Ad Regulations will Change, Your Strategy Doesn’t Have To

Yesterday, Google announced upcoming restrictions on political ad targeting. They will continue to actively support paid political, issue, policy, and advocacy content across all of their platform, but — beginning in January — they will remove some audience targeting capabilities including voter file matching and behavioral targeting.

While voter file matching continues to exist on other platforms, it’s likely that others will follow Google’s lead and restrict them as well. Which means campaigns need to be prepared and will have to change some tactics.

Voter matching, using the voter file to find people online, was a strategy we pioneered in ’12 — and this efficient buying tactic consistently helped level the playing field against better-funded candidates. Losing the ability to use it on Google’s platforms will change media plans and make buying more challenging — but doesn’t have to change outcomes as it’s always been just one of many tactics. To navigate these new rules, successful campaigns in ’20 will need to do two things:

• Run truly integrated campaigns with great creative, smart research, and rapid + effective measurement. Reaching people with ads that don’t work has never been a persuasive strategy.
• Find the best way to buy digital in a world without voter file targeting. Digital remains many times more efficient than TV, but it will require a different approach than in past.

For example, in 2018 less than 40% of budget across the 139 House races we worked on was spent on voter file targeting — because many of the most impactful digital placements, such as connected TV and digital audio, are only available for targeting, at scale, at the geographic and demographic level. As nearly 80% of households own a connected TV, spend more time listening to digital audio than radio, and spend 6+hrs a day with a digital device — these placements were extremely effective despite the broader targeting.

We understand that the less campaigns can do directly with platforms, the more they need new tools to deliver impactful buys — and we’re here to help. We’ve been preparing for these pending changes by creating and investing in tools and technology for several years.

Our approach:

1. Identify the right reach + efficiency tradeoff. We built our “Doppler” toolset to forecast the best mix of targeting tactics to reach voters — without the need to rely entirely on list matching. This helps us find the best mix of permitted targeting — zip, age, and gender — that reaches the right voters, as well as the point of diminishing returns.

Example:

2. Create an always-on measurement + optimization framework. As targeting becomes broader, campaigns need to rely less on offline models. Modern digital campaigns cast a broad net and use online signals — like surveys and attention — to prospect for the audiences that are most persuasive. We ran over a dozen tests using this method in ’18, and found that this consistently outperformed more traditional voter targeting.

3. Invest in top-quality buying tools and approaches. As targeting becomes less precise, it’s more important than ever to make every impression you buy count. Managing frequency, buying viewable inventory, screening out bots is critical — and requires substantial investment in infrastructure, technology, and staff.

4. Research, Creative, and Content matter more than ever. We need winning messages that appeal to broader audiences and are designed for digital. And new ways to deliver that message — whether that’s amplifying a press story or finding the right influencer to share a piece of information.

We’re happy to discuss in more detail how these changes might impact your 2020 plans and how we can help.