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.

Wanna be seen as a kewl kid in the online ad world? Use the word ‘privacy’ in a sentence when you’re talking about online advertising.

It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to tell which of the massive platforms which depend on mining of user data is now – suddenly – the most concerned about user welfare.

And that’s without questioning the sincerity of those concerns.

All this jockeying has an impact on political ad sales because – rightly or wrongly – using commercially available data to target voters rests on the privacy-violating tools that the platforms have been using for the past 15 years.

There’s also a little bit of posturing going on here in anticipation of government regulation of the tech world. Appearing to care about users – known as consumers in the antitrust world – helps big tech companies argue that they’re not all that bad.

The lead dog here is Apple which has – on many levels – gone to war with Facebook over the manipulation of user data. As New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin put it a few years ago “Apple cares about your privacy and it wants you to know it cares about your privacy. ”

With its most recent set of software upgrades on phones, tablets and desktop devices, Apple has dramatically reduced ad targeting ability. No more device ID tracking.

Then we have Google. Google’s using privacy talk to move away from the use of cookie tracking in its ad sales. But the resulting confluence of targeting techniques is, well, mind-boggling. It will be especially – maybe even impossible – if you’re running a small campaign.

There are some attempts at less confusing work-arounds, which may sound really good to political folks since they rely on email addresses and implied consent. But the privacy Gods, in this case, Google, aren’t happy.

And there are lots of people who are happy to point out that Google’s ideas about privacy may be good for Google but not so much for the users from whom it profits.

This is, as we used to say, breaking news. Lots more to come so we’ll point you to a source we like a lot: DigiDay’s privacy round-up of stories. It’s about as comprehensive as anyone can be right now and it’s being added to as things develop.

Digiday makes a good point in its stories: Platforms, not lawmakers are leading the way on privacy. But that doesn’t mean there’s no activity.

Across the country, states have teed up online privacy legislation. Oklahoma, Florida, Virginia, Washington and Connecticut all considered – or actually passed – legislation this year. That comes after California enacted and started enforcing privacy rules for its residents.

So, naturally, there’s a federal privacy bill kicking around. How that fares in the larger conversations about breaking up Big Tech, suing Big Tech, regulating Big Tech – the list goes on – is anyone’s guess. But it’s safe to say there will be something.

Okay, so what’s next. Short answer: Your guess is as good as ours.

What we do know is that starting in January 2022 – right on time for the Midterm elections – the online ad world will be in a state of flux. Whether that flux turns to turmoil remains to be seen.

Naturally, we have thoughts on all this. One: Look longer and harder at buying direct from local news publishers who are looking to capture political ad dollars and may well use these market adjustments to curtail access.

Spot-On’s new Pinpoint Persuasion ad buying platform make direct buying easy and clear. Drop us a note and we’ll show you what we can do to help navigate through the year – and beyond.

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 provider, which can change at any time. Their business is more important to them then yours.

So, when Google – the Mississippi River of ad tech – dams up a major tributary saying it will no longer support online data tracking, colloquially known as “cookies” a lot of companies are going underwater.

Starting in 2022, firms used by political campaigns to find and identify voters (data brokers like LiveRamp, BlueKai) and ad exchanges which resell Google’s ad inventory (Trade Desk, A4) to the highest bidder will face dramatic changes in how they do business. Some may not survive.

Says Google:

“People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. And advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising.”

Short version: No more swapping out or selling data that monitors and analyses the behavior of Internet users. In other words, you won’t be able to buy so-called “buckets” of, say, Democrats who own guns and drive Priuses on your favorite DSP.

It gets worse. Google is flatly saying that the use of personally identifying information suggested by some of these intermediary vendors will longer be a way to cull or identify users. Here’s more:

“We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII [personal identifying information] graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment.”

Translation: Feel free to use other use tracking techniques but be aware that Google will not support that behavior to sell ads. And Google controls most ad sales.

Google is not the most politically savvy firm in the country (too many billionaires in leadership) but it knows that the 40-and counting lawsuits it’s facing in state capitols across the country, the threatened oversight by federal regulators and a general distrust and suspicion of big tech – which it embodies in a single verb – means things have to change.

What it’s offering as change 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. Outside data – voter files – will not be allowed.

