If C&E's CampaignTech conference is any indication, online politicos are going to fight on two different kinds of ground in 2012, and they’d better be ready for both. We might think of them as the air war and the ground war, but those words also apply to television advertising and grassroots organizing. A better metaphor might be retail vs. wholesale—one-on-one vs. mass communications.
Online advertising shows the distinction clearly. The majority of today’s political digital ads are intended to recruit supporters, donors and volunteers for particular campaigns or interest groups. Using interest, demographic and geographic matches, advertisers can target Google, Facebook and display (banner) ads with ruthless precision.
It’s even now relatively common practice to zero-in on individual people (if anonymously) by matching a campaign’s voter file with the “cookies” placed on consumers’ computers by commercial advertisers. Retail politics, indeed! At the same time, digital campaigners can run ads with the entirely different goal of influencing the broad public conversation. These ads may not be geo-targeted in the same sense as the recruiting ads mentioned above; instead they try to reach influential voices like reporters, bloggers and political activists.
This just came in over the proverbial transom: basic social media numbers on several politicians being mentioned as potential Romney Vice Presidential picks. These data were compiled by experienced digital marketer Al DiGuido, about whom you can learn more at AlDiGuido.com. Note that Marco Rubio leads the pack, for what it’s worth — as we’ve seen here more than once, raw numbers about Twitter and Facebook are no predictor of electoral success. And of course, these are simply follower numbers, which give you no hint of how someone actually uses the channels. Also note Biden’s equivalent standing, included for comparison.
Good times on internet radio last night: I sat down with the FDH Lounge’s Rick Morris for one of our occasional political bull sessions. Rick’s a self-proclaimed “paleo-conservative” and I’m a bit of a Lefty, but we always have great time tossing ideas around. Last night was no exception: we covered topics ranging from the politics of Obama’s gay marriage support to the changing demographics of North Carolina to the effect of Romney’s Mormonism on evangelical voters, with plenty more in between. Check out the audio below, and I hope Rick and I can reconnect a few more times before Election Day rolls around. Also see Rick’s recent blog post, How the anti-left killed the right, which we discussed at length.
Howdy folks, one of our Epolitics.com contributors, Kayle Hatt, has launched his own digital politics/political commentary blog, so go check it out! He’s Canadian, the poor frozen bastard, so he’s writing (appropriately enough) at KayleHatt.ca. Very cool, and welcome to the club!
Also, I believe I may have #failed miserably by never formally welcoming the Netroots Foundation’s “Winning the Internet” blog when it launched a few months back. They’re already doing great work by gathering “curated strategies and tactics for change,” and from Day One they demonstrated their profound understanding of the ‘tubes by including a cute kitten in their logo. Brilliant! So go check them out, too.
Lots of online talk today about the Obama campaign’s new two-minute(!) anti-Romney attack ad airing in battleground states. Here’s the video, and note the RomneyEconomics.com website promoted via a custom overlay:
This video is apparently the online-optimized version; I assume the TV ad (part of a $25,000,000 Obama buy) mentions the website as well, perhaps right before the “I approve this message” line. I bring this point up because of the integrated nature of the anti-Romney message: the site strongly reinforces the ad with details about Bain Capital’s involvement with companies that later laid off workers, via a sliding set of screens similar in presentation to what we saw in the “Life of Julia” infographic. Plus, each story has a mouseover-controlled timeline and is individually sharable on Facebook and Twitter. To top it off, the site has a share-your-own-story feature to further encourage supporters to get involved.
Regardless of what you think about the substance of the Romney Economics critique, this is good work all around: robust online engagement to capitalize (hah!) on offline promotion. We should see more of this kind of integration in the months to come, assuming people are doing their jobs.
Update: Mere moments after I published this piece, the first DNC email arrived promoting RomneyEconomics.com…yet more integration.
Please find a special message from one of our advertisers, Fisher Investments. Please note that the following message reflects the opinions and representations of our advertiser alone, and not necessarily the opinion or editorial positions of the Newt 2012 campaign.
Fisher Investments
Where is the stock market headed?
So glad this hucksterism doesn’t reflect Newt’s own editorial position! His predictive abilities haven’t exactly stood the test of time of late…. Full text here, as a PDF. I’d call this pitiful, but that would be charitable. Sad to see you go, Newt! You’ve brought so much joy to the e.politics bunker this year.
Infographics are all thecommunications ragethese days, in part because of the visual emphasis of sites like Pinterest and the new(-ish) Facebook Timeline layout. But what makes a good infographic good? For a recent example, let’s use something from my day job: the National Women’s Law Center’s successful “What Do Tax Breaks for Millionaires Really Cost?” graphic, which was released soon before the Senate vote on the so-called “Buffett rule.”
