6-Second Ad Trend Challenges Political Campaigns

Political campaigns are facing a new challenge in the fast-paced digital ad race. Political marketers, who have honed standard 30-second video ads for TV and online, must now adapt to a trend to 6-second ad spots, reports a recent article in Campaigns & Elections magazine. With public attention spans shortening, corporate marketers are declaring that 6 seconds is a more effective format, especially for reaching "a younger demographic." The article notes that Google’s YouTube has been holding a contest to promote the format, that Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg recently told investors that the length was ideal for sales pitches, and that Fox TV debuted its first ever 6-second ad slots during the "Teen Choice Awards" in August. Although both Democrats and Republicans want to court the "younger demographic" in 2018, political media consultants express misgivings on their ability to leverage the trend, citing concerns about condensing a message into a 6- or 10-second "snackable" ad creative that will still persuade. They worry that even today's micro-targeting of voters will not overcome a poorly executed appeal. "We found the perfect voter," Casey Phillips, a media consultant with a GOP client roster explains for the magazine, "we can buy [what he is watching], but what is it that we’re going to tell him in 10 seconds, and get it done in a way that doesn’t suck. That’s where we're all having problems." Budget limitations pose another hurdle for political marketers.  Political consultants see the costs to produce and edit down 30-second spots into shorter versions, as well as spread those ads across the many available digital and traditional media formats, as putting added strain on campaign budgets in the next election cycle. For more on the trend to "snackable" ads, read https://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/snackable-ads-giving-some-media-consultants-heartburn

'Memes' the Word for Today's Political Donors

Donors to political campaigns and causes are being drawn to a new strategy for political influence: viral digital. In addition to funding TV ads and PACs, The New York Times reports that deep-pocket donors are now bankrolling partisan organizations that specialize in creating catchy, shareable memes, messages and videos, especially on social media platforms. Outfits ranging from Occupy Democrats to the alt-right Milo Inc. are gathering donors who hope that their streams of aggregated links, captioned images and short videos will garner funds, votes and real-world action. While operatives across the political spectrum are being attracted now, the bandwagon got rolling with the Trump campaign's success with Twitter and other social platforms, to the point where a study found that nearly two-thirds of the most popular election tweets were either anti-Clinton or pro-Trump. The Times story cites many new participants from the left/progressive side of the aisle today, including David Brock, a well-known Democratic operative, who started an effort last year to raise $40 million to support Shareblue, a left-wing viral news outfit to rival alt-right publisher Breitbart. And there's John Sellers, a left-wing organizer and former Greenpeace activist, who started a Facebook page called The Other 98% to promote environmentalism and other progressive causes, which now boasts 5 million followers and funding of its nonprofit affiliate by donors such as billionaire George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations. The low cost for potentially high impact is especially attractive to causes and donors. Per the Times, Stand Up America, a progressive group run by Sean Eldridge, husband of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, reaches, on average, 10 million people weekly by only spending "in the low six figures" to produce a Facebook page of shareable graphics and news. For more detail, read the full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/business/media/political-donors-put-their-money-where-the-memes-are.html

Don't Let Digital Ad-Blocking Hobble Your Campaign

Ad blocking by digital and mobile viewers is a growing challenge for political campaigns and causes in the 2016 election cycle, and video ads are especially vulnerable, warns a recent AdExchanger.com post. There are already 45 million monthly active ad-blocking users in the U.S., and ad-blocker usage is growing rapidly. Ad-blocking rates vary by region, from a low of 8% in Washington, D.C. to over 14% in a swing state like New Hampshire. Besides ad blocking, voters--especially millennials--are engaging in ad skipping thanks to skippable digital ads and ad-skipping DVRs. And with ad-free digital video subscriptions, more voters are able to avoid political videos. What can campaigns do? The article suggests several strategies to dodge ad blockers and maximize the viewing run of online display, mobile and video ads. Start by asking digital content providers how they handle anti-ad blocking, such as withholding content if ads are blocked or employing a tech solution to defend agaist ad blockers. Since ad blocking rates vary by site vertical and environment, take that into account in media buys--for example, ad blockers are less effective with mobile native apps than with mobile web browsers. When it comes to video ads, go for premium viewing, such as major media and broadcast sites, to combat viewer drop off due to poor ad stream quality, overall low viewability and even fraudulent impressions. Of course, personalized targeting decreases ad avoidance, and programmatic and other precise viewer targeting can help. For the full article, go to http://adexchanger.com/politics/how-will-political-campaigns-reach-voters-who-are-avoiding-ads/