This raises lots of questions. Privacy activists are already questioning Google’s apparently total control of data and suggesting that a closed ‘black box’ for targeting users is just as bad as the free-for-all that currently exists.

So what does this mean for political advertisers? Well, kiss voter file targeting good-bye. Voter files are composed of personally identifying information [PII] like age, name, home address and gender, which has always been questionably effective.

Secondly, be very concerned about how any “political cohort” might be constructed. Political advertising doesn’t work like brand ads. Joe Biden isn’t a budget hotel chain, Elizabeth Warren is not an organic apple grower. Political cohorts, if created, won’t be able to keep up with changing voter perceptions. They are likely to go out-of-date quickly

Political cohorts will also vary by location – they 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.

Then, of course, there’s the question of whether or not Google will even permit these political cohorts to exist. Political ad revenue made a lot of Google’s DC sales team very happy last year. But that revenue – still less than $1 billion – was a fraction of Alphabet’s $180 billion – and a large portion of its bad PR.

It’s a safe bet that large presidential campaigns will craft cohorts for their efforts. But it’s just as safe a bet that they won’t share with other firms or other campaigns. And it’s likely those cohorts will have short shelf lives and be pretty useless on a local level.

Spot-On’s been touting the value of contextual ad buying – putting ads on known sites – for a while. We’ve even built a new ad buying platform specifically for political ad buyers. Our Pinpoint Persuasion platform is independent from Google’s technology and designed for the specific needs of political ad buyers who want to reach known established outlets in cities, counties and states where their voters live.

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.

Spot-On normally uses the first newsletter of the year to reflect on the last and look ahead. This year we feel it necessary to start by channeling the late great Yankee shortstop (and poet) Phil Rizzuto.

Holy Cow!

There’s a lot more we could say – but none of it is printable.

A lot of things changed last year and some of those changes are going to keep rolling through this year. We don’t pretend to know the end game here; too much is still unresolved and incomplete. So rather than our usual predictions, we’re going to go with some observations that we hope are helpful.

We Are All Georgia

Now that it’s won big and won in the clutch, it looks like the Stacey Abrams approach to voter outreach is here to stay.  This could mean real battles in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and – this year – in Virginia as both parties look not at the lists of who’s voted but start compiling lists of people to encourage them to vote.

Local News On The Rise

There’s a trend complementing the Abrams-style outreach. Readership for local news sites – and elected officials interest in supporting those sites – has increased in the past year. News readers are voters – or likely to be voters.

Buying ads on local sites has two benefits. Campaigns and advocacy efforts can talk directly to people who are active and interested in their communities and likely to be voters. They can also talk to editorial teams and publishers – supplementing earned media coverage.

There’s a trend complementing this shift: Publishers are showing a much stronger interest in setting ad rates for their sites and reaping that revenue directly rather than from remote third parties. So many are curtailing platforms’ access and looking at their subscribers, the first step in being able to talk to advertisers in detail about their readers.

Targeting on the Decline

Last year started with a slate of privacy law changes at the state level but most were delayed by Covid stay-at-home orders. This year, with lawmakers finding ways to work with social distancing in mind, passage of these laws is likely to accelerate.

That’s the first blow to the use of voter data to target ads. There are some others.

• A reluctance by ad platforms, long the go-to for political campaigns to run political ads – While Google and Facebook, the big players here, have come and gone on these issues, it’s likely that their legislative battles at the state and federal level might move political off the platforms.
• New federal regulation –  The Federal Election Commission has a full slate of members for the first time in eight years. Its former Chair Ellen Weintraub has campaigned tirelessly for digital ad disclosures and disclaimers. It’s likely she’ll get something done this year.
• Apple’s push to protect the privacy of its users. The most recent Apple software update will require opt-ins for tracking on all the applications it offers, including Facebook. This means iOS users – who tend to live on the Coasts, have high incomes and corresponding computer literacy and privacy awareness – are going to be curtailed.

The end result of all of this, as this Politico story put it: many consultants feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under them. It hasn’t really; we’re just seeing a long series of trends pile up on one another to create big change. Not like anyone in politics doesn’t get that.

If your outreach has depended entirely on platforms, that rug has indeed been pulled out. But if your scope has and is broadening, there’s plenty to see.

