DOJ’s complaint expanded? Or maybe they can just forget the whole thing?

The problem, of course, is that is Google use its dominance to set the rules, then other vendors will come up with other solutions. But since Google is the dominant player – across all aspects of ad technology – those solutions are likely to be limited in scope.

There are other changes. Google’s shedding employees – voluntarily and through lay-offs. The brand ad business is slowing as the post-pandemic economy reorients itself. And Silicon Valley, which has cruised along in a free money, low interest environment, is going though a reset. That bank failure last week? It hit Roku, a favored political ad vendor.

Regular readers know Spot-On doesn’t think relying on large ad platforms for political ad placements is a sound idea. That’s not how things work on the TV side. Or for mail. It’s time that the line between talking to voters and talking to consumers is drawn more clearly. The Google antitrust case won’t do that. But it will create an environment where change isn’t just welcome, it’s necessary.

We’ll be ready. Will you?

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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 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.

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 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?

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, 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 variety of markets, and because the work is on a national scale, the use of targeting and parsing work as it should. Presidential campaigns are flashy, fun and can land the CEOs a White House dinner invitation.

Everything else – state house races, local campaigns, even Senate races – isn’t anywhere near as exciting or lucrative. So, unlike presidential campaigns, they get short shrift. There are some platforms with dedicated ad sales folks, sure. And they sell up and down the food chain. But once an ad is sold, it goes into the brand mix – there’s no assurance that any of the targeting, time or even pricing set in the insertion order gets executed.

Which is why this New York Times article is an important read.

Referring to the changes that Apple and Google are making (or announcing they will make) to protect user privacy, readers are warned.

“The developments may seem like technical tinkering, but they were connected to something bigger: an intensifying battle over the future of the internet. The struggle has entangled tech titans, upended Madison Avenue and disrupted small businesses. And it heralds a profound shift in how people’s personal information may be used online, with sweeping implications for the ways that businesses make money digitally.”

In other words, what’s worked for the past two elections won’t work next year. Really.

Techniques that are going by the wayside include anything that deal in personal information. And voter information IS personal information.

Here’s a list of soon-to-be obsolete political outreach strategies: voter-matched ad targeting, newsletter fundraising, donor re-targeting, micro-targeting ads using demographic information, mobile device ID targeting and the ability to track users from one device to another.

Political advertisers like to argue that they can’t be treated the same as brand advertisers because they have smaller budgets raised on shorter time frames with a hard election day ‘close’. That’s one good set of reasons why the digital market needs to be adjusted for political ad outreach.

Here’s another: Political ads are about influence. It doesn’t really affect the public trust if a lot of people see an ad for a soda brand that doesn’t exist. It does matter if they see – and are persuaded by – ads that defame a candidate. Or if a platform agrees to carry one type of ad but not another. Or if a platform agrees to carry one candidate’s ads but not their rival’s. All of these things have happened to campaigns.

Clearly, it’s time for political advertisers to ask to be treated differently. Instead of buying video and banner ads via black box exchanges or platforms, political ad buyers should have a system similar to the post office’s red tag where they go to the front of the buyers’ line and get special treatment.

If political were segregated from brand advertising, it might re-open the door to micro-targeting and other forms of identifying voters as campaigns do with political mail. A system that’s separate from brand advertising might be permitted more leeway in using data for the very reasons that TV and the post office make exception for campaigns – because the goal is to talk to voters.

That’s not something that’s likely to happen overnight and there are plenty of party divisions that might preclude a solution. But the idea that digital is a separate type of ad outreach is one that might solve some of the chaos that’s threatening to ensue – and could prevent some of the problems we’ve already seen.

Spot-On has long believed in the segregation of political and brand advertising. We told the Federal Election Commission as much in 2018. And we’ve built an ad buying platform that takes a step in that direction by allowing political and advocacy ad buyers – and only those types of buyers – to place ads on local and national news sites.

We’ll be showing it off publicly at the AAPC’s Las Vegas conference and talking about how we think a new digital marketplace should function.

Drop us a line, and we’ll get you on the schedule.

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 a particularly good deal for campaigns because buyers only paid for ads that got clicks. Those “free ads” appeared to lower the cost of each ad.

That thinking took root. A lot of ad sellers like to figure costs by taking a campaign’s total ad buy and dividing it by the number of displayed ads – regardless of engagement. The result is a lower price that ignores waste – all those ads that viewers ignored – in favor of volume.

A more accurate measure would be to take the successful ads then divide by total cost. That raises price for engagement but gives a buyer a truer picture of the result of their spend. If you spend $10,000 to buy 1 million ads your CPM is $1. But if only 50,000 of that 1 million garnered a click your real cost $200 per ad.