Campaigns Must Arm to Win the 2016 Digital Race

Campaigns and causes will be competing on a digital battlefield as never before in the 2016 elections. A recent MediaPost.com article by Mike Werch, marketing manager of SocialCode, offered eight key digital strategies to boost message impact, expand voter base and capture donations. Werch advises: 1) target unaffiliated voters by serving digital ads to lookalikes, people with the same interests and behaviors as those in the voter, donor or e-mail subscriber files; 2) recapture donors with digital remarketing (use of Website Custom Audiences) to target people who visit a donation page but fail to donate; 3) apply digital insights across channels, using the creative test results of digital video to hone TV or print ads, for example; 4) improve primary audience response with digital geo-targeting, testing geo-targeted digital video to perfect expensive local TV ads, for example; 5) segment audiences for more digital leverage, using Facebook's rich user data, for example, to deploy ads relevant to targets' demographics, behaviors and interests; 6) do a local-interest digital campaign in an area before hitting the pavement, and follow up with conversion-focused ads to build mailing lists; 7) do digital "get out the vote" campaigning, messaging politically inactive Facebook users who also match political affinity targeting as an example; 8) test 2016's new and improved ad options for political campaigning, such as Facebook's lead ads for mobile sign-ups and conversions with pre-filled forms. For more detail, read http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/264971/how-2016-presidential-candidates-can-win-the-digit.html

New Made-for-Digital Content Courts Young Voters

In their efforts to corral younger, millennial voters, 2016 election campaigns are investing in made-for-digital content, with a focus on social media and mobile, at record rates, according to a recent CNBC.com article. Reuters estimates that candidates will spend $1 billion on digital media advertising, close to four times the amount spent in 2012, CNBC reports. Almost six months before the primary elections, 80% of declared presidential hopefuls have created made-for-digital YouTube videos, and eight candidates have used live streaming for their candidacy announcements. Democratic contender Sen. Bernie Sanders even worked with a virtual reality production company to film a fundraising speech so viewers could have a 3-D, 360-degree experience. Candidates clearly want to tap into the 18- to 36-year-old crowd that, per the Crowdtap marketing platform, spends 17.8 hours a day consuming media content, especially through social sites. It is also a voter group that is so mobile-phone-addicted that YouTube on mobile now reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds than any single cable network. When it comes to content delivery, Facebook is aggressively courting politicians with updated ad products that allow matching of voter files with Facebook profile data, and Snapchat is curating live candidate events and offering candidates their own Snapchat channels. However, in embracing made-for-digital video, candidates are taking a new approach from the slick TV-style productions of the past. Campaigns are trying to connect to a new generation of voters with raw, live and hopefully viral content (Sen. Ted Cruz frying bacon on the barrel of a gun). A quote from Sen. Rand Paul's chief digital strategist, Vincent Harris, sums up: "2016 is potentially the first cycle that, by Election Day, voters will be consuming more content from the Internet than on television. This is especially true for first-time voters, younger voters and college voters..." For more, read http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/05/how-pols-are-targeting-the-youth-vote-go-360-and-snapchat-like-mad.html