Spot-On’s approach to online ad placement for political has long concentrated on local, known outlets. We’re growing our list of sites and alternatives with our own Pinpoint Placement platform and other vendors.

Drop us a line and we’ll tell you more about how we can help you find a new run, some different platforms and a new way of looking at digital ad placement.

It’s going to take a while for the professional political class to digest the 2020 election. Trends that popped up and were dismissed in 2016 came roaring back. And there was plenty of new stuff.

One thing is clear, however. Like 2016, the 2020 election brought a lot of new voters to the polls. And many of them didn’t fit neatly into predictable categories.

So, once again, it was harder for pollsters and their handmaidens in the political press corps to make sweeping generalizations. Bummer, huh?

This newsletter is written by a former political reporter so we aren’t going to shy away from sweeping generalizations about the role that digital outreach played in the 2020 election. Old habits die hard.

New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who is more of a tech guy than a political guy, had a must-read write-up of how the Biden campaign used digital outreach. There are some real insights there.

Rather than treat online activity as just another screen to be flooded with ads, the Biden folks tailored messages to specific platforms and specific users on those platforms. They looked at digital outreach as something separate and distinct from other forms of paid media.

On Facebook, the campaign found surrogates (also known as “influencers”) to carry its message. They paid attention to feedback loops from the platforms to reinforce messaging and they steered away from simply reusing TV ads to plaster news feeds and YouTube.

Since Facebook and Google put limits on how political ads could appear (some efforts more successful than others), the Biden campaign was most likely making a virtue of necessity. But their winning approach has implications for future campaigns. Digital outreach on social platforms is a lot more like field – reaching people where they are online – than media buying.

This is going to make a lot more sense since the ability to track and follow voters using data about online behavior is dying. Privacy law is doing away with cookie matching and so-called voter match targeting is following right behind it.

Which bring us to another sweeping generalization about 2020: targeting using assumptions about voter behavior is also dying. Campaigns need to collect and use their own data about voters instead of relying on warmed-over observations from prior campaigns.

The pool of voters isn’t just bigger, it’s more diverse. So pollsters were surprised to see Asians and some Spanish-speakers support Republicans. And suburban women split their votes, supporting President-elect Biden against President Trump but supporting Republican lawmakers at the state and federal level.

This ticket splitting might be the result of a trend that’s going to have the biggest impact of all: voting when it’s convenient for you by the most convenient means. Call it whatever suits – vote-by-mail, permanent absentee voting, early voting – but the idea that voters are all going to turn out on one dramatic day is over and done.

So the focus may well shift away from getting out the vote to getting the vote in. This technique was used with great success by California governor Gavin Newsom in his first run for San Francisco Mayor. By the time election day rolled around, Newsom had won. His victory was the result of a concerted effort to first encourage then track permanent absentee voters in San Francisco.

Or to repeat a sweeping generalization much loved by the political class: as goes California, so goes the nation. Corralling ballots – with social media surrogates, specific messages in specific languages, via paid ads, email or texts – is going to be the strategy that wins elections in the near and long-term.

And, of course, Spot-On’s here to help. Pinpoint Persuasion direct buying platform will debut in mid-January. We’ll have information about trusted local outlets in your statehouse and Congressional districts as well as zip search and a ton of information about sites and voters.

Want to kick the tires with a demo? Drop us a line.

It’s gotten a fancy high-tech name now but the old fashion technique that political ad buyers have relied on – buying ads where they think they’ll find voters – is coming back with a vengeance.

This time around it’s called “contextual targeting.” Which means that advertisers run ads where they’ll reach people who care about the things related to the ad messaging. You know, like buying local TV news during an election!

The main driver behind this back to the future renaming is a series of actions that may well come to be called the “online privacy wars,” a fight among web browsers to see who’s best at reassuring customers all the while throwing shade on Google and Facebook.

Here’s Apple’s opening salvo off a page from Hearst’s SFGate website.

The SFGate page has 27 trackers, according to Apple. Some of which are companies that have almost nothing to do with news publishing and a lot to do with following people around the web to sell them stuff. Here’s Firefox’s version of the tracking on CNN which has 24 of the pesky little bots on alert.