Good Data
Data is the core of an infographic — without it, even a well-designed one is just a pretty picture. In the case of NWLC’s tax cuts infographic, the data was good for two reasons. First, it was accurate, which the organization emphasized with a lot of footnotes to sources on the image’s primary landing page. Second, it was relevant: it took an abstract idea (the opportunity cost of giving more tax cuts to a person who is already wealthy) and compared that number with government services people could relate to and see as important. One millionaire’s tax cut equals a daily meal for 249 senior citizens? Whoa.
A big change in the world of campaign advertising: over the past six months: the practice of targeting online ads directly at voters in a particular district has gone from being exotic to being a standard part of the political toolkit, with serious implications both for the political advertising environment and for the digital ad industry itself.
Here’s how it works. First, commercial advertisers put cookies on consumers’ computers to track their online habits and target ads at them appropriately. A good example of the results is “cookie-based retargeting,” the practice of hitting someone repeatedly and on many websites with ads related to a site they’ve visited recently (Zappos.com has employed cookie-based retargeting extensively).
Next, companies in the political space take all or part of a campaign’s “voter file” — the database of registered voters for their district — and match it to consumer-advertising databases linked to those cookies. Finally, the campaign and its consultants pay online advertising networks to deliver ads to the people whose identities have been matched. A campaign might target a subset of its file — only registered Democrats or Republicans who voted in the last election — or send the ad network a set of criteria it’s interested in and let the company target the ads accordingly. Women under 40? Subscribers to gun magazines? High-end car owners? All potentially fair game.
Women are a key consituency for the Democrats this Fall, and it’s no surprise that the Obama campaign is trying very hard NOT to let Mitt Rommey leave the contraceptive coverage fight and the rest of the “War on Women” behind. Their latest weapon: an interactive series of illustrations showing the relative effects of Democratic and Republican policies throughout the life of a woman.
Of course, “The Life of Julia” is a propaganda device in the tradition of all good campaign materials, meaning that Obama’s policies are presented in the best possible light and Romney’s are the height of perfidy. The presentation is effective, though — it’s hard to imagine that someone could flip through all the slides without getting The Message. Yet another example of the power of illustrating abstract policies visually.
Let me repeat: a QR code on a banana. I’m sorry, but digital marketing has now officially Gone Too Far — it risks the wrath of the gods. You Have Been Warned.
(Credit for this well-composed photo: my NWLC colleague Rachel Perrone.)
Good news on the publishing front! Our latest ebook here at Epolitics.com, “How Campaigns Can Use the Internet to Win in 2012,” is galloping right along: in the three weeks since its release, it’s been downloaded directly over 900 times and purchased in the Amazon store (optimized for Kindle) scores more. We should hit 1000 total downloads in the next day or so! Those numbers don’t include the ripple effect as people forward it on to colleagues and others, and they’re also destined to go up as the promotional campaign chugs along (press release hits the wires tomorrow, for instance, and the ebook should have a mention in the next issue of Campaigns & Elections magazine).
Despite being written specifically for digital politics practitioners in the U.S., it’s also spreading around the world, with sales logged in the Amazon stores for Germany, the U.K. and Italy and visitors to the ebook landing page arriving from every continent save Antarctica (get with the program, penguins!). Grab your copy today — and don’t forget to pick up Learning from Obama (still the definitive guide to his groundbreaking 2008 online campaign) and the ever-popular Online Politics 101. And please spread the word! Almost all of the promotion so far has been word-of-mouth, and friends-of-Epolitics.com have done a terrific job of letting people in the field know about the book. Thanks, folks!
The disturbing part was in this message from my friend and former NMS colleague Matt DeLuca:
I will be moving on to the Republican National Committee as their Victory Digital Manager and leading up their efforts on their Social Victory Center. I have been impressed by the level of passion and dedication the RNC and Chairman Preibus have put into this application (and digital efforts overall) and I truly believe it can help bridge the offline-online gap and become an effective tool for both the national and state parties.
Why disturbing? Matt’s a smart guy for whose mad skills and killer instinct I have great respect, and as a Democrat who wants to see Obama reelected, I want the Social Victory Center to fail outright. With Matt there, that prospect is a lot less likely, dammit. Plus, I’m jealous of his title — “Victory Digital Manager”? That’s pretty cool…congrats to Matt on the new gig! Other talented friends have also moved on to important roles at campaigns recently, including Lauren Miller and Alex Kellner. This development demands a single response: damn kids, get off my lawn! And when you’re done with the campaigns, come write about ‘em at Epolitics.com.
“At some level, what they’ve done is they’ve taken the same kind of tools that were in the MyBarackObama.com toolkit four years ago and posted them to Facebook,” says Colin Delany, the founder of Epolitics.com. “But at the same time, they will be able to leverage a certain amount of social data – what’s being shared, what’s being viewed – and there is a possibility that they’ll get a higher adoption rate because it’s within Facebook.”
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“It’s good for engaging the loyalists and giving them something to do,” he says, but “not likely to make a huge difference in the outcome of the election.”
Useful no doubt, particularly in giving people outside of battleground states opportunities to get involved (one of the big advantages of MyBO, note), but a game-changer? Let’s see if the results match the hype.
