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Episode 3

Reach Voters With Digital Political Advertising

Illustration of Todd Van Etton, Chief Digital Strategist at The Herald Group

About This Episode

September 14, 2022

We look at how programmatic advertising and strategies can drive political campaign performance and reach the right voters.

Todd Van Etton | Chief Digital Strategist, The Herald Group

Nathan Saxman | Senior Account Executive, StackAdapt

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

Here they are with their family, they are cute, cuddly and pathetic. Here they are being tough on X, Y, or Z issue. That paints a much more colourful picture of a politician, which is always the goal. You know, in persuasion, you start with something like introducing the candidate, you try to make them human first. You try to say, here’s how they got into this business, because they care about X, Y, and Z, just like you do, here’s how they’re gonna fight for you and why they deserve your vote.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:21)

But then you think about the social landscape. The 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 lead to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results and audience targeting, and really, is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Matt (00:00:46)

A lot has changed in the last few years. And because of this, marketers have had to adopt dynamic new strategies to keep up with the changing digital landscape. Now, if the world has progressed, so have many of the ways of advertising and reaching your target audience. Depending on where you are in the world right now, you’ve probably noticed a lot of political campaigning and full swing. And if you’re interested in peeling back the curtain, then we have a great episode for you today. In this episode, we have Nathan from StackAdapt. And Todd from The Herald Group, Todd brings in years of experience in political advertising. And with the election season in full swing and picking up lots of momentum, this episode is sure to help you gain a better understanding of the landscape as well as the rules to play by, and how to get an edge on competition with programmatic. So what we typically like to do with these episodes is give our audience a sense of who’s on it. So what we’ll do, Nathan, we’ll start with you, you know, a little bit of an understanding of your experience, areas of expertise, how long have you been in the landscape, and then Todd we’ll pass it over to you with the same questions. But if you could also tell us a little bit about The Herald Group, then we’ll go ahead and get started. So starting with you, Nathan.

Nathan (00:01:56)

Awesome. Thanks, Matt. So I’m Nathan Saxman. I’m an Account Executive at StackAdapt. I’ve got close to a decade of experience in politics started as a field organizer, and jumped agency side, originally working in fundraising and now shifting over into media buying, and I’ve been working with StackAdapt for a little over a year now.

Todd (00:02:17)

My name is Todd Van Etten. And I’m the Chief Digital Strategist at The Herald Group. I’ve been here for eight years, and I oversee digital advertising creative, and kind of the fun stuff that we get to do when running campaigns. I got my start in politics at the RNC, way back in 2005, when there were conversations about, you know, what is this Facebook thing? What is this Twitter thing? And does politics deserve any place on those platforms? I was firmly in the no camp, but I lost that battle. I was the RNC director, a digital director till about 2012 and then helped start a company with two former bosses called Crowd Verb that did large-scale semantic analysis, listening to conversations online and putting together public affairs campaigns based on the composition of, you know, how certain audiences we’re talking about things in certain ways. From there, I went to Burson-Marsteller, a big global ad agency, where I was for about two years, and then I spent two years at a smaller PR firm. And before founding The Herald Group, kind of a good Goldilocks move of big to small to just right. But yeah, happy to talk politics today. It is in my blood. It’s what we do. So excited to dive into it.

Matt (00:03:32)

Fantastic. Yeah, Todd, I didn’t know you had been in it that long. But that’s cool to see that. You know, you were there in the early days where social media was kind of the question of, hey, is this something that’s going to work? Funny enough of how things have turned out today. And, you know, we’ll get into it a little bit about how programmatic has really helped political advertisers in the bit of the drought that we’ve seen with social media. But you know, this episode is split up into four main questions, I’m sure there’ll be a couple of things we find along the way. But we’ll go through the first half, take a quick break, and then jump back into it. So starting out, and I’ll leave the floor open to both of you to address this. But political is very unique as a vertical because unlike other verticals, your product is people, it’s ideologies, it’s a platform. That’s not something you typically see with other verticals, because it’s it’s pretty intangible sometimes. And in that vein, with political advertising naturally, there’s this idea of persuasion. So to both of you, how does political persuasion typically work? And what are some of these rules you know, whether they’re written or unwritten that you can play by, and what lines should you avoid crossing with with political advertising?

