New Data Technology Enables Laser-like Targeting Capabilities

By Drew Brighton, Target Smart

It’s February 2016, and the biggest election in the history of the planet is officially underway. Campaigns will spend more money in 2016 to reach voters and influence their decisions than in any year prior. And the campaign technology they are employing is more sophisticated than ever. Does that sounds familiar?   It should, because you have probably heard something similar every Presidential election year for as long as you can remember.

Imagine that you’re sitting in your living room watching a rerun of NCIS and playing Words with Friends on your iPad, multitasking as usual.  As you know, political campaigns can communicate with you in a variety of ways; they can knock on your door, call you on your home or cell phone, send an email or digital advertisement or run a radio or television spot.  And while those methods of communication haven’t changed much over the past few election cycles, the media mix and the ability to target—that is, to speak directly to you as an individual—has dramatically changed.  Campaigns can now tailor their messages to focus on what issues or messages will most likely resonate with you—not just because you’re watching NCIS—but because of your past voting behavior, your income and demographics, political giving and any other information that they may know about you. 

The ability to create individual profiles isn’t a shiny new toy this year either, as those capabilities have been around for years.  In fact, political campaigns still use much of the same data they did decades ago, using precinct and census level data for targeting and traditional voter contact methods such as direct mail and telephone calls to reach and influence voters.  Yet while these data and techniques are still part of the process, they have been augmented in recent years with new sources of data and new methods of voter contact.  As voters and consumers are reached on a more individual level, we have had to figure out more sophisticated ways to target and communicate with them. 

Over the past year, new targeting technology has created a dramatic improvement in our ability to target voters and consumers online and through addressable television advertising with more precision and accuracy than ever before. Through a series of partnerships with media companies, the REALTOR® Party Voter Database has now been matched to the subscriber databases of almost every major digital media company, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many others. In addition, satellite television providers such as DirecTV and DISH network have also matched their customers to the voter file. This “person-level” match allows campaigns to use the traditional voter targeting techniques that we’ve relied on for years, and then apply those targets directly online, in a cookie-free, device agnostic environment.  What that means is that if a campaign determines that you can be persuaded to vote for their candidate or issue based on the targeting information they’ve collected, they can now spend LESS and contact MORE of the voters that are likely to vote for them. And that is really the point of targeting after all, figuring out how to get more out of each precious campaign dollar.

In a recent REALTOR® Party campaign, this new targeting technology provided a 5-fold improvement in click-thru rates over traditional digital targeting.  So what does this mean for the REALTOR® Party?  Effectively, just as we’ve been able to determine which houses on a street we should send mail to, or which phones we should call, now we have the technology to send digital advertisements and and/or television advertisements to those same households.  The result is significantly more effective—and most importantly—more cost-effective communications to amplify our efforts to win.  In a year when campaigns will spend more money on getting their message across than ever before, it’s imperative that we find ways to target smarter, and reach voters in a more cost effective way than ever before.  Targeting technology like this is keeping us in the game.

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