S4
Episode 10
Political Advertising: Trends and Strategies
About This Episode
Discussing trends, challenges, and strategies for effective political ad campaigns in the ever evolving world of political advertising.
Thom Josephson | Media Director, Blue State
Charlie McDonald | Account Executive, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
On a political timeline, everything moves a lot faster, it might be a matter of months or a few years. Whereas for brands and nonprofits, you’re effectively around forever, everything needs to be faster, can’t wait for results, you need to test in the moment, you need to be able to put things up today, potentially, within a few hours of some news coming out or some new creative coming around. Everything just needs to be much more efficient. It needs to be in a place where you leave everything on the field in one election, and then just pick it up and be ready for the next one.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:27)
Then you think about the social landscape. Research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints. So that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really, is what’s going to set you apart if you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Sneha (00:00:53)
So I read something interesting on Statista, over 75% of eligible voters surveyed in the US, in 2022, reported that they tend to tune out or ignore political ads, and around 60% of respondents considered political advertising unethical. It’s the year 2024, and a big one for political advertising. So what’s that looking like then? Only one way to find out. Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive Podcast. I’m Sneha Suhas from StackAdapt. And with me, I have Thom Josephson from Blue State. And StackAdapt’s very own Charlie McDonald. Today, we’re here to talk all about political advertising, right from privacy regulations, transparency, trust, voter demographics, latest trends, we’re going to cover everything you need to know. But before that, let’s start with a round of introductions. Thom, welcome to the episode, please tell us about your area of expertise and your experience so far.
Thom (00:01:56)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here. For a little background. I’m currently at Blue State, we do a lot of digital advertising for nonprofits, political campaigns, and issue advocacy. I’ve been there for about two years, but I have quite a wealth of experience in the political and nonprofit world. I cut my teeth way back when doing a lot of advocacy and political advertising with a lot of super PACs, spent some time in-house at a Super PAC have worked with a variety of campaigns. And best of all, I have a lot of strong opinions on all this stuff. So excited to share them with you today.
Sneha (00:02:34)
Amazing. Oh, welcome to the show. And, Charlie, I’ll pass it to you for a round of introduction.
Charlie (00:02:40)
Yeah, Charlie McDonald. So just an account executive here at StackAdapt on our political and advocacy team, have been on said team for going on little over half a year at this point. So super excited to be a part of that, as we’re now getting into 2024. And sort of starting to attack that cycle. Beyond that, I’ve experienced that other programmatic shops going back half a decade or so, which is devastating to say out loud, but yeah, have some experience going all the way back to the 2020 cycle. So as I said, super excited about 2024 and moving forward.
Sneha (00:03:19)
Awesome. Welcome to the show. Charlie, thank you for being here. And I’m going to jump right into the first question. How has the landscape of political advertising evolved in the digital age? And what are some key trends you have observed in the recent years?
Thom (00:03:39)
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I would say that the landscape is dramatically different from what it used to be. When I joined before that even earlier, one-to-one targeting and one-to-one measurement was really the order of the day. It was the cornerstone of what made digital effective, it was really the selling point to get people into digital and out of broadcast mediums out of print out of TV out of the things they had been used to for a long time. That said, it’s all really just worse now. iOS 14.5 has put a nail in Facebook’s coffin. We’ve had the collapse of different targeting across Facebook across Google where you can really only do certain amounts of targeting, they’ve removed a lot of political restrictions. Google for political advertisers has removed a lot of one-to-one targeting period. And then we’ve had changes to cookies, really anything going on with the EU, everything is just overall a lot worse than it used to be. The other thing I think that’s really changed is measurement is so much harder. So back in the day, even like 10 years ago, you could go and grab UU IDs from Google, you could actually survey those folks directly and then pull and measure direct infield brand lift across different programs. That’s really gone now. The other thing on measurement is that attribution used to be so much better. Atlas, DCM tagging, you could do so much more with all of that information. And now you just kind of load what you can into GA four, cross your fingers. And that’s the best you can do. I think that there are a few things that are better now. CTV is better, podcasts exist, and are, you know, viable for advertisers, there are so many more audio mediums. And overall, I think that it is better for the actual people involved. But for advertisers means you have to be a lot smarter about how you’re doing targeting about how you’re doing measurement. And I’m gonna say this a lot throughout this podcast. But I think that digital right now really needs talk a lot more like broadcast and less like what it used to be where it was singular targeting on narrow basis.