Todd (00:04:58)

Starting with the second point of course, you know, lines being crossed, there are legal distinctions with what you’re able to do. You know, if you’re working for a PAC, or a C3, C436, the nature of the entity that you are is going to inform the types of messages you’re able to put out there, whether it’s direct advocacy, whether it’s issue advocacy, that kind of stuff. There are different legal distinctions, which means different reporting requirements for each of those things. But I think, you know, political persuasion generally is one of the big, probably the biggest bucket when you talk about segmenting your audiences, and your messages and your campaigns in political advertising. Generally, you know, you could put them into four big buckets. Persuasion is moving people, that is a whole bunch of testing and test learning grows, is what we’d like to say, there is, you know, an absentee early vote bucket, which is usually separate. One might move from persuasion to be AB/EV, or EV. But the idea is, you know, can you decide if people are going to be early voters, that is, people who are going to vote before election day, or vote by mail, you need to treat them separately as a universe for the final phase of a political campaign, which is get out to vote. You know, before you could go heavy before the first Tuesday in November, and say, Everybody get out the vote on Tuesday. You know, let’s help you find your polling place. Do you need a ride? How can we make sure that this is a done deal? It is much more different. Now, I think in 2020, we saw lots of the rules change, all of those things means that the dynamics of the campaign has changed. For persuasion. You know, it’s funny, I had a political science professor in college, talk about how campaign, political science is not like, you know, it’s not beakers and Meyer Flynn, flasks and other things like that, I probably got that wrong. I’m not a science guy. But it’s not done in a laboratory. You know, it’s much more hearts and minds and things like that. But in many ways, I have always found that digital advertising is a lot like a science, where the testing, the little dab of this little dab of that, what is the fruit that comes from that all of those things, it is amazing, the immediacy with which you can get responses, the quantifiable nature of just about everything online, whether it’s polling, whether it’s obviously election day, that kind of thing, the movement of audiences through a persuasion campaign, the way that you are able to learn about all of those things on the internet. And test assumptions is pretty amazing. So generally, you know, you’d start with the voter file, which are up kept by generally the parties, although the third, you know, 3rd-party companies do have them. It’s a general list of who is registered, who’s not many states have partisan registration, they have their primaries, and you can kind of get a sense of who the high propensity voters are, who the high propensity Republican or Democrat voters are. And based on that you can amalgamate, you can add many different pieces of information, and derive models to say, okay, these are the low propensity voters, these people only make it out in, you know, presidential election years, what message can we put in front of them, to make sure they’re going to come out in this off-election year, for this ballot initiative, or for this primary, that kind of stuff. That model is then going to say, you know, this is your universe of people who are persuadable, we generally know they know how to vote, they generally vote the right way, when they do, they just don’t do it in the primary election. You know, let’s go up with here are five major issues that are in the zeitgeist, let’s figure out which of those messages appeal to this person the most. And then you get in front of them as many times as you can. And you generally see through things like polling through things like, you know, brand surveys, favourability, any the kind of quantifiable metric, if that person has moved, you know, ideally, you want them to come to your website and say, yes, I am excited about this candidate. And I’m going to show up on this off-election cycle. Here I am. Short of that, you could obviously see if they did at the end of the campaign, but generally that’s how persuasion works. It is that testing methodology, it is getting in front of people a lot of times with different varying creative and seeing if you can get judging your receptivity for each of those messages and figuring out which one is going to help them do the right thing on election day.

Nathan (00:09:41)

The only thing that I really want to add to that is you know, Matt, you alluded to some of the differences between other verticals and political that to Todd’s point. A lot of that iterative testing takes place in other verticals. The key difference is how rapid it is. The iterations that you put forward the different messages that you’re testing in such a short timeframe, because you have things like hard deadlines, ie elections, that you need to make sure you’re getting your effective messaging out before that point. That’s really what drives political. And Todd, you alluded to some of the tools that are available in the programmatic space, you know, we always offer our lifts studies, where you can very, you know, in a customizable way, offer a question to your audiences and evaluate how your messaging is influencing their propensity to vote, or how receptive they are to certain messaging that you’re putting out there. And that always complements outside polling that political organizations are doing as well. So lots of different measurement tactics that are in that space, that just make sure that your evolution of messaging is much more rapid before those firm deadlines.

