• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 22, 2012

Katz 360, the cross-platform digital division of Katz Radio, has signed a strategic agreement with Audience Partners, an online ad platform that specializes in political and cause-related advertising, to offer Katz’s political advertising clients “micro-targeting” of online registered voters, via online display, mobile and video advertising.

Audience Partners and its subsidiary, CampaignGrid, maintain a national file of over 187 million registered voters, which can be filtered to find online voters that meet a number of detailed criteria. Using this data, Katz’s political ad clients will be able to target highly specific audiences of online voters segmented by party affiliation, voting history, and congressional district, along with related demographic, behavioral and lifestyle data.

The political ad-targeting service complements Katz’s existing digital advertising capabilities, ranging across online digital audio, mobile, database and display. Katz’s Online Network has aggregated a national portfolio of media Web sites, including the majority of the nation’s terrestrial broadcast streams, a large number of newspaper publishers, and most pure-play Internet webcasters.

For its part, since being founded in 2008 Audience Partners’ subsidiary CampaignGrid has served more than 400 political campaigns and causes.

Brian Benedik, president of Katz 360, stated: “In this political cycle, advertisers and candidates are starting to appreciate the enormous value of targeting audiences online, which can capture incredibly effective results and near real-time, responsive flexibility."

Pat McGee, Katz Radio Group’s vice-president for political sales and strategy, said the new partnership would also complement Katz’s offline TV and radio sales efforts for political advertisers.