Charlie (00:05:47)
Yeah. And I’ll hop in there as well, I think it’s interesting, right? Because to your point, Thom, a lot of it can be sort of better, in some ways, worse in some ways, but kind of different in a lot of different ways. I think looking more kind of broad scope at like the shift to digital, for lack of a better couple of words, they’re like, you know, you see some of the largest Super PACs now in the political space announcing that they’re shifting all of their dollars into digital, right? So even with all of the sort of hang-ups that might come now with how the landscape has sort of changed. Everyone still understands the value there. And sort of what you can unlock with digital, I think, on you know, some of that attribution piece, if we’re looking at one of the largest channels that we typically see for programmatic is going to be connected TV, right? Comparing that to broadcast, which we still hear about a ton, which everybody still uses a ton in the political advertising space, it’s always kind of funny to look at them through different lenses. So for like that attribution lens, for example, for broadcast TV, Nielsen has always been right, kind of like the number one at the box office for all that sort of measurement. But when you really start to dig deeper and look into them more closely, it’s like, okay, they’re in wildly fewer than, like 50,000 households across the US. Meanwhile, you get players in the CTV space like Samba, whoever it may be, who’s at over like 100 million households across the US. So yeah, I think to your point, it is kind of funny to look and see where we’ve come, almost sort of full circle in a way, like you were saying how it used to be so much better for some things. And you know, but I do think now, from like, the position of being on like, the DSP side for us for StackAdapt, like, in a really good spot as far as being able to deliver those results, which we’ll probably get into a little bit later as far as what political advertisers are looking for. And also being able to give them some transparency into how they’re spending their money, and whether or not it’s actually going to the audience they’re trying to hit.
Sneha (00:08:09)
Awesome. And can you share some insights into the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when you’re executing advertising campaigns for political candidates or causes?
Thom (00:08:23)
Yeah, definitely. So I think one of the biggest ones in comparison with brands or even nonprofits is timing. On a political timeline, everything moves a lot faster, it might be a matter of months, or you know, if you’re really lucky, a matter of like, a few years, whereas for brands and nonprofits, you’re effectively around forever. But what that means for political campaigns for issue advocacy, especially anything focused around an election is that everything needs to be faster, you can’t wait for results you need to test in the moment, you need to be able to put things up today, potentially, within a few hours of some news coming out or some new creative coming around. Everything just needs to be much more efficient. The other big thing I will say is that like attention is so much more important. You know, on an election or an issue, attention can be a huge boost, especially if you’re looking at something like fundraising. But at the same time you’re fighting with everyone else and every other issue for it. And then the last one is, I think a little more personal. And, Charlie, I’m curious for your take on this. But I think that political advertising can be really hard. You can you know, do your absolute best you can run the best campaign and at the end of the day, you can still lose. And it can be hard not to take that personally. And I think that’s the reason a lot of people burn out and they fall into other verticals. You need to find a nice balance between cynicism and naivete and you need to be in a place where you can leave everything on the field in one election and then just pick it up and be ready for the next one and just kind of keep going.
Charlie (00:10:03)
Yeah, it’s definitely a memory of a goldfish type scenario with a lot of political campaigns, being able to have that disconnect, and to your point Tom, move on from, if it is a loss or whatever it may be to then just go back and tackle the next one. Because, frankly, if you’re working with multiple clients, agencies, whatever the sort of situation is, they aren’t necessarily knowing what you’re going through on your side, right, what other campaigns are running, how successful or unsuccessful they might be? So you got to be kind of ready to act in that moment. But also, I know, you had mentioned sort of speed of everything in ASAP or sooner is something we hear a lot in the political advertising space. So that turnaround time is always something that’s top of mind. And something that we’re always concerned about. Because yeah, when it comes to political clients, you know, if it’s creative changes, if it’s strategy updates, if it’s, you know, anything under the sun, it needs to be done ASAP. And then yet to the burnout point to it is you do see so much shuffling around, even in like the little sort of industry that is digital, political advertising. You know, it’s one of those things where you pop onto LinkedIn, everyone’s been everywhere. You gotta go through somebody’s history and seeing what agency or PACs or super PACs they’ve been at. It’s a small, small world. But yeah, I think ultimately, just going back to the original question, like, the challenge for us is always going to be hitting voters where they’re at, right, boiling it down to what is the kind of biggest number one issue overall. As far as that goes as a challenge, I think it creates a lot of opportunity. Thom, like you were saying earlier with the sort of restrictions that somebody like Google or Meta has put in place with that political advertising, it creates opportunities for people like programmatic partners to sort of step in, where we have all these relationships with, like third party data providers, we’re have, again, if folks have a voter file that they’re trying to target run against the ability to do exactly that is super valuable. So it’s always the case that where there’s challenge, there’s always opportunity. And I think that gives us a good shot to always step in and help out where we can.