Matt (00:10:58)

Fantastic. Well, thank you to both of you for such a strong start to the episode. It really brings us into the second question that we had, I mean, to think about comparing, last year where we were at last year with political advertising to not just where we are now, but where it’s going. And further to that, you know, what kind of role has technology played? So if we think of things like audiences, identity, attribution, how has that started to transform the political advertising space?

Todd (00:11:36)

Colossally is the answer. So much, so that it’s hard to stay on top of that stuff and keep up a day job of helping our clients and then actually executing on on campaigns. I mean, I think that the general shift that we’ve seen, obviously 2016 was probably the biggest inflection year where people realize the power of data and the power of external data, which caused in the walled gardens know your Twitter’s and your Facebook’s to greatly limit what you’re able to bring to the platform or take from the platform. All of those things, I think, have pushed the political advertising industry and I think all legit industries, more toward network advertising and things away from socials. You know, before, I think it was great that Facebook knew everything about your targets. I say that flippantly knew a whole lot about your targets, and could help derive personas, hey, I want to reach unregistered voters here who care about this. Facebook knew exactly who that was. But Facebook would not give you any information about who they are, how to reach them, that kind of stuff. They’d say, give us your ad dollars, give us your creative and we’ll show it to those people. You obviously get quantifiable things from those if you’re looking for clicks, if you’re looking for signups if you’re looking for donations, those would come from there. But you don’t get any information. You can’t use any of that targeting to inform other segments of your ad campaign. And knowing that the political walled gardens are the walled gardens generally are finite. Obviously, you want to use similar big analytics to inform other parts of your advertising. So I think, you know, the prevalence of 3rd-party data vendors who were able to do the really complex modeling to help drive how you target means that then you can do a lot of your analysis offline, derive your models, either one-to-one or you know, zip plus four zip, somehow get a list of people who you think are going to be right for your message, and then onboard them through a tool like StackAdapt, where you can hit them with any number of advertising channels. What role has technology played an audience, Nathan and I were chatting before this. And I think this goes into a bit, of the next step to obviously the amount of channels has increased greatly. The maturity of the channels has greatly improved. So things like CTV, which is much more mellifluously integrated into your other digital campaigns in a way that before it wasn’t. It’s no longer a you know, a separate vendor who needs a separate line item who’s going to build things and report on things entirely separately, you now have kind of an apples to apples, at least in the efficacy of a separate channel like that against something like digital video, different pricing structure, obviously different occasion to use them. But you can generally get an apples-to-apples, I understand when I see metrics from this platform, how it compares to this. And because of that, as a political scientist, as a strategist, I know when to utilize one and not the other or one or the other in a way that was really hard before. So I think when it comes to technology, the planning tools that are out there, where I can start with an audience and say I would like to persuade this group of people in this state, you know, the technology exists to say generally, that segment is interesting, Todd, here’s the best way to find them. For persuasion, you’re probably gonna want these channels. Here’s the ideal meal media mix that you’ll employ to hit them with the requisite reach and frequency ahead of a campaign. And of course, in that, like we mentioned before, you throw in a few different creatives, and you see if one gets more engagement than another. It’s all of that stuff, I think is worlds different than what it was in previous cycles. And it’s also only going further, I think, you know, CTV is probably the biggest one, I think I heard this year that CTV is taking up more ad dollars than any other medium. It has surpassed cable this cycle. I mean, that’s an amazing stat, I think, when it comes to where it was even two years ago. But I think with planning tools, you know, integrating things like radio, digital radio, podcasts, broadcast is kind of on my list for dreams. But that’s probably a while off from that, just to bring it back, technology helps us say I’d like to hit these people, where are they? The abundance of tools out there that can say, this is the best way to reach them. And I think that’s, that’s new this year, for sure.