Facebook Emerging As 2016 Digital Ad Heavyweight

Facebook is being declared "the single most important tool of the digital campaign" in 2016 by a recent National Journal magazine article. The National Journal reports that 2016 presidential contenders as disparate as Hillary Clinton and Ben Carson, Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders are already investing in the social network. And the reasons for Facebook's expanded clout, beyond its 190 million American users, are new features unveiled since the 2012 presidential campaign, including more customized and sophisticated splicing of the American electorate and the ability to serve video to those thinly targeted sets of people. That means "the emotional impact of television delivered at an almost atomized, individual level," as the article points out. Facebook not only has a wealth of information about its members--identity, age, gender, location, passions--its new partnerships with big data firms, like Acxiom, allow it to layer on behavioral information, such as shopping habits. Political operatives are already modeling the universes of likely Iowa caucus-goers and potential New Hampshire primary voters and uploading those models into Facebook to match them with Facebook profiles of actual voters in those states, per the article. "We are guaranteeing you will reach the right person at the right time and eliminate the waste that you might find in e-mail marketing, certainly in TV advertising," Eric Laurence, who is in charge of political advertising on Facebook told the National Journal. Cost factors are definitely driving Facebook interest. Vincent Harris, Paul's chief digital strategist, is quoted: "It's so cheap. I am getting Facebook video views for one cent a view—one cent a view! ... It's a fundraising tool, it's a persuasion tool, and it's a [get-out-the-vote] tool. It's a way to organize, too." And there's an attractive ROI potential, too. Facebook likes to point out that the 2013 campaign of Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor recovered 58% of its Facebook acquisition costs by linking new e-mail subscribers to online contribution forms. For more, read http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/facebook-the-vote-20150612

GOP Hopefuls Face Online Ad Space Sell-outs

Even before all the Republican presidential hopefuls can enter the 2016 race, the hottest online ad inventory is selling out, especially for the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries, reports the National Journal. There were digital-ad shortages ahead of the 2012 and 2014 elections, too, but not so far in advance, note political pros and online sellers like Google. But, with the summer of 2015 still ahead, winter 2016 ad inventory is booking up in this presidential race. The ads that are selling out the fastest are those that automatically play on Hulu, YouTube and other Internet-based videos that users can't skip. With a field of nearly 20 GOP candidates, and super PAC money, the ad crunch is not surprising, and Peter Pasi, now vice president of political sales at Collective and a former GOP digital ad strategist, predicts "a huge shortfall." The ad space that will be available for late arrivals includes Facebook, which sells video ads at auction, so campaigns can't lock them up in advance, and YouTube's skippable ads, which are also sold at auction. But political strategists advise conservative campaigns to grab prime ad real estate early, especially since there is little penalty for pre-buying; most ad reservations can be cancelled later at no cost or for a small fee. Perhaps just as important, campaigns are urged to use more sophisticated data targeting than in the past to make the most of scarce ad inventory, avoiding wasted dollars by serving ads only to likely caucus-goers or primary voters. "It's BYOD--bring your own data--if you will," remarks Kenny Day, head of political-advocacy sales for Yahoo. For the full story, read http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/websites-are-already-selling-out-of-ad-inventory-for-2016-20150512

Will Voters 'Like' New Facebook Political Videos?

Political campaigns expanded use of video ads on Facebook and other social platforms in 2014. But if campaigns like Facebook video, they'll have to make changes to get voters to "like" them back in 2016, according to a recent article by Derek Willis for The Upshot website of The New York Times. Previously, many political videos were just re-purposed TV ads, either run on the candidate's Facebook page or as a "pre-roll" clip before another YouTube video that users actually wanted to watch. For political video ads to really leverage social media impact, they will need to be in the "feed" as ads, and grabbing attention in just a few seconds. That means 2016 campaign videos will have to be designed specifically for the Internet rather than TV, digital ad consultants predict. Plus, while social media has a great potential audience, data shows that politically active Facebook users rarely cross party lines and mainly share with like-minded followers. So tapping the wider reach of a social network like Facebook also will mean producing more distinct online videos customized to specific audiences. "Campaigns will need to produce vast quantities of customized messaging," Connor Walsh, a Republican digital consultant, told Willis. "And with a cap on the frequency a user is shown the same ad, campaigns cannot rely on repetition to drive home their message." Instead of repetition, video content will be challenged to use a few seconds of title and image for an immediate hook that inspires engagement and sharing. Yet while grabbing viewer attention, social video content will have to straddle the line between serious policy and the over-the-top "red meat" that can backfire, especially outside the base, warn digital media experts. Clearly, winning over social networks with political videos will not be an easy task. For the whole article, read http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/upshot/coming-to-your-facebook-feed-more-political-videos.html