Sneha (00:12:40)
Right, and in what ways can advertising technologies be leveraged to effectively target and engage specific quarter demographics? Can you throw light on programmatic different channels like digital out-of-home, native, video, and maybe adding a bit of paid social too?
Charlie (00:13:01)
To our point for programmatic, what we see, the lion’s share of targeting is always going to be a voter file, making sure you’re hitting the voters in that file, and kind of having the opportunity to define and tailor that audience appropriately. Right. Because of restrictions that we alluded to earlier, and some other platforms, you might not have that freedom to be targeting folks by, you know, outside of just like your basic demographics, but throwing things like age, language they’re speaking ethnicity, whether or not they were a recent voter, if they’ve never voted before, whatever it may be. There’s a lot of opportunity for that sort of targeting in programmatic, to speak more specifically to like channels, one that I really love is digital out-of-home. You know, for those unaware, it’s basically those screens that you’ll see out in the world, something that’s not on your phone or laptop, but say a billboard on the side of the highway. Shout out the turnpike here in New Jersey, or at a bus stop or, you know, inside a gym, whatever it may be. I think what’s exciting about those is not only is it expanding your digital footprint, literally beyond digital, because it’s actually out in the physical world. But it also lets you do some more niche targeting. What I always like to think of for political specifically is like neighbourhoods, if you’re wanting to be targeting a specific neighbourhood, what better way to ensure you are hitting folks in that neighbourhood than literally being on a billboard in their town square, town squares don’t exist anymore, but you get my point? It does create kind of a fun opportunity to do that. That’s a little bit different than say, a classic display campaign or CTV, native, other ones we’ve talked about before.
Thom (00:14:58)
Yeah, I think I’d add a few things to that one is that a lot of the advantage of programmatic comes from what you’re talking about with that last question. It’s really about meeting people where they are. And programmatic gives you an ability to do that across multiple channels. In comparison with something like, let’s say, you know, the meta suite of products, you’re really reaching people on to apps across where they are. Whereas with programmatic, you can find people in a variety of places you can find them on what they’re listening to what they’re watching what they’re reading, what they’re, you know, playing games on their phone, you can really create a surround sound that allows you to find them just about everywhere. And a good campaign really uses all of those to find people and then to persuade them at frequency. And that’s what I think this all comes back to is you got to meet people where they are you got to meet them with good creative, and then you got to show it to them at frequency. So that is where programmatic really shines in my mind.
Charlie (00:16:00)
Yeah, and I think to just to kind of go along with that thread, so many people love the results that they get on a meta or Google search. And given the size of those walled gardens, right, they are enormous, there is plenty of scale to be had and individual folks to be hit within those gardens. But at the same time, you’re only hitting them there within those walled gardens, right? So you can, like the EOC counter is if somebody is super happy with their meta performance, or, you know, the results they’re getting on Facebook and Instagram. It’s like, okay, what about everybody who’s not on Facebook, and Instagram. So to your kind of full suite point, that only makes sense, especially for something as broad as political, right? In theory, anyone over the age of 18, right in the country can register to vote, and go and vote for the person that you’re running those creatives for. So, yeah, there’s there’s always an audience to be tapped.
Sneha (00:17:00)
And how important is transparency in political advertising? And what steps can brands, agencies and even platforms take to ensure openness and accountability in their campaigns?
