• by Mark Severini , August 8, 2012

Every four years, the story is the same -- the overall ad spend on the U.S. presidential campaign goes higher than anyone expected. With the Citizens United ruling, the amount of political ad money flowing in the next 5 months will be staggering.

And we're not here to debate specific political viewpoints, but every political pundit agreed, President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign ushered in the first digitally integrated political campaign in U.S. history, and his opponents last time couldn't match the digital prowess of Obama's team.

Four years later, digital will remain a centerpiece of both campaigns, and they're leaving no digital stone unturned -- Pinterest accounts, Tumblr, Google+. There's a strategy for every digital channel.

In 2008, mobile advertising was a nascent industry. The first iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007. In the second quarter of 2012, Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones. In 2008, the iPad didn't exist. And, that's just iOS. We all know Android's torrid growth too.

In this changed marketplace, mobile advertising will be a key strategy and tactic for the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign.

As the campaign spending increases week by week, here are some key points that the presidential campaigns (and brand marketers) should keep in mind about mobile advertising:

Targeting - Despite the deep coffers of the campaigns, buying huge swaths of mobile ad inventory without intelligent targeting will be an absolute waste of money. If a user is reading news about the Obama campaign on their mobile device, combined with frequent visits to Democratic-leaning Web sites, and combined with other semantic signals that that user is most likely a Democratic voter, the Romney campaign will have to decide whether it's worth targeting and re-targeting that person via mobile ads.

Mobile ad companies are rushing to decipher user sentiment and intent so they can hopefully identify the all-important self-identified, independent voters -- since everyone agrees that those voters will be the key to either candidate's victory.

Creative - Once you've identified those users you want to target via mobile, what form will that political ad take? If they're smart, campaigns will be hammering their vendors and systems to test, test, and test -- interstitials, banners, in-game rewards -- to see what works most effectively.

And beyond the ad unit itself, which campaign performs best? Email capture form, donation button, a brief survey -- the campaigns will need to figure out which performs best.

Privacy - The mobile advertising industry is moving ahead at the rate of Moore's Law or even faster. Yet consumers have stated that privacy matters to them. The targeting we've described above is possible without prying into personally identifiable data. Political campaigns aren't governed by the same restrictions as commercial brands (CAN-SPAM, for example, exempts political emails). Yet campaigns run the same risk as marketers in angering and alienating the people most crucial to their success.

When the political historians look back at 2012, the campaigns' mobile advertising efforts, we think, will have the same historic impacts as the famous televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon. We'll be crossing the mobile advertising Rubicon in political campaigns, and every campaign in the future will have a robust mobile advertising strategy.