Midterm Lesson: Web Ad Space Isn't Unlimited

Political campaigners are learning a surprise lesson in the midterm election battles: Premium space on the web is not infinite. Late-comers to the increasingly crowded digital space are finding that they've missed all the tastiest spots for video and display ads. A recent story in The New York Times underscored that savvy political players now must make pre-emptive strikes to ensure ad placement when and where it matters most. Online video spots are especially hot, and there are two main types: those a viewer can skip after just a few seconds, and “reserved buy” ads that run in their entirety before another video begins. The ads that can be skipped are unlimited but sold by auction so the price goes up as demand increases closer to Election Day. The ads that cannot be skipped, those that viewers are forced to watch for all 15 or 30 seconds before they can see content from their original search, are limited. Campaigns are hurrying to reserve this video ad type in advance to lock in a good price and ensure prominent display. Video ad space on popular sites like YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo and top news outlets is in short supply; there is already almost no remaining YouTube inventory for reserve buys in some very competitive races, the New York Times reports. Banner ads and home-page takeovers, in which ads from a particular buyer are the only ones prominently displayed on a website’s home page, are also being scooped up fast. “Smart campaigns book early, the same way that smart brands book television early,” Andrew Bleeker, the president of Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital marketing company, told the NYT. “We reserve most of the inventory for our clients in the spring to make sure something like this isn’t a factor.” For the complete article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us/campaigns-find-ad-space-finite-even-on-the-web.html?_r=0

Rapid Growth Forecast for Political Online Ads

"Explosive" growth in online political ad spending is being projected by ad forecasting firm Borrell Associates. A political advertising outlay of $8.3 billion is forecast to flood all media markets for the midterm elections, up from the $7.2 billion spent in 2010, the previous midterm election year, according to the Borrell 2014 forecasts reported by Deadline Hollywood. But the shares of the pie going to broadcast TV, cable TV, online and newspapers are shifting. While broadcasters are expected to reap $4.6 billion this year, or 55.4% of the ad spend for all races and ballot issues, that take is actually down from its 57.5% share in 2010, and broadcast's share is expected to shrink further to 52.6% in 2016. Where's the money going? Cable and online are "the only media choices projected to gain share" this year, per the Borrell report. In fact, online’s projected $271.2 million is up 1,825.2% from its $14.1 million in 2010. Although online ads are expected to account for just three cents of every ad dollar spent on all 2014 political contests, "current forecasts call for explosive growth to continue, nearing the billion-dollar level by 2016′s Presidential election," according to another quote from the report. By 2016, online will account for 7.7% of ad spending, ahead of newspapers' 7.1%. Display ads and video will make up three quarters of this year’s online spending. Forecasters attribute political campaigners' new "fascination" with online to its targeting ability, quick response and relatively low cost as well at to generational shifts that see millennial voters "much more likely to turn to streaming video and social media" for political information. For a summary of the report, see http://www.deadline.com/2014/06/political-ad-spending-tv-online-borrell/

Online Videos Nab Attention of Majority of Voters

Whether informative or inflammatory, online political videos clearly won the attention of a majority of voters in the 2012 political races. According to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, 55% of registered voters watched political videos online this election season. And it was a highly social affair: Some 52% of registered voters said that other people recommended political videos for them to watch during the political campaigns, with social networking sites playing a prominent role in this process. For more on the research, see http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Election-2012-Video.aspx