Thom (00:17:14)
I think that when it comes to digital advertising, just knowing who is spending and how much isn’t necessarily going to change anything on a fundamental level, but it does make it a lot easier to see what’s going on and helps to peel back some of the curtain and some of the dark money influences that are happening. So let me give you an example, which is that last cycle, APAC waded into several Democratic primaries to defeat progressives who had not been supportive of APAC or had actively opposed them. And in my mind, I think it was pretty clear what they were doing. And that is largely in part because all of their ads were up in Google’s ad library, they were up in Facebook’s ad library, and their spend was there. And you could see just how much they were investing in all of these races to defeat all of these different incumbents. And, candidly, they’re expected to do the same thing again in 2024, and it’s going to be all there again. And I will say, for transparency, digital is a lot better than it used to be. Facebook has an ad library, Google has their transparency reports, Snapchat has an ad library now. And all of those are huge steps forward for all of us in the ecosystem. Facebook, in particular, I think threw a wrench into like little organizations that are real, that were just set up by different Super PACs for the purpose of convincing people that they were local, these would be things called like Montana Proud or Veterans for Vermont, or if some nonsensical name that was really sponsored by SLF, or someone like that, you know, even Xander has a transparency report now. So all this stuff is much more out there than it used to be. And I think that in terms of platforms, the proactive move is really to mandate compliance with organizations being actually real. You can’t just set up fake organizations, and then also just to disclose the ad spend in the creative, this is pretty much what TV has been doing for years. And for those of us in the digital system. I don’t think there’s any reason that we can’t. My last point here would just be that I think when it comes to agencies, like you said earlier, Charlie, like this is just going to come out in the wash. For most of it. It’s going to be reported out in FEC reports, who’s paying you how much, et cetera. I don’t think there’s necessarily any reason to be coy about who you’re working for and what you’re doing. That said, there are some agencies in the progressive space who intentionally create white-labeled agencies to do work with Republicans. That’s not something that we do at Blue State. I personally would not do that or be involved with that. I don’t think any progressive agency worth the name would do that. So when it comes to transparency for agencies, that would be one thing I would say is sometimes lacking in the system.
Charlie (00:20:02)
It’s interesting to hear from the agency side there. Yeah, I think, on our end, transparency is kind of the name of the game. Right? I think from the political side, specifically, like there’s a reason why not all DSPs run political, right? There’s a few reasons why that’s the case. But a big one is because there’s a lot of legwork involved, right? So, you know, for speaking for StackAdapt. I mean, we have an internal platform quality team that’s checking every creative that’s uploaded by advertisers, we’re taking a look at for those paid for by disclaimers, confirming you know that it’s matching whoever, whichever website is associated with those creatives. And then beyond even StackAdapt. You know, we’re connected with a bunch of publishers, they’re doing their own due diligence on their end as well. Right. So kind of keeping the pipes as clean as possible in political advertising is super important here. Thom glad you mentioned as well, like the Facebook ads library and the Google Ads library as well, it’s always super helpful to be able to dive in and, you know, take a look at all that stuff, sort of on the on the back end. And then with broadcast, like you had said, like the FEC filings and everything. Giving that transparency is super important. I am super interested to see as well, where it goes, as we’re moving forward. I hadn’t even really thought about it so much from the agency perspective, because we’re so embedded with the platform side over here. But that would be really interesting to see how folks how forthcoming I guess they’re going to be I also love the little shadowy organizations, Veterans for Vermont, very much might actually exist. After you said that out loud. I was like, I may have shot those people a LinkedIn message at some point. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s interesting, will be interesting to see.
Sneha (00:22:07)
How can programmatic advertising platforms help in ensuring the accuracy and credibility of political ads?
