Like pretty much everyone else on the internet, we’re still elbow-deep in an autopsy of last week’s election results.
No matter how you slice it, there’s clearly a lot that political advertisers can do better next time around.
What happened? Blame media fragmentation or misinformation or, as our guest on last week’s pod, Power Interactive CEO Jordan Lieberman, suggested, blame it on a decline in social media spend.
This week, we’re continuing the conversation with Jessica Alter, co-founder of the nonprofit Tech For Campaigns, who previously spoke with AdExchanger about the organization’s two major programs: one that uses direct response channels to encourage voter turnout and another that pairs state legislative campaigns with much-needed digital marketing volunteers.
According to Alter, low-propensity voters – not undecided ones – increasingly make the difference between who wins and who loses a presidential election, a margin that’s usually between 300,000 and 500,000 votes.
To target these voters, Tech for Campaigns operates like a performance marketer rather than a political operative. And although it’s too soon to determine the impact this year’s turnout efforts had on the election results, TFC’s report from the 2022 midterms suggest that its method does produce positive, measurable outcomes.
Plug and play
Despite the uproar over this year’s election results, Alter doesn’t believe that political advertisers will learn meaningful lessons about digital marketing from what happened – at least not just yet.
Most political ads are based on persuasion first, then fundraising and then turnout, Alter tells us. From there, CTV spending often takes precedence over other more effective, measurable channels, because political campaigns are able to “plug and play” their linear TV ads into that same format.
“TV is king,” Alter says. “It’s part of the political media industrial complex. And it’s hard to take dinner off people’s plates, and it’s hard for people to disrupt themselves.”