Nathan (00:16:25)

And Todd, I’ll add just one thing to that as well, you know, the identity question, is huge in the programmatic space. And I think that, you know, platforms like StackAdapt, are well suited to use some of the 1st-party data that political organizations maintain. So you know, your fundraising lists, and also, your general voter contact files, I mean, that’s going to be golden, as the identity question online continues to be in flux. So something where you’re able to campaigns are well suited to have those first-party data sources on hand and activate them across all of those channels in a great way. So really just kind of tossing in there the idea that as identity continues to be an open question: what are the most effective ways to find people online? That the political organization, 1st-party data is really a treasure trove?

Todd (00:17:24)

That’s exactly right. I think that’s a nice, I mean, there’s, that dovetails, just the question of identity more generally, people have been talking about the death of the cookie for a long time. And, you know, oh, gosh, we’re all going to be out of business. It is amazing to me the forward thinking that has been going into that question for a long time following up on it, I think contextual targeting people understand in the abstract, but just how sophisticated you can get with contextual targeting, is surprising. And I feel like, you know, it’s the kind of thing where I’m going to start employing it now moving away from cookies myself, because the contextual is so powerful, you know, the idea that I can hit people on certain domains, or certain, you know, articles that have keywords around content that matches these other things that are in me, in a way, it does take a lot more creativity and a lot more forward brain power to say, what else do I want, surrounding my content. But the idea to customize based on that concept, is super powerful. So I think one of the things we’re excited about doing this election cycle is really utilizing that giving hard thought to that question and then seeing if our frequency is higher, if the receptivity or if we’re able to, conclusively say this person took an action, and they were only touched because of these ads on these sites, as opposed to we blitzed them over here and got our frequency as high as possible. Did those two different use cases have a different path to the right outcome? That is one of the many tests that we are employing this this cycle.

Matt (00:19:04)

Political advertising on social media platforms can pose a bit of a challenge. So let’s shift and talk a little bit more about how programmatic has helped political advertisers accomplish what traditional social hasn’t. And, you know, on top of this, to both of you we’re wondering, are there any successes, any success stories, you know, you don’t have to name names or but experiences that you’ve had in the last few years within this cohort of shifting from social to programmatic where you’ve seen a lot of success.

Todd (00:19:38)

There is no doubt that the socials have at their own whim changed the way you’re able to engage with politics online, for better or for worse. I think it’s justifiable the steps they took. I think they just announced yesterday. We’re recording this in mid-August. They just announced yesterday that again, they’re going to institute a ban on new ads eight days before the election, here in America. So if your ad is not approved, which itself, you know, could take three or four days, if your ad is not approved by, I think, November 1, they will not approve it for new advertising. A lot can happen in politics in eight days. There is a lot of nefarious stuff that could happen, but also a lot of stuff that would be relevant for reaching new people. All of those have pushed people toward, as I mentioned before, I think 3rd-party data external sources. That is to say, you know, the programmatic angle, reaching people wherever they are, and allowing ad platforms to say, yes, we know who that person is, and we know how to reach them. It is a more difficult transition. I think, you know, when I started at The Herald Group in 2014, 2015, it wasn’t a big part of what we did. It is now the biggest social, you know, when we, at The Herald Group, we do a lot of advocacy advertising, you know, a lot of reach your congressman here, that kind of stuff. Social is the dominant place to do that kind of stuff. If you are looking for just direct outreach, and direct response kind of stuff, we have found that to be very successful. When it comes to persuasion, I think what, you know, the new tools from things like programmatic are, yes, you can identify individuals and hit them with branded ads. But it’s things like native advertising, which, unless I’m mistaken, I think is kind of the bread and butter of what StackAdapt does. Native advertising allows you to, you know, if someone’s reading National Review, or someone’s reading slate.com, see a headline that maybe imparts a message that then links to a subsequent article that has more information about that, all without introducing who is trying to promote that message to that person. That is incredibly powerful. When it comes to the persuasion angle of campaigns, someone may have a bad taste for Republicans, or for Democrats, or for libertarians, or for independents, or some political stripe, where if they see an R next to a name, they’re gonna say, you get away from me. But if you can start to introduce messages that say, you know, this state of the country is questionable, and you know, when I’m not sure the exact cause, but it may be due to these policies, if you can start to introduce headlines like that, and find someone who’s clicking them more often than not reading that Wall Street Journal op-ed, reading that National Review opinion piece, reading that news article about the increase into this or that bad thing, you can start to say, ah ha, I’ve got a lead here, I’ve got someone who maybe the data said was firmly in one camp. But I feel like because of these, you know, this issue, in particular, we may have an entree to get that person to start to think the right way. And from that, start to introduce more and more, you know, different issues. Maybe then you come in with some solutions. And then maybe then you come in and introduce candidate who espouses all of those positions and is going to fight for them and fight for you and make the world a better place. That sort of stuff. I think, you know, with the transparency that things like Facebook and Facebook have instituted, Facebook and Twitter have instituted, it explicitly removes that angle from advertising, because it’s all about here’s who the organization is, that is targeting you, and here’s why you’re being targeted. And here’s how to learn more about them. So not nefarious in any sense of the term. But, or in the sense of the term that it could be.

