How Digital Advertising Works in a Campaign

Digital has become an integrated operation throughout campaign structures and part of the core strategy of most campaigns, operating at the intersection of fundraising, communications, and voter contact efforts. Many parts of a digital advertising program are generally run in-house, from email writing to volunteer recruitment and mobilization.

For paid digital advertising, the process is often similar to that of television advertising: campaigns have the final say on the strategy, budget, and message of a buy recommended by consultants, but leave the execution and buying tactics to an outside firm. Like modeling, analytics, and television ad buying, the economies of scale that enable efficient digital buying and measurement aren’t available to individual campaigns like they are for high-volume agencies like BPI.

At the outset of a campaign, the leadership will set an overall campaign budget and allocate that budget to different types of voter contact. After polling and research determines the messaging and audience strategy, the digital staff works with the rest of the consulting and leadership teams to define and execute media buys that attempt to register, persuade, mobilize, or turn out voters.

Efficient and effective digital advertising programs are informed by a few rules and principles:

1. Let the audience be your guide.

   Leverage the sophistication of political analytics programs to define the precise audience you want to reach, and then build strategies matching the consumption and behavioral patterns of that audience

2. Tailor the creative.

   Digital advertising allows campaigns to tailor creative elements of advertising to specific audiences at scale. Audiences can be shown the customized messages that will move them the most, instead of speaking to everyone with one megaphone. But only be as granular as your creative capacity allows—each individual voter doesn’t need his or her own version of an ad.

3. Don’t just measure how much, measure how well.

   Focus not on how much media was delivered, but instead on how that media actually changed the minds of their target audiences. Campaigns should be consistently integrating attitudinally based, experimentally-informed programs (EIPs) to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of every dollar they spend.

This last point is the key area of focus for digital marketers in 2016 and beyond, and the motivation behind many recent advances in technology and tools for advertising agencies on both sides of the aisle.

Using Experimentally-Informed Programs to Measure Effectiveness

Borrowing from concepts developed in the academic world, an EIP divides an audience into random subsets that are exposed to specific advertising conditions (treatments) or to no ads at all (control). Because these groupings are assigned at random, we can assume that their attitudes or activities would have been identical (statistical noise aside) absent any advertising. Therefore, any differences can be attributed to the advertising received by the treatment group.

EIPs follow the same basic principles as traditional A/B tests, but because the outcomes they measure are more complicated than basic click-through or purchase behavior, they also typically involve some kind of separate post-exposure measurement. Crucially, these measurement cycles take place within the advertising campaign itself—allowing for the applications of those insights to optimize the remainder of the program. EIPs also allow for the testing of multi-part treatments and other complex strategies.

Tools for Delivering Better Ads and Measuring Their Impacts

In order to convince campaigns, companies, and causes to buy into digital advertising, the industry has had to prove that digital advertising could raise money, mobilize activists, and provide engagement with its content. But the days of proving that only by impressions and clicks are over. Now, in addition to those metrics, there are others that matter: exposure time, creative heat mapping, and audible/viewable metrics to ensure clients are getting the most exposure for their investment.

A key decision point for any digital advertiser is choosing partners to provide the types of tools and metrics that are necessary to run a smart ad campaign and tell a story about effectiveness. Parts of the digital ecosystem are well monopolized, and custom-building a solution would be foolish. No one has built a person-based advertising platform that rivals Facebook’s, a buying platform with breadth and reach that rivals Google’s Doubleclick, or a matching platform that rivals Liveramp and Neustar. This parallels the situation for offline components of a campaign as well: an overwhelming majority of Democratic campaigns use VAN to record and measure their voter contacts, BSD to send their email, and Acxiom, Experian, or Infogroup to supplement their voter files with consumer records.

But in other areas, the ecosystem is sufficiently fragmented for agencies to have leeway in choosing with whom to partner to help detect fraud, to measure viewability, or to reach certain audiences. Across existing technology solutions, a lot of the metrics that have been effectively commoditized in the digital space don’t effectively tell the story of the persuasive effectiveness of our campaigns, and whether advertising dollars actually moved the minds of our audiences. When we talk about moving minds, we want to know which features of our campaign made voters more likely to retain a fact about a candidate, feel less favorably about an opponent, or shift their vote choice.

