• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 18, 2014

With midterm elections looming and control of the Senate up for grabs, the political advertising business is in full swing again. Clear Channel Media and Entertainment (formerly Clear Channel Radio) is unveiling new products to help campaigns target likely voters more accurately and efficiently.
 
Clear Channel announced the launch of the Audience Delivery Optimizer, or AuDiO, an ad optimization tool intended to enable local, state and national campaigns to target specific voter segments with radio. AuDiO matches listener information from Clear Channel’s 840 radio stations across the U.S. with third-party political databases to create a detailed political profile of each station’s audience.
 
The AuDiO program breaks U.S. voting age population into 10 segments, ranging across the political spectrum from “Super Democrats” to “Ultra Conservatives,” then determines the composition of each station’s local audience using these segments, including data about when they are listening.

It also provides information about the media preferences of each segment, helping advertisers determine which media channels work the best to reach certain voters.
 
Back in March Katz Radio Group, the national radio sales representation company owned by Clear Channel, launched a new Political Strategies group to showcase radio’s reach and effectiveness as a political ad medium and create political ad packages exploiting Katz’s research and creative media capabilities. The group is headed by senior vice president of political strategies Pat McGee, who previously served as a deputy political director for a 2002 Congressional race and also worked in radio ad sales at Interep.
 
While TV gets the lion’s share of political advertising spending, and digital poses a long-term threat, politics is still a big business for radio, at least during election years. BIA/Kelsey forecasts that total radio revenues will increase 1.4% to $14.5 billion, due in large part to political advertising.

In 2012 radio’s political advertising revenues totaled $124.1 million, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau .