• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, July 9, 2013

Why wouldn’t a Republican consulting firm expand a relationship with a certain measurement company enjoying a nice political bounce? If the publicity is to be believed, Rentrak proved crucial last year in helping President Obama win the White House – just what the GOP desperately wants to take back in 2016.

There’s been considerable hoopla about how the Obama campaign exploited Rentrak data as part of the most effective voter targeting effort ever, but word emerged Tuesday that Republicans had actually used the stuff, too. The GOP firm National Media Research, Planning and Placement (NMRPP) employed it for strategy while representing clients such as the Republican National Committee and a right-leaning legal arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

NMRPP has re-upped with Rentrak, saying it will use the company's set-top-box data for local buys on broadcast stations and cable networks in the 2013-14 campaign cycle for Congressional and statewide races.

Rentrak is hardly the only research sources it calls upon, saying it also turns to Scarborough, MRI, comScore, Arbitron and Nielsen. But it is the only one that has received recent press coverage portraying it as political gold. 

The way it’s looking, the dollars Rentrak received from the Obama 2012 campaign will prove to be gravy. The credit it continues for its role in the Chicago operation is likely to increasingly attract business from politicos looking for similar success.

The attention began shortly after election day last fall when the Washington Post reported the Obama campaign matched Rentrak set-top-box data with its proprietary voter profiles, looking to reach undecided voters. It found cable networks such as the Hallmark Channel and Food Network could be helpful and bought time across an array of them, along with heavying up on certain broadcast dayparts. A chest-thumping Rentrak – which reportedly received at least $359,000 from the Obama team -- emailed a copy of the Post coverage around.  

Then, last month, a New York TimesMagazine cover story about what Obama campaign veterans are doing now in advertising brought a detailed rehash of the campaign’s Rentrak data crunching. The campaign developed an “optimizer” tool that shifted traditional TV buying away from demographics such as women 25-to-54 to the identified blocks of persuadable voters.

The Times offered Rentrak a spectacular quote for presentations to political consultants, referring to the “optimizer” as “a system that could determine with more precision than ever what swing voters were watching in the greatest concentrations and how to get commercials in front of them in the cheapest advertising time slots possible.” That’s pretty much all a political operative – or any marketer, for that matter – can hope to do.

As campaigns move ahead, local stations are likely to continue to receive chunks of money for spots on their late local news to reach wide swaths of viewers. But cable operators might be able to use the Obama template to make a more persuasive case about the value of buying cable networks on their systems to reach highly targeted voter segments.

It’s unclear whether 2014 is shaping up to be a good year for Republicans or Democrats, but it looks to be strong one for Rentrak. If politicians relish blaming the media, Rentrak would seem to owe it quite a bit.