Charlie (00:22:16)
Yeah, I feel like I could probably take that one to start on being on that side. Yeah, I think the number one, follow the law. No, but there’s a lot of rules in place already for political advertising, obviously, across the board that is ever-changing, too. They’re always making these sort of updates, not only in the US, but also across the world. So staying on top of all that is super important, but also like, to our platform, specifically, you know, again, speaking to like the, our platform quality team and having them reviewing each and every creative that’s getting run through our platform that’s super important in political specifically, not just to check for disclaimers and things like that. But we have rejection reasons now in place for fake news, right? So if the creative itself is harboring a message that is factually incorrect, that’s gonna get flagged and rejected and not run. And we kind of take on that responsibility to check those sorts of things and make sure that that’s the case. You know, things like somebody calling an election early, right? We can’t have somebody, you can cut an ad that says, hey, we won, and then upload it to our platform and expect that to run like, no, that’s not really going to fly. I think the other interesting piece too, is now with all the buzz about generative AI, and how that can be used to create, obviously, some questionable creatives, as we’ve already seen, even in 2023, a little bit, we’ve seen the AAPC strongly discourage the use of AI for these sort of things and making those sort of creatives and then even having places like Washington State, regulating deep fakes and things like that in ads. So having, that’s where you need to be top of mind, is important for us on the platform side to have a team literally dedicated to exactly these concerns, right, reviewing everything, making sure everything is by the book, and that, you know, being we are giving the tools to advertisers to be able to use and run these creatives. We want to be able to empower them, but not empower them to tell lies, right?
Thom (00:24:42)
Yeah, I think all that is exactly right. And I think that we were talking earlier about how political moves faster. This is something where it is worth it to move slower and to take time and to do it right. Because the alternative is so much worse than the reality of it. I think the only other thing I would add about this is, you know, I think that advertisers and platforms have a responsibility to evaluate where ads actually run. Advertisers don’t want to run on sites rife with misinformation. And there’s a reason those places shouldn’t be monetized at all.
Sneha (00:25:23)
All right, and could you provide examples of successful campaign strategies, programmatic or otherwise that have been employed in recent political campaigns? And what is it about them that made them effective?
Thom (00:25:38)
Yeah, so one I would love to call out is ACR. So that’s automated content recognition. It’s a technology that has been around for a few years now. But it’s really become much more widespread, and I think it has led to some really interesting strategies. Essentially, what ACR is it allows you to see ads that have run on someone’s television, usually through CTV, and then to target the people who have seen those ads, usually on a household level. So I’m watching TV, I see an ad from Ron DeSantis. If I’m the Biden campaign, I can then go ahead and target that household with a, you know, exact response, whether that’s on video, on a CTV ad of my own. I can also target them, you know, on display or on native in other formats. And this is a way to get to that response part of persuasion. With ACR, you can literally respond to people who have just seen an ad and show them a counter example, or present them the other side of the story, or even just create more surround sound on your own hats. I think the other big strategy that has been effective and that you’re seeing more and more from political campaigns compared to, you know, four or five years ago is just video generally. Biden, his campaign, last cycle, or last presidential cycle, invested hugely in CTV and in high impact video. And I think that really points to a rigorous focus on quality to make sure that whatever money they’re spending on video really isn’t wasted. We can talk about ad fraud another time. I don’t want to spend the rest of this time just talking about how fraud exists in the ecosystem. But you know, keeping viewability high, keeping player size large, keeping audibility up, and just making sure that people are seeing ads and the ads are playing a real sites that people are on, it can really make the difference between persuading people in an important election and just throwing money into an adtech wood chipper. Last thing I call out is just something Charlie talked about earlier, but like, the importance of geographic targeting, whether it is a congressional district, or whether it was like over-indexing zip targeting. So as it’s gotten more difficult to target certain communities, zip targeting, I think has really stepped in as a method of targeting places where you otherwise can’t necessarily get reliable data. So you know, you might target has zip code that has more Latino residents than another one. And by doing that, you’re able to actually reach those folks when you wouldn’t necessarily have the data to do so otherwise, you’re seeing that a lot more in political campaigns across the spectrum. And I think that that is really going to be kind of a staple of every campaign going forward pretty much regardless of size, as we move into that broadcast world I was talking about earlier.