Nathan (00:23:45)

Yeah, and Todd, actually, if I can jump in here, that the effectively what you’ve done is then you’ve primed your audience for action, right? And so then when they inevitably open that Facebook app, or wherever it is, you can use tools like uh, you know, StackAdapt has a social retargeting pixel where you can populate a retargeting audience on Facebook and then you know, the people you’re serving your social ads to have already been exposed to those native campaigns that you’ve been running. So, it’s a way to seriously tack on some data that is no longer available in some of those social platforms and augment your kind of action-driven campaigns on those social platforms. So coupled together, it makes a very strong funnel towards action taking.

Todd (00:24:39)

That’s totally right. I mean, it also just introduces another angle of creativity, of testing. You know, Facebook is a platform where you want to see pictures of your friends’ puppies and your friends’ kids in that order. Just kidding. You know, you want to see kind of the more thoughtful family stuff. That’s where pictures of the candidate and his wife and a barbecue go. That’s where the Forward Thinking messages go, you know, you can utilize the network or at least utilize different methods, different deals or different white labels or different segments, to then maybe take a harsher tone on these types of websites. So it’s the same candidate. But you can introduce these things over here, you know, it’s possible that someone is they’ll make the connection between the two, they will see a much fuller picture of a candidate. Here they are their family, they are cute, cuddly, empathetic, here, they are being tough on X, Y, or Z issues that paints a much more colourful picture of a politician, which is always the goal. You know, in persuasion, you start with something like introducing the candidate, you try to make them human. First, you try to say, here’s how, they got into this business, because they care about X, Y, and Z just like you do. You know, here’s how they’re gonna fight for you and why they deserve your vote. That is awfully powerful. When it comes to strategizing about how to reach change minds.

Matt (00:26:06)

Fantastic. Well, this puts us in a great spot for our final question about succeeding in the vertical, I think we’ve already addressed a lot of this in the episode, but from both sides, you know, from Todd, from you at the agency. And Nathan, from you at StackAdapt. You know, what does it take to succeed in this vertical, and what are some best practices or trends that people should be paying attention to, as we head into the coming months?

Todd (00:26:35)

Curiosity about how to reach people in politics is almost more important than ideology in many ways. You know, there is a plethora of issues that are going to move somebody in some direction. And if you are, you know, pro-life or pro-choice, or you’re super pro A, you know, pro-Second Amendment or anti-Second Amendment, knowing the issues that is going to move someone in your direction, is going to be most important. And you may be, you know, figuring out exactly where they are. And how they’re going to persuade people, is what it comes down to. That kind of curiosity of which of those messages on which platform in which cadence, at what frequency, when in the campaign, all of those things, you are able to test, you’re able to throw in new forms of advertising. As planning gets more sophisticated, you’re able to know more ahead of time, which in many cases, makes choices harder, because when you know when you eliminate this or that variable, because the data told you so, you then say, Aha, what if we do this or that all of those lead to different use cases, different ways to approach different solutions, and ultimately, more fun, I would say the other thing is, you know, having a team around you that is similarly curious. You know, we talk about curiosity, creative, the fun side of this stuff, too. But there’s a whole lot of empirical data that comes into it, making sure that you are sober about how to read empirical data, how to read ad reports, and how to read different metrics that come from different platforms, is very important. Spreadsheets run my life, spreadsheets are the foundation of my team’s lives. Figuring out how to get an apples-to-apples, how to report to client, all of that stuff, is really, really important. So you know, I say curiosity, but it’s not, you know, curiosity, I think, leads you off into the world of possibilities. You do also need to have a firm grounding in what is doable? What is quantifiable? And if it is quantifiable, how can we do so in a scalable way? Where it’s not, you know, great reporting now takes 25 hours. And we learned a whole bunch of stuff, how do you, you know, test the specific about variables that are being tested, keep everything else the same, as much as possible. And use those results to optimize a campaign to make yourself smarter to make the client smarter and, ultimately, to have a favourable election come election day.

