How Political Advertisers Can Help Win Hearts, Minds, and Votes Through Connected Advertising Experiences
Image source: Adobe Stock.
Last month, I donned my favorite Fall sport jacket and sat down with Shane Greer from Campaigns and Elections Magazine to talk about how political candidates can turn to omnichannel digital advertising to share their views and policies, fundraise, build support, and ultimately earn votes and win elections.
We covered how voters are leading increasingly complex lives awash in an ever-expanding set of communications and media channels. Constituents have many media choices to learn about candidates and the issues for upcoming elections, but the experience can be overwhelming and confusing. They’re looking for candidates to provide compelling, personal, relevant messages through experiences across channels.
What does that mean for fundraising campaigns in the 2020 election cycle? Candidates running for elected office, whether local or national, must master today’s top digital channels including advanced TV, digital out of home, and podcasts to reach audiences. Below I detail these channels, how they can be powerful in a political campaign’s media mix, and how Adobe helps.
Addressable TV is now programmatic
Access to addressable inventory is now available to programmatic marketers, who will be able to plan, execute, and optimize linear buys in satellite and cable networks across the country. Adobe Advertising Cloud will be rolling out the addressable ad placement later this fall, giving digital campaigners even more control over linear TV that’s targeted directly to the voters they need to persuade.
Adobe Advertising Cloud has an exclusive partnership with Roku, making the CTV/OTT world truly addressable from a programmatic platform for the first time. Roku-specific CTV placements let political marketers match their own voter targeting files in Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP directly to Roku Device IDs in a deterministic way. The ad team can keep their premium CTV placements running from the same programmatic platform as the rest of their video, display, and audio placements for more cohesive planning, reporting, and optimization, saving time and enabling greater efficiency.
Digital out of home distributes messaging across cityscapes
Digital out of home (DOOH) presents another opportunity for political marketers to calibrate their advertising toward strategic groups voters by matching them against mobile device IDs to establish traffic patterns, returning estimated views based on proximity and ad rotation from screens in airports, bus stops, elevators, taxi cabs, gas stations, and, of course, good old billboards. DOOH gives political marketers the ability to reach voters as they move throughout their daily lives on commutes, to work, to the gym, as they shop and run errands, and back home again, punctuating the voter journey at every turn with moments for influence, action, and support.
Personalized creative at scale
On that journey, voters expect creative content that’s customized for them and relevant to their interests. One of the great things about Adobe’s creative heritage is that it naturally led to Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative, an intuitive Programmatic creative management tool that allows ad ops to segment their audiences based on data, geo, and experience with a visual drag-and-drop interface, and then rapidly iterate custom creative for all of those audiences, without having to bother the creative team. Using ad templates that creatives can set up once, the advertising team can then take them and run wild, customizing any element of the template to quickly build new ads for different constituencies, or test out endless variations to see which combination of targeting and ad creative converts targets to donors and activists.
Digital audio for the win
Finally, podcasting has also debuted as an important new arrow in the programmatic advertisers’ quiver. Podcasts can now be tracked by download, and the ad slots in each one can be tracked to provide metrics for buyers indicating reach and frequency to strategic targets. As audiences across generational divides start gravitating back toward long-form content, podcasting offers a compelling new channel to reach voters who are deep diving into their favorite content streams in a fully engaged way. According to a recent Adobe study, 61% of surveyed organizations said they plan to increase their investments in digital audio advertising by as much as 35% in the coming year.
The voter journey is fragmented and unpredictable. Luckily for political marketers, reaching voters across digital channels in a meaningful way is possible using a single platform that makes personal and relevant advertising to voters easier and more accountable than ever before.