Commentary

On-Target, Off-Message: Political Advertising Looking For Something To Say

It comes as no great surprise that political messaging is lacking. The concept of politicians talking and talking and talking without anything really of substance to say is pretty much an American tradition. But the ramping up of targeting technologies in recent campaigns is only underscoring the paucity of the content.

One of the emergent themes in programmatic ad platforms discussion throughout this year has been what we might call content lag. The targeting technologies are ahead of the message. We can find audiences of ever-narrower niches and interests, but the cost and toil associated with customizing the creative to address that niche is too high to justify the effort. And so you get nicely segmented audiences all getting the same message: segmentation without personalization.

This is a topic that is especially acute in political advertising, which embraced programmatic targeting aggressively across the last two campaign cycles. It was a subject of much discussion at our first Marketing Politics event last March and will be again in our second edition in April next year. In the post-mortem to this week’s election, an extensive story in The New York Times explored how many marketers on political campaigns ran up against the conundrum of messaging. Joe Rospars, founder of Blue State Digital and keynoter at this year’s event, put it succinctly for the Times: “The science is ahead of the art.”

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According to the piece, many of the campaigns and national political committees are mastering the big-data aspect of online targeting. They are able to track and segment audiences across many of the critical variables needed to identify key constituencies. But the campaigns are moving so fast and with such limited creative resources, many of these marketers say they just can’t give those segments the messages that really address their concerns. Often the budgeting has all been devoted to the technology side without enough consideration to the creative side. And in some cases there just isn’t enough time to do it all well.

There are some interesting solutions that emerged from recent campaigns, the article suggests, however. Trying to contour messaging to all segments may be fruitless and inefficient, one analysts argues. One of the functions of data analysis should be deciding which are the four or five key segments you need to move. Narrow the field of personalization to the most critical segments and make the job of creative variations more manageable.

Alex Lundry of Deep Root Analytics notes that overreaching on custom creative can be counterproductive. “We always say have that umbrella message, but then supplement it with as many highly targeted messages as you think you can stand, both from a budget standpoint and a philosophical standpoint,” he told the Times. Learning how to rank segments in order of importance and bang for the customization effort seems like a lesson from this last campaign cycle that can be applied far outside the political realm.  

Texas Senator John Cornyn’s campaign used Facebook to target guns-rights voters in his area with Second Amendment pitches. The campaign also led Spanish and Vietnamese constituents on Facebook to distinct sites in Spanish and Vietnamese. At the extreme of targeted creative, a manager of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign claims it reached 18 targeted groups with 4,000 different Facebook ads, 300 banners and about 36 different pre-rolls.

While the McAuliffe campaign may have been exceptional, it points towards the kind of creative range and diversity the technology invites. Of course the technology should also be able to help determine how effective custom creative is, with which groups and at what levels of targeting.  Ironically, marketers may need to go to the data to figure out how much, when and where to invest in creative.    

1 comment about "On-Target, Off-Message: Political Advertising Looking For Something To Say".
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  1. Alex Gochtovtt from Audience Partners, November 6, 2014 at 6:49 p.m.

    Thank you for the insightful post Steve. From lawn signs to digital ads, political messaging still leaves a lot to be desired (as demonstrated quantitatively by Google's Benchmark database- www.richmediagallery.com/resources/benchmarks). Some of the problems you highlight, like differential messaging, custom creative effectiveness, multi-variate analysis are well utilized by other advertisers, yet digital advertising in politics is still a 7.x% rounding error of the $3.67 billion budget that was spent on the Congressional mid-terms (according to the Center for Responsive Politics). Until consultants and advisors decide to a) bring all channels together for strategic communication planning-no siloes b) use true experimental design techniques to see what works-don't run the test afterwards c) realize that the audience scored in May is different in November-audience change over time, we are likely to continue seeing "lawn signs" online.

    I remember early days in pharmaceutical marketing when we, as the digital agency, dreaded turning the brand's sales tool (core visual aid) to a simple PDF on a web site. Now pharma marketers use marketing analytics and communication planning that rival the best; they evolved, so lets hope political consultants adapt their message to the medium before 2016 because while they only do this every two years, this has been going on at least since 2008.

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