Nathan (00:29:13)

From my perspective, I like to think that curiosity is driven by a kind of humility and understanding that you are not necessarily in the heads of all of your voters, you need to seek that out, you need to find the ways that they’re going to be moved to vote for your candidate or your support your legislation. Because, at the end of the day, that is really the metric of success. Right? Come election day. Do you did you win or lose? Right? Did the legislation pass, they did not. Right. And so that’s what you’re measured up against? It’s that curiosity that takes you there. I’m curious. You know, Todd, and maybe I’m adding another question in here. But when it comes to kind of some of the best practices you have for finding those new tactics and engaging that curiosity, what are some of the things you and your team have found are most effective and in keeping you learning as the election season goes on?

Todd (00:30:13)

There’s any number of, I think, to your first point, Nathan, I think, you know, nothing gets me more delighted than being proved wrong by data. If I say, this message is going to work 10 times better than the one you silly client think is going to work. And I am proved wrong, I did not get mine gets less clicks or less receptivity. I have no problem eating Club Crow. It always ends up being fun anyway, that’s powerful, that’s a part of what we do is proving assumptions wrong. You know, we eat, live, breathe, and do everything in online advertising. So it’s hard to stay away from it in some ways. I think StackAdapt does a fantastic job of both introducing tools, but then also keeping clients abreast of those tools. You know, there’s industry pieces out there. I don’t know if there’s one or two, you know, publications or places where I’d stay to stay on top of it is also, you know, Google is your best friend in this world, too. As you start to ideate and say, how can I do this, or I have an assumption, I have a feeling that this is going to work, inevitably, you’ll reach a place where the current tools that you have cannot do that. And you say, oh, shoot, I thought there was something out there if you Google it, you will find a tool that fills that hole that does that niche that performs this one operation, that then means great, here’s another license I have to manage. But it does mean that I get to test this assumption and derive value from it in a way that, you know, I was limited over here. Now there’s this new thing, great, the amount of times I have gone down that road and found a vendor. You know, I was not too personal with StackAdapt. I found StackAdapt because I saw a native ad that was gorgeous. That was just wonderfully flowed into content on another site. And I kind of reverse-engineered it, looked at the URL was pointing to, saw StackAdapt referenced and reached out. That’s how my engagement started. So it was that curiosity of that’s a gorgeous ad, I need to know how and who is doing that led to a relationship that’s been now, four or five years in the making that kind of stuff. I encourage my team and others at The Herald Group, constantly. If you see something interesting on the internet, let me know, if you take an advocacy action, if you sign up for a newsletter, donate to a political campaign. And you had a good experience or a bad experience. Tell me about it. I want to know what you liked, what you didn’t like. Anyone listening, please look me up and shoot me a note about an ad you liked or didn’t like, and we will geek out over why it was effective or why it wasn’t all of that stuff, I think makes us smarter in a way where there’s you know, it’s infinite opportunities to grow infinite opportunities for introducing new ways of doing things, and ultimately infinite ways of getting to election day with a favourable outcome. That’s why this world is so fun.

Matt (00:33:16)

Fantastic. Well, you know, that puts us just about at our time, I wanted to say thank you, Nathan. Thank you, Todd, for joining us on this episode to all of our listeners who are operating in the political vertical. We wish you the best of luck in your campaigns. And we hope you took a lot away from this episode. Until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast, and thank you for listening.

Episode Outro (00:33:40)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at StackAapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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