{"id":4160,"date":"2017-05-03T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T09:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spot-on.com\/?p=4160"},"modified":"2017-05-03T09:00:20","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T09:00:20","slug":"campaign-tools-digital-media-geo-fencing-and-mor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/2017\/05\/03\/campaign-tools-digital-media-geo-fencing-and-mor\/","title":{"rendered":"Campaign tools: Digital media, geo-fencing \u2014 and more"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article appeared in\u00a0Capitol\u00a0Weekly.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

For years, the Silicon Valley mantra was \u201cThe Internet changes everything.\u201d These days it\u2019s more accurate to say \u201cThe Internet is always changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the conventional wisdom about online ad targeting and other digital means of finding voters can easily slip out of date. Things are always changing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>For a few years, some vendors claimed to be able to match voter data to ad placements with a success rate of more than 60%.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s possible \u2013 but only if you\u2019re running a national campaign that uses other demographic data to bolster voter information reaching millions of online ad viewers over a period of several months. With a potential audience below one million and a short time frame, matching is considered a huge success at 40% \u2013 and that rarely happens.<\/p>\n

Why? Well, the Internet is good at compressing space and time. Anyone can buy a can of Coca Cola from anywhere at any time \u2013 as long as they have an Internet connection. Voting is restricted to specific places and times and only some people can participate. And if you take a look at how voter file matching to cookies and IP address actually works, you see the problems compound pretty quickly as accuracy degrades.<\/p>\n

The \u201cdata\u201d that any voter file vendor provides to a digital match service \u00a0is ALWAYS redacted. What\u2019s removed is called \u201cPersonally Identify Information\u201d or PII.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>What\u2019s PII? Your name, your date-of-birth, your physical address, in some cases your phone numbers and email address. What\u2019s left? Voting history and party affiliation.<\/p>\n

Those two points \u2013 and only those \u2013 are used to buy \u201ccookies\u201d \u2013 a name for a computer code that tracks users\u2019 online activity via web browsers. The cookies purchases are based on characteristics<\/u><\/em> shared with other people who have similar voting history and party affiliation. \u00a0Those cookies are then matched to IP addresses against zip codes which further degrades the accuracy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s loss at every point in the chain, especially when the PII is stripped out. More of a problem: cookies don\u2019t work with mobile devices. And increasingly, mobile is the best way to reach voters.<\/p>\n

So now we have a new silver bullet: \u201cgeo-fencing\u201d\u00a0 as a way to target voters. But that familiar term has taken on new and interesting definitions in the political sphere. Geo-fencing is NOT targeting ads to a specific Congressional District using IP addresses matched to zip codes. That\u2019s a constant of any online buy. Geo-fencing is NOT recording a mobile device ID and tracking that phone to make a subsequent call to that user. That activity is illegal.<\/p>\n

Geo-fencing IS the use of cell tower locations and mobile activity to reach a group of specific people at a particular time and location. It can be used to put your GOTV message up in a 1-mile radius of a polling place on election day. It can be used to \u201ctalk\u201d to potential voters at rally or large event and secure their permission to contact them at a later date.<\/p>\n

Even without the move to mobile, our firm, Spot-On, has seen plenty of evidence that tight targeting doesn\u2019t work as well as it does with mail or even cable TV. Our firm regularly splits client\u2019s online ad buys between those aimed at a specific district and the \u00a0larger area around the district.<\/p>\n

Our clients have consistently seen little or no difference in engagement between tightly targeted ads (district only) and more general placements (citywide). And they\u2019ve won.<\/p>\n

Spot-On has had great success with and encourages clients to\u00a0 use \u2018rich\u2019 media \u2013 audio, video, expanding ads, ads that take over a page for a set period of time \u2013 on local high-traffic news sites simulating a TV-like experience. Those sites are voter-rich: more than 60% of regular news readers are regular voters. Which is why rich media placements ALWAYS leads to higher engagements. They also bump up engagement rates<\/a> for other less dramatic placements.<\/p>\n

Rich media grabs the reader\u2019s attention and sends them to a site where they learn more about a candidate or campaign. And that, at the end of the day, is the reason to buy an ad, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

The long-standing emphasis in the political market on targeting is a legacy, a way to make sure that the large sums of money<\/a> needed for mail, field, phone GOTV and TV weren\u2019t wasted. And while many statewide and national campaigns can and should use voter targeting and matching, for most consultants and campaigns a broader online strategy combined with targeted mail and cable buys produces a 360-degree media buy that\u2019s compelling and victorious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appeared in\u00a0Capitol\u00a0Weekly. For years, the Silicon Valley mantra was \u201cThe Internet changes everything.\u201d These days it\u2019s more accurate to say \u201cThe Internet is always changing.\u201d That\u2019s why the conventional wisdom about online ad targeting and other digital means of finding voters can easily slip out of date. Things are always changing. \u00a0For a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}