Charlie (00:28:32)
Yeah, and for me, made my job a little bit easier. Here, I had a couple of examples, and you hit two out of the three. So there I was just gonna speak a little bit about ACR as well. Where we’ve seen it a lot is to your point like that conquesting side of things, which is just to say, right, to your point, those Ron DeSantis ads, and now Biden wanting to hit those same households with their own creative and whatever channel that may be. Also, we saw a ton of even in 2023, just basically every single campaign we ran was utilizing either ZIP Code targeting or congressional district targeting same thing, just being able to hit the voters where they’re at. But the other one that I wanted to highlight is, as far as measuring success. You know, one way that we can do that is if you’re trying to get people to register to vote, right, if you have that voter file, we now have the ability to, you know, run a campaign, run the impression logs against that voter file using, you know, unique identifiers to then be able to confidently say, okay, X percent of this list actually went and registered to vote after we served them, ads, right. So in a sense, it’s a more tangible way to see in the results like okay, what’s the value of running programmatic advertising? Is it actually getting folks out to vote? Is it all, you know, just kind of out there in the ether? Here’s the proof in the pudding. Right? A nice way to be able to tie a bow on a campaign too especially earlier in the cycle, if it is like a, you know, register to vote sort of initiative, so that as you get into the heat of things in the actual cycle, you can go back and say, Look, we have this effect, when it came to registering folks to vote, you can be confident in getting them out to vote as well down the line.
Sneha (00:30:36)
Yeah, that makes sense. And, what role do data privacy regulations play in shaping the landscape of political advertising? And how can advertisers navigate these regulations while still reaching their target audience?
Charlie (00:30:52)
Yeah, the elephant in the room with the privacy conversations with the deprecation of cookies, how it’s going to be at the end of 2024. And now the scuttlebutt is actually no, not so much might get pushed to 2025. Which, at this point, everyone’s just kind of come to expect that but yeah, I mean, on that piece on the cookieless piece, it’s just going to become more and more important to rely on first-party data, or in political case, a lot of the time, that’s voter files, right. So wherever you’re getting them from whichever partner you use. The data privacy is obviously a huge aspect for us on the on the side of the DSP, if we’re working with voter files, or our clients are, you know, if you’re uploading them to our platform to target, that data is immediately hashed and anonymized because, you know, that’s not for us to to lay eyes on that sort of PII. So, you know, working with sort of the leaders in the space for those identity solutions is going to be super important going forward from like, the DSP side of things, just to ensure everything is, again, circling back to like the regulations and the laws in place to protect folks. It’s really important that we, that we continue to do so.
Thom (00:32:18)
Yeah, I think all of that is right, I think that privacy is really going to be the biggest extraneous factor on digital ad and advertising generally, over the next 10 years. You know, Google continually kept kicking back their cookie deprecation, I think is the best example of this, it shows that they are just not in a place where they can be compliant with the rules around the world, whether that’s GDPR, or whether that is whatever they’re expected to come out in the US. And I think fundamentally, what a lot of those organizations are coming to realize is that the data collection, the targeting, as it currently exists, is just fundamentally incompatible with how an ordinary person understands privacy, I think what’s going to happen, at least in the US is eventually, we’re going to end up in a world with much more stringent privacy and compliance requirements. And the biggest thing that advertisers can and should do is get ahead of that and find strategies that are going to work over the long term, digital is going to look a lot more like broadcasts, especially when it comes to persuasion where you might have a voter file and the upload and match rate and might just not be good enough, you might have to find other ways to reach persuadable folks across the Internet and in different places than what you could do before. It’s going to include more targeting by region, like we talked about earlier, it’s going to include more contextual targeting, it’s going to include creative that has more mass appeal, and is less narrowly targeted to a specific group. I personally think that the age of one-to-one exact targeting is mostly gone, this will probably be the last election, maybe a two-election cycle where we’re going to really be able to do that with any sort of efficacy. I’m really curious to see what happens in the future, you know, maybe we’ll go down the road of what medical and pharma does, where they introduce a certain percentage of people who don’t match your profile into a third-party list. And so you always know that there’s some anonyme, because some of those people just don’t even match your profile at all. I don’t really know. That’s one possibility. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to try and solve this problem. I’m just the one who has to try and figure out how to target as effectively as possible.