Both of these privacy tools are, of course, aimed at Google and Facebook. Firefox, which is run by a bunch of super nerds has always worried about user privacy – well ahead of everyone else. Apple’s getting in on the game to make sure its well-off, well-educated customers know the company is, to invert a phrase, not doing evil.

Tracking is creepy and most people aren’t aware of it. And when they are aware they don’t like it. So, it’s a good bet that the average web user seeing these warnings might have a new interest in some of the once-boring conversations about privacy, tech policy and regulation.

Over the past two years, Congress has had a big think about Big Tech and, well, it’s decided that what happens online is something that bears watching. Hearings through this year, largely ignored by anyone with anything else to do – like run a political campaign – did a pretty good job of educating lawmakers to the ins and outs of how tech companies operate. It wasn’t pretty.

Put another way: The stage is set for regulation. And if it’s not legislative regulation, it may be court-ordered controls.

What does all this mean for your average political campaign: big changes, that’s what. Because the regulation isn’t just aimed at how companies behave; it’s squarely aimed at reining in their ability to collect and sell data about their customers.

Which means that political campaigns going to have to think about online targeting in a new way. The reliance – and mistaken belief that so-called voter matching enabled advertiser to reach specific individuals – is thwarted by privacy concerns and laws. Restrictions on how user data can be used will put up more obstacles.

Why? So-called voter-match targeting isn’t targeting voters. It’s targeting people who may be like the voter a campaign wants to reach. Maybe they share a similar financial or credit history; live in the same neighborhood, own the same type of car. So when people get more control over the information used to make those associations – if a user can block CNN and SFGate’s trackers – that user has opted out all ad targeting, not just political.

So, we’re back to the future. It’s in political campaigns best interest to buy ads on local news site because – just like TV – people who vote are people who care about local news.

And local news sites, having weathered what can only be described as an extended depression, are coming back. Bad news, as anyone in the news business would happily tell you, is very good for business. And there’s been no shortage of that lately.

The problem that’s emerging with folks who are interested in contextually targeting political ads is the fractured nature of the marketplace. Well, we here at Spot-On have made the same observation. Over the next few months you’ll be hearing about our Pinpoint Placement platform which allows campaigns of all sizes to buy ads on local news – and other sites – by election district.

If you’d like an early preview to learn how you can target local news outlets – by state legislative, Congressional district or zip code – drop us a line.

This newsletter, coming to you at the beginning of the earnest and chaotic political buying cycle, comes with some good news.

You are not alone.

A recent survey by Centro, a Chicago and Toronto-based programmatic ad buying firm, says that political ad buyers are worried about a range of issues facing this political year. The know there are landmines out there, they’re just not sure when they’re going to go off.

To which Spot-On says, “d’uh”.

Regular readers know most of this but to re-cap (and kinda humble brag) here are the results with links to our earlier newsletters on the topics.

Worried about changes platforms have made for political ads (81% say this is a big problem) and corresponding concerns about the ability to target voters on the minds of most buyers (66%).

Getting clients to pay attention to digital (64%) or increase budgets (55%).

Covid-19 as a distraction for voters (53%). We actually don’t think this is as big a deal because Covid-related news is driving the surge in online searches for information.

Brand safety and ad fraud worries (40% each).

Changing state and federal regulation (38%).

If you open this newsletter even semi-regularly, there’s no news here. So bear with us while we repeat ourselves.

Buy your political ads directly from publishers. It’s not just good business, it’s good politics. Publisher are paying more attention to their website than ever before. Your ads will be seen – and appreciated.

A well-run online ad buy can avoid waste – without voter targeting.  Advertising on trusted news sites reaches voters. Look for ways to target by geographic and zip, not just voter lists. And use high-impact ads that can generate attention both inside and outside the newsroom.

Spot-On knows the local news market. We have a database of more than 4500 trusted local sites in cities and town across the country. We can tell you who serves your district and advise you on options and buying strategies.

Want more? Drop us a line and let us show how our new platform makes your ad buying easier, clearer and more secure. 

With the Friday announcement that it was cancelling contracts with political ad buyers, Adobe – a venerable Silicon Valley company – is sending a clear signal: Political ads are too hot to handle.

