Behavioral Targeting for Political Campaigns Holds Perils, Consultants Say
The 2008 election cycle probably wasn’t the breakthrough that online advertising was hoping for, but it was full of useful experimentation, campaign consultants told an Interactive Advertising Bureau event in Washington Friday. Especially noteworthy was the Yes on Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage initiative in California, whose successful use of the Web to overturn a state Supreme Court ruling surprised even its leaders, said Kate Kaye. She wrote Campaign ‘08: A Turning Point for Digital Media. One big question for candidates is whether to jump into behavioral targeting, whose privacy issues may dog candidates more than business advertisers -- and whose value is debatable after a point, consultants said.
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Campaigns in 2008 spent about 5 percent of their ad dollars online, Kaye said: “There’s still a lot of reluctance among more old-school political consultants and political media buyers.” Most online spending went to fundraising efforts. Then-candidate Barack Obama’s success with online advertising in the primaries overcame some skepticism, Kaye said. The Obama campaign’s “dynamic” advertising -- giving ad elements to Yahoo so voters from a particular state are shown a state-specific ad on the fly when visiting Yahoo News -- was notable, Kaye said. Such tactics are “not all that new in our industry,” said Mike Zaneis, IAB vice president of public policy. “In many ways the political world is catching up to the online medium.”
The Proposition 8 campaign was surprised to conclude that “all these old fuddy-duddy conservatives [managed to] win the Web,” Kaye said. The campaign paired voter registration data with registration data from Web portals including AOL, MSN and Yahoo to target specific messages to voters by party identification. It also called Google to “bombard” a specific geographic region with ads across the AdSense network, which reaches four in five Web users, 36 hours before the vote, Kaye said. It’s a “huge shift from the past” for conservative groups to use the Web so heavily.
Nonprofit campaigns should consider applying for Google Grants, in which the company historically gives $10,000 in free advertising per nonprofit group, said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics.com. Google says it’s given away $350 million in free ads in that way. Many nonprofits are wary of such deals because “advertising still has the hint of the devil in it,” he said. But there’s no “magic number” or percentage of an ad budget on which to spend online, said Jeff Dittus, founder of CampaignGrid. The Web is good for mobilization and “relationship management,” Delany said. But he'll sometimes recommend an issue campaign hire a lobbyist instead of spending online.
The John McCain campaign suffered from a “compartmentalized” attitude toward online efforts, Dittus said. New-media strategists often weren’t plugged in to the rest of the campaign, leading to different messages being relayed online, said Emily Williams, interactive account executive for MSHC Partners. “Online is not a strategy in and of itself.” There were other major differences between the presidential campaigns, namely Obama’s purchase of keywords for Web sites to refute rumors that he was secretly Muslim, Kaye said. McCain’s team, in contrast, didn’t respond online to accusations from the Obama camp that the Republican senator was tainted by his association with the 1980s savings and loan scandals -- not wanting to draw more attention, Delany said.
When considering whether to use behavioral targeting, candidates should consider the “classic political test: How’s it going to look on the front page of the New York Times?” Delany said. “It may make voters think “Oh God, they're tracking me.” The plus side is that candidates who admit to targeting can say that Obama did the same in his presidential campaign, Dittus said: “It’s almost like a bad Seinfeld skit.” The Obama campaign probably didn’t get much out of its targeting, since the candidate’s name was such a popular search query, Delany said. “You're getting less and less benefit for every increase in targeting,” or making a more specific pitch to a smaller audience, he said. Williams said candidates should start with “re-targeting.” That’s when sites that a Web user has visited are served back to them in the form of ads, since they already expressed interest in those sites.
Online video is the key to grabbing more campaign ad dollars away from television, Dittus said. He’s seeing a trend of more candidates re-purposing a TV commercial to use on a Web site landing page, so that visitors immediately hear from the candidate. Pre-roll political clips before mainstream video are also showing gains, he said. “If we can really exploit video in everything we do, we can really take more share from the big broadcasters.” The problem is that online buying is much more difficult than for TV, where a campaign’s media buyer can put the same spot on multiple stations quickly, Delany said. With online media, there’s a need for constant analysis -- and no “cadre” of political professionals capable of making the most of the data, he said.
Contrary to rumors of the unattractiveness of social media for advertising, Obama’s campaign spent $640,000 on Facebook ads, Kaye said. It wasn’t just a “viral Facebook extravaganza” of Obama supporters spreading the word. Asked about the possibilities for political advertising on videogame consoles, Dittus said campaigns would like that. But “we're at the mercy of the technologists.”