Charlie (00:34:38)
I like what you said too, about effectively dumbing down what targeting will be to a point where folks can actually understand what it is you’re doing. And I love like having that example of contextual targeting, right? That is so much easier to explain to a person versus like, oh, yeah, we have a match of voter file and we get a match rate of this because we can only connect the dots with this IP address that mobile ID bop, bop, bop versus like, we know that people that are perusing democratic blog sites are pretty likely to vote for a Democrat. And so that’s where we’re going to target them among the context of what they’re consuming, so, yeah, I mean, as far as that core sort of cookieless future that we’re all looking at, depending on how far it is in your rearview mirror, or I guess we’re looking ahead so windshield is in front of, wrong metaphor, but it’s fine. Yeah, I mean, it all kind of depends, when that’s eventually going to come. And to your point, Thom, how folks like us are going to attack it and make those sort of targeting decisions.
Sneha (00:35:48)
Awesome. One, last question about measurement. What are some of the best practices for measuring the effectiveness of programmatic political advertising, political advertising? And what metrics should advertisers prioritize for meaningful insights and not get lost in data?
Thom (00:36:08)
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. My biggest piece of advice to advertisers would probably be just don’t get caught up in bullshit metrics, you know, click-through rates are great for some campaigns, but I really just trust them about as far as I can throw them. I think it’s much more important to look at things around the actual presentation of ads, audibility, viewability, the site’s ads are showing on reach and frequency, those are really important. You know, I personally really look askance at anything that has too low of a CPM or too many clicks. Like even if IAS or mode or another of these third-party verification systems is saying it’s all good, something funky just has to be going on. For us to get to that point, I would say better than that would be to set up independent tests and to measure and evaluate success in other ways. I think that for certain campaigns, match market tests, where you’re evaluating a treatment market against a control market can be a really great way to measure something and actually incorporate all of the different things that you’re doing. It can be a little hard to work in the campaign. Sure. But it can be really worthwhile if you’re able to do it, because it’ll give you something you can use. I think the same also goes for Brand Lift studies, and the like, being smart with the questions that you use. And the way the tests are set up, I think is really the key to actually learning something and not just, you know, sticking a number on a measurement and calling it good. But, Charlie, I’m curious for your perspective on this.
Charlie (00:37:45)
Yeah, I think it’s funny, because ultimately, a lot of, you know, maybe the less, I mean, I hate saying word savvy. But folks who could be running political campaigns, the ultimate thing that they care about results-wise is just if they win, right, if they win the election, so you do have to kind of work it in such a way that you have to highlight those other metrics that like, okay, we didn’t win the election. But where did we see success? Right? What can we kind of learn from this moving forward? I think targeting that correct audience in that correct geo is kind of square number one, and then kind of going a little bit deeper there. To some of those metrics you had mentioned, Tom, like your viewability audibility, but the one that we always see time and time, again, clients super interested in is that unique reach and frequency, just kind of finding that perfect balance between hitting as many folks as you can be in that geo be on your voter list, what have you, and hitting them enough times, so that the message resonates, and they take it sort of moving forward? I’m glad to hear that you had mentioned Brand Lift studies, because time and time again, we see clients that are upset that there’s no way to know in real-time, effectively how a campaign is performing. The beauty of a Brand Lift study. And, Thom, to your point, if you tailor those questions appropriately and smartly, it can effectively act as a digital poll. You know, you can bet especially since we’re in the political sphere, kind of pitching it in that sort of way, can give advertisers insight in real-time, if their ads are doing what they want it to be doing. And then because of the nature of the industry that we’re in, if it’s not doing exactly what you want, make those changes to those creatives, get them uploaded, and let’s see if we can correct that moving forward.
Sneha (00:39:53)
Amazing. And that brings us to the end of this very interesting episode, Charlie and Thom, thank you so much for joining us, this was really insightful. Great to have you here. And thanks to you, the one listening to this, whoever you are, marketer, brand, agency, I’m sure you had a lot to take away today. I definitely learned a lot of new things here. And that’s one of the best parts of hosting this show. Again, great to have the both of you here. Thank you, and to you, the one who stuck around till the very end. Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast, listen to the new episodes right when they drop. If you like the podcast, share it with your teammates, it could be a cool resource to post on your work chat as a recommendation. So go ahead and do that. And if you want to get in touch, write to us at academy@stackadapt.com That’s academy@stackadapt.com we have episodes releasing every alternate Wednesday, so stay tuned. Until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. See you in the next episode.
Episode Outro (00:40:55)
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