The Adobe news broke at the end of a week that saw The Big Tech Four on the hot seat before Congress and word that Hulu, Facebook, Verizon and Google made an editorial judgement about a political ad.

These are all indication of how the established practices in the online political world are changing – and a hint that they may change again before the election.

Of course, these practices aren’t all that established. The current (but fading) fad for voter targeting – also known as ‘micro-targeting’ really came to the forefront in 2016 when campaigns became convinced – wrongly – that online targeting was the same as mail targeting.

It’s not. It never was, especially for anything smaller than a Congressional race. But using voter targeting to buy remnant ads via platform dashboards – which is what Adobe’s stopped on its platform – is an easy and fast way to buy lots of cheap ads and avoid oversight by regulators. No editorial or legal review. No need for substantiation or disclaimers.

So, oversight is the big news here. Google, Hulu, Facebook and Verizon (which now owns the still-popular Yahoo!) have actually looked at the ad and decided not to run it. Adobe, realizing somewhat belatedly that its acquisition of TubeMogul in late 2016 brought them a political business, decided to remove a potential PR nightmare like the one dogging Facebook.

There’s more change coming between now and the election as shortcuts taken for granted by many online advertisers get closed off. Here are two more important changes we’ll see before Nov. 3.

Apple is ramping up protections against ad tracking. These privacy protections will be part of Apple’s next software updates for all its phones scheduled for mid-September.

On July 12, Facebook announced that the dashboard buttons allowing users to block political ads were fully in place. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to realize that the more political ads a Facebook user sees, the more likely they’ll be to block those ads.

All this against a real world background that is, to understate the situation, a bit unsettled. Congress is making odd noises about election interference. And others are – perhaps not coincidentally – looking at the likelihood that there will be political ad fraud this year. It’s considered all but certain which is another reason why Adobe may have abandon the market.

Not to be outdone, it seems, the US Post Office is warning of a series of crises over mail delivery. Congress is in on this, too because USPS is warning that it may not be able to get ballots to everyone who wants one for voting at home or by mail.

What to do? Well, consider buying digital ads directly from local publishers to reach voters. Don’t know what they’re reading? Spot-On does. And we’ve got the experience and data – a list of 4,000 sites across the country – to support those buys.

Give us a shout. We’ll make your digital headaches go away.

With the state primaries schedule slow down it’s time to survey the digital ad environment for fall.

Like almost everything else, it’s changing. Again.

The ability to use user data to target mobile devices and desktop computers is under new fire. And the one platform campaigns have used as a go-to to reach voters is, well, playing games that will hurt political campaigns.

Let’s start with Facebook. Under fire from brand advertiser (who pay the bills) with suspicions about their political motives under new scrutiny, the platform made an announcement that’s a cynical as anything it’s done so far. And that’s saying something.

Users will have the ability to block all political ads. So if your ad says “paid for by…..” Facebook will let a voter say “never more.”

So Facebook is now officially a casino: Campaigns pay their money, they take their chances on reaching voters and the house always wins. 

We’ve written enough about how so-called voter targeting on the open web is being eroded by various legislative and other protective measures so we’ll skip those revisits (here and here) for some new news.

Apple – as part of its battle for user trust against Facebook and Google – has announced that it will restrict targeting on iPhones. Apps will no longer be able to share data without user permissions. And those permissions must be actively granted so there will be warnings as well as an easy-to-read privacy guide for users.

As one tech newsletter put it: “This definition of tracking includes, data collected for ad targeting, location data, and email lists to share with data brokers, and a third-party [software developer kits] placed in the app to track user behavior.”

So the vendor who’s telling you they can track a phone into a home or event just got their wings clipped. It’s just a matter of time before Google’s Android devices catch up.

This doesn’t mean mobile advertising doesn’t work; it does and Spot-On has seen engagement rates that dwarf desktop for most of our campaigns. Devices can be targeted by language, age and geography, all powerful tools for reaching groups of voters. 

But the inaccurate perception that specific devices can and should be targeted with specific one-to-one ads is now official nonsense.

Our last bit of news concerns the buying and selling of consumer data – the fuel that drives voter targeting. With more publishers paying attention to the revenue generated by their websites, many are casting a jaundice eye on these data resellers who they believe are taking subscriber information without paying for it.

