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.”
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.