In this environment, BPI made the decision to build its own measurement tool, Vantage, which quantifies the persuasive impact of different types of digital marketing. By surveying individual users online and connecting those surveys to exposure to a specific digital campaign, we’ve begun to build a platform that can integrate the full range of advertising tactics outlined above and to learn how to apply those tactics for maximum effect.

None of what can be done now would have been possible in the technological ecosystem that existed 5 or 10 years ago. The ability to leverage scalable, modular pieces of infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Storage are absolutely critical to building the technology that powers digital advertising. These solutions give us the ability to rapidly and efficiently scale what we do to meet the ever-evolving solutions in the ecosystem, without locking into an unsustainable cost curve.

Finally, there is some critical nuance to figure out which parts of our ecosystem can be automated and repeated, and which parts need to be iterated on and produced anew for each client. Measurement as a science belies easy cycles of productize-and-forget-it. Ad measurement technology has to be as tailored as the advertising that we run for a given client or vertical. And since the advertising ecosystem changes every quarter, the ad technology has to evolve as well.

Adapting to a Changing Campaign Environment

The most critical asset in broadening adoption of digital advertising isn’t technology as much as it is the way we talk about it. If digital practitioners can’t use measurement to demonstrate the value of their work, then it won’t be taken seriously, no matter how novel the campaign or technology used to analyze it. What we do is just as important as how we talk about it and measure it.

The end result focuses on a clear ROI of the overall persuasive impact of a campaign, but also on the relative performance of different messages and tactics. For years, campaigns have responded to mail and field measurements that have put a precise cost-per-vote on their programs. Now digital advertising can optimize for persuasion in the same way, and provide campaigns an apples-to-apples metric of cost-effectiveness across mediums and tactics.

Applying These Lessons for Non-Political Clients

Digital advertising should be tailored to the specifics of the client and the objective of the campaign, but many parts of our approach remain constant. Focusing on a defined universe of individuals—from a model, poll, or external list—is a critical component of planning, executing, communicating, and measuring the success of advertising. Whether a campaign is devoted to motivating someone to vote, or getting someone to buy a car, it is trying to generate actions that are difficult to move and measure at scale.

Whether voting for a candidate or purchasing a car, the actions an audience takes can be difficult to attribute to the specific digital advertising they have received. To meet this challenge, it is important to create specific messages within a campaign to move an audience through a “ladder of engagement”—for example, first getting someone to sign up for a mailing list, then priming them to pay attention to those emails, and ultimately inspiring them to make a purchase or donation. This allows us to measure success at each stage of the process and optimize the overall program toward the high-bar end goal. A deliberate focus on specific steps along the way helps us run better campaigns by making it possible to measure and optimize a program’s effects before the final vote tallies or sales numbers are in.

What Comes Next

Future campaigns, especially at the downballot level, will continue to embrace and elevate digital considerations in campaign decision-making. More and more campaigns in 2018 and beyond will be led by staff with digital expertise or who have run digital programs.

In a technological ecosystem that’s dominated at the top by industry giants like Google and Facebook, and fragmented at the bottom by hundreds if not thousands of ancillary solutions, the coming years will force advertisers to make difficult decisions about how to prioritize platforms and approaches to stay ahead of the curve. Digital components of a campaign are dependent on technological partners to achieve scale and efficiency, and so decisions about advertising technology affect every facet of its program. Once those digital components are decided upon, you’ll see advertisers begin to build budgets from the ground up (based on target audience size, ad vendors’ capacity, and a proven understanding of where marginal dollars are best spent), instead of allocating budgets from the top down based on outdated rules (like spending every required dollar to achieve television parity, and then allocating the rest among a campaign’s other functions).

And finally, digital survey technology—the actual tools that collect attitudes and quantify effectiveness—will continue to evolve. Campaigns will come to expect the same forms of feedback from the online world as they do the offline world, and that means being able to collect more demographic information, detailed feedback, and open-ended qualitative outputs from survey respondents. Digital advertisers that focus on developing their measurement solutions will be the ones best equipped to successfully participate in the discussions about campaign planning at the highest levels.