Election 2016: The Future of Political Advertising Is Now, presented by OpenX

WASHINGTON, D.C.-When can digital media be its own worst enemy? In the heat of an election cycle, when time is finite and decisions are made minute-to-minute by lots of people who don’t always agree. This is when organizational structure is critical to political campaigns—from their agencies to their data suppliers and tech partners, was the […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Political candidates aren’t the only humans capable of saying one thing and then doing another. While many a campaign’s media strategists talk a great game about harnessing digital ads and programmatic television to target voters with less waste, there’s a big disconnect from what they actually do. This sentiment was echoed by all three […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-It’s common wisdom that the growth of programmatic television advertising has been constrained less by technology than by the difficulty in herding together all the players that own the inventory. But at a more basic level, human instinct is in play. There are a “lot of different actors on a lot of different levels,” […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-When competitors DISH and DIRECTV came together in 2014 to offer addressable television advertising solely for political campaigns, early takers were traditional TV buyers. But in the 2016 election cycle, digital buyers wanted in. “I was amazed at how quick the political ad agencies were to accept this and to want to use” D2 […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Like many newspaper publishers, the transition to digital and then to programmatic sales rendered the value of Advance’s traditional consultative approach to audiences and advertisers moot. But that has been changing. “We’ve found that as programmatic continues to evolve, we’re seeing more and more consultative demand coming our way where we’re being asked to […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The Washington Post has gone to great lengths to create a unified auction for its ad inventory that is sold programmatically as it tries to make it easier for buyers to understand and manage private marketplace deals. “If you don’t have a direct relationship with the buyer, you’re just line on the spreadsheet,” said […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-If there’s a misconception that political content is not the best platform in which to advertise political campaigns, “We completely disagree with that,” is the response from Politico’s Randon White. Just about a month ago, qualitative research showed that 60% of the Politico audience was undecided on specific policy issues and that 30% were […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Sometimes success has less to do with how you do something than with letting people know you can actually do it. So it is with publishing giant Hearst—whose local newspaper reach extends from California to Connecticut—and political advertisers. Hearst has been “very aggressive with adopting technology and very flexible with executions. There’s nothing we […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-When you are a publisher serving more than 50 political buyers across some 200 different political campaigns and receiving one trillion bid requests monthly, ad tech only goes so far. “We have to be able to understand what’s happening,” according to Erik Requidan, VP of Programmatic at Intermarkets. “Let’s say a bidder is bidding […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Quality and scale of audience are key to most political advertising campaigns, according to the VP of Business Development at OpenX. “The quality component is really key for buyers because we’re no longer in a world where we’re just trying to buy the audience across any type of content. Ad effectiveness on quality content […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Two major ways that political advertising campaigns differ from those of brand marketers are the “Super Bowl” effect of intense competition and the detailed CRM databases the campaigns have at their disposal. But true programmatic TV buying won’t be available until the 2020 presidential election, not owing to a of lack of technology but […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Challenged by reach, scale and bidding against brand advertisers for impressions, political campaigns are hamstrung in their desire to do audience-guaranteed buys. But that is bound to change by the next presidential election cycle, according to Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising & Business Intelligence at The Washington Post. “I think that in 2020 […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Too much TV pretty much sums up this election cycle with regard to political advertising for Susan Parker at Hearst. In the next cycle, publishers will make data for targeting voters easier to manage than it is today and cross-screen reach will be much more important. “I think one of the takeaways for me, […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-From Alaska to Obama, since 2004 Mark Jablonowski has witnessed the explosive rise of political campaign technology, a business where “everything is an emergency.” Now the Chief Technology Officer of DSPolitical, a digital advertising network for Democrats, has a hand in fueling that growth overseas. Jablonowski described DSPolitical as “Somewhere in between a trade […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-With programmatic display advertising for political campaigns “fading, or at least plateauing,” video, mobile, social media and in-banner formats have become much more popular. “It’s not functioning, it’s not getting the same engagement rates that we’ve seen,” is how Jordan Lieberman describes programmatic display. The Politics & Public Affairs Lead for Audience Partners predicts […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Political campaign veteran Zac Moffatt believes a big key to success for future election cycles is more optimized television spending to heighten targeting and reduce waste. “Being able to optimize your linear TV is going to be the single most important thing a campaign can do,” The Co-Founder of Targeted Victory said earlier this […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Matt Prohaska disagrees with the stereotype of political campaign teams being behind the curve of cutting-edge audience targeting strategies and tactics. “That is far from reality,” the CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting said earlier this month in an interview at the Beet.TV summit on politics and advertising. One reason campaigns need to be […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-After the 2012 election cycle, POLITICO decided to move beyond its D.C.-centric publishing model and expand nationally. Now with seven state-specific newsletters and three state-specific websites, it’s knee deep in the audience targeting game and working with directly with the Clinton and Trump campaigns, as well as numerous PAC’s and Super PAC’s. “Historically, POLITICO’s […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The 2016 presidential election cycle is the first one in which campaigns have been able to target voters with addressable television advertising. “So we’ve been awfully busy,” said Mark Failla, Director of Political Ad Sales at D2 Media Sales. D2 is a limited partnership between DIRECTV and DISH that was created just in time […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The most exciting aspect of the 2016 political cycle for Matthew Dybwad isn’t candidates’ foreign trade policies or medical histories. It’s programmatic television, which in his view is complicated to execute now but by 2018 will be considerably more friction-free. Dybwad, the Head of Politics & Public Affairs at global advertising software platform TubeMogul, […]