The New York Times is pulling out of its agreements. Other publishers are following – and quickly. So the ability to use this data, which is the backbone voter targeting is weakening. Again.

Oh, and a footnote on the TikTok Tulsa Trump Troll. TikTok, a Chinese-owned company does not accept political ads.

But here’s some good news: Local news outlets reach voters. They talk to people who are engaged with their communities. And they’re getting better at responding to queries about subscriber demographics with surveys suggesting that about 60% of regular local news readers are regular voters.

Spot-On has always believed in the power of local ad placements. Which is why we can help your campaign navigate this often difficult terrain.

Shoot us a note and we’ll share our 10 years of detailed knowledge about placements, outlets and ways to reach voters.

Thinking differently about how to run your campaigns? It could be time to change up your digital ad game as part of that process. 

Two online publishing trends are coming together in a way that should encourage political campaigns to think differently about the tried-and-true method of reaching voters with digital technology.

First, the lingering and slow death of the 3^rd party cookie, brought on by fatigue, frustrationand fraud, along with the enactment or threat of enactment of online privacy protection laws means the most popular means of buying political ads, known as “programmatic advertising,” is losing its shiny gloss.

That gloss included the ability to use redacted voter information in an attempt – in Spot-On’s eyes, an overstated one – to target specific voters. With the death of the 3^rd party cookie, alltargeting loses its effectiveness.

At the same time, attention to local news sites, spurred on by the Covid-19 Pandemic – has increased dramatically. McClatchy, which has outlets from California to Miami – says its online readership is up by more than 60%. They’re not alone.

Things were headed this way even before the pandemic. In late February, Pew Research Center found that 75% of the folks they surveyed – from both political parties – did not believe Facebook or Google would be able to prevent election interference on their platforms. Another survey found that readers were more trusting of the ‘open web’, not platforms, meaning they trust ads on news and information sites, not the platforms’ walled gardens.

When it comes to TV, well, there’s more acceleration of existing trends that change campaign outreach.

Cable and satellite are seeing a slowdown in growth. One analyst told Variety:  “There are now as many non-subscribing households (46M) as there were pay TV subscribers in 1988.” In other words, the number of folks using online to access information and entertainment is now the size of the early days of the cable TV business – when political advertisers began to notice.

The pandemic is creating problems for political campaigns that won’t disappear with any fall-off in illnesses.  

Door-to-door outreach – the go-to voter contact method since Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign will change – that’s if campaigns are even using it.  And vote-by-mail is on the increase as more states solicit voters to register for that process. 

So, what to do? Well, as we said, these trends are accelerations – not new ground. So, there’s room to adapt.

Online publishers were looking for ways to reclaim ground lost to Facebook and Google before the pandemic hit; voters  distrusted social and other platforms before the crisis.  The use of vote-by-mail and remote contact tools like Zoom and WebEx isn’t new it’s just moved away from the office to daily life. Cable subscriptions have been falling for a while and the use of voter ‘targeting’ has been on the wane for at least a year.

But change is hard – even in the best of circumstances. So here are some real-world suggestions on how campaigns might adapt

Buy your political ads directly from publishers. It’s not just good business,  it’s good politics. Publisher are paying more attention to their website than ever before. Your ads will be seen – and appreciated.

            Spot-On has a database of more than 4500 trusted local news sites. We can tell you who serves your district and advise you on options and buying strategies.

A well-run online ad buy can avoid waste – without voter targeting.  Advertising on trusted news sites reaches voters. Look for ways to target by geographic and zip, not just voter lists. And use high-impact ads that can generate attention both inside and outside the newsroom.

            Spot-On’s new Pinpoint Persuasion buying platform lets you see your buy before its executed so you know where your ads are running and can see their impact on your campaign.

Plan now for fall outreach. Once pandemic panic fades, it’s going to be harder to draw voters to real life events. Help your virtual outreach efforts – phone calls, texting and video meetings – with targeted local ad buys that tell people reading the news what you’re doing so they can join in.

            With its database of more than 4500 trusted local news sites, Spot-On can help you plan ‘air cover’ for phone, in-person or virtual meetings that get voters to you and your event. 

Want more? Drop us a line and let us show how our new platform makes your ad buying easier, clearer and more secure.