Commentary

MediaPost Conference Roundup: Political Data, Tools Better Than Ever

Digital marketing professionals gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, DC, yesterday, for MediaPost’s yearly Marketing Politics conference.

Eleven days before the Iowa caucuses and 19 days to New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, marketers and vendors were eager to hear from insiders working on national, statewide and local campaigns.

Among many topics, we heard about how digital marketing in politics has changed over the past few election cycles, how new targeting abilities have supplemented political strategies on TV and digital media, how the new “bright” and “shiny” digital platforms are being used to promote candidates.

The conference reinforced what we already know: Political TV ads aren’t going anywhere -- and when it comes to serving ads on social media, Facebook has the best ROI.

One of the overarching themes was the understanding that political marketers have more data than ever before and the tools they integrate data with are as robust as ever.

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Political marketers have developed ways to quickly integrate data to micro-target voters more effectively than ever. Whether mobile or a desktop, statewide or by Zip code, young or old, the technology used so effectively in the commercial advertising space is now increasingly being used in the political sphere.

Accordingly, Borrell Associates predicts that the 2020 election cycle will see around $3.2 billion spent on digital advertising, up from about $1 billion expected this cycle.

Screens have taken over our lives, from the first TVs to the futuristic “smartphone” and the computer screen in between. Applications, particularly social ones, have offered additional inventory, and political marketers have taken advantage.

Whether it’s Snapchat, Twitter or Facebook, the list can go on, there are various ways to use digital media to help better understand a campaign’s target demographics. Just remember with all this personal data flying around through the cloud (or more accurately swimming around in servers) it’s “important not to be creepy.”

What happens next? According to our panelists today, digital marketing will become increasingly complex and strategies more efficient as we learn from successes and mistakes over the course of 2016.

For a full video recap of yesterday’s events visit the MediaPost Marketing Politics Conference page.

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