Many political ad buyers remain in love with this spray-and-pray approach, even as the tide is turning. Budget pressure is the main reason, of course. Campaigns are accustomed to spending big on TV, mail and field – all established outreach – often have difficulty coping with another demand on resources. And many buyers still don’t see how 1 million ads at $1 each is a bad investment.

But it’s time to refocus this conversation. More and more attention is being paid to the hidden costs of the low priced CPM. Fraud is the main culprit here. The programmatic ad market is riven with content farms posing as editorial sites, server farms pretending to display ads to real viewers and just plain human carelessness.

All of which is getting to be more important as the platforms raise their prices. Facebook and Google are charging more this year than they did two years ago but much of that cost isn’t solving waste or fraud problems.

You pay for what you get. Buy cheap ads in volume. get questionable results. This is why a TV ad on the “A” block for local news costs more than the Home Shopping Network at 2 a.m.

Direct placement solves this problem for online buyers. Ads run on known outlets at specific times with established delivery metrics. CPMs are higher but so is quality control and transparency.

Spot-On has been preaching the value of direct ad placements for political campaigns since we started our business. We’re going to stick with it. In fact, we’ve built an ad buying platform that helps political and advocacy efforts maximize their spending on reliable, known outlets frequented by voters.

Buys placed via our Pinpoint Placement platform go to known outlets. Buyers know where the ads run, when they run and how they’ve performed. Voters see these ads, not bots.

Want more info about our Pinpoint Placement platform? Drop us a line and we’ll tell you all about it.

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 is no shortage of considerations that political ad buyers should bear in mind as they make their way through the next year. The short list of considerations that have triggered Google’s decision point to an interesting conclusion: the ad tech giant no longer has absolute power and authority in the digital ad world.

Here’s our take on Why Google Will Keep the Cookie:

Things are not going well on the tech front. To us regular people, it may sound easy for Google to gather up lots of information about people using its Chrome browser and then use that to target ads. They’re Google, right? But software engineering at this level is seriously complicated, and Google may have gotten a little bit ahead of itself.

Gossip about Google being poorly managed and risk adverse might be true. With great power, comes great responsibility, not to mention press and regulatory scrutiny. Google might have pulled back rather than push ahead to avoid internal conflicts and bad press – especially if the tech isn’t sound.

Amazon said it would not go along with Google’s new ad scheme. Amazon has deployed technology to block Google’s Chrome from collecting information from its sites. That means a lot of good data about consumer behavior wouldn’t be available to Google.

Regulators in the United Kingdom and the European Union have been taking a close look at Google’s FLOC system with many saying – almost immediately – that it would benefit Google to the detriment of other platforms.

And lastly, Google’s announcement came the same day that the U.S. House of Representatives started a collection of anti-trust bills on the path to passage. This lawmaking is by no means fast-tracked. It takes years of negotiation to get legislation like this passed. But it’s an indication of the seriousness with which Congress is taking Big Tech’s role in voters’ lives.

What does this mean for political ad buyers? Well, in the short term, voter match targeting using cookies will hang around, but its ineffectiveness will get more obvious over time. Smart buyers – that’s you – are going to keep an eye on trends that don’t use cookies – or cookie fakes like so-called universal IDs – to see how they can start to find new ways to reach voters.

Spot-On’s here to help with that effort. Our Pinpoint Placement ad buying platform automates direct ad buying to help your campaign reach voters, not bots. Drop us a line and we’ll set you up with a demo.

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 2016.
  • Women voted more than men – no real change here.

The census can’t tell if the increase in polling hours, use of mail-in ballots or drop-boxes helped with turn-out; those drill-downs will come in time as results are compared between locations and years. But given the increasingly colorful data landscape, it’s likely that info will be available soon – and not from your paid pollster.

We may be at the start of an interesting trend: The widespread use of data – real data – about voters, location and behavior in new and more public places. There is a ton of good statistical analysis going on. And it’s made a lot more accessible with a host of computerized graphing and illustration tools.

What used to be the purview of pollsters and modelers and the occasional nerdy reporter is getting more and more public and a lot less geeky. Have a look at Github, a code repository where a lot of open source projects are housed by civic-minded nerds and you’ll see a long and varied list of projects related to the U.S. elections.

The NYTimes Upshot has done some great work along these lines looking at the 2016 and 2020 elections with some pretty colorful maps and very nicely done interactive websites graphics and displays. It’s also highlighted a project studying partisan segmentation within Congressional Districts. That analysis is going to crop up again as the arguments over redistricting are taken up in the fall and winter.

Spot-On has always suggested that campaigns “roll their own” data and increasingly the tools to do so are easy to find and deploy. That’s why our new Pinpoint Placement ad buying platform will let our users keep and record their activity, privately and securely. Your info won’t get dumped into a pile so other can paw through it; it’s yours and yours alone.

We’re happy to show off the new platform. Drop us a note and we’ll set you up with a demo.