Next up: TV ads just for you, dear voter
Feb 17, 2014 8:32 AM (ET)
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20140217/DAC10ULO1.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - The days when political campaigns would try to make
inroads with demographic groups such as soccer moms or white
working-class voters are gone. Now, the operatives are targeting
specific individuals.
And, in some places, they can reach those individuals directly through
their televisions.
Welcome to Addressable TV, an emerging technology that allows
advertisers - Senate hopefuls and insurance companies alike - to pay
some broadcasters to pinpoint specific homes.
Advertisers have long bought ads knowing that only a fraction of the
audience was likely to respond to them. Allowing campaigns - political
or not - to finely hone their TV pitches to individuals could let them
more efficiently spend their advertising dollars.
"With a traditional TV buy you can end up paying for a lot of eyeballs
you don't care about," said Chauncey McLean, chief operating officer of
the Analytics Media Group, an ad and data firm. "Addressable TV is a
powerful tool for those that are equipped to use it. If you know who you
want to talk to and what you want to say, you can be much more precise."
Data geeks look at everything from voting histories to demographics,
magazine subscriptions to credit scores, all in the hopes of identifying
their target audience. The advertiser then hands over a list of targets
and, without the viewer necessarily realizing it, the ads pop on when
viewers sit down to watch a program if their broadcaster has the technology.
"This is the power of a 30-second television commercial with the
precision of a piece of direct mail targeted to the individual household
level," said Paul Guyardo, chief revenue officer at DirecTV. "Never
before have advertisers had that level of precision when it came to a
30-second commercial."
The level of precision on televisions has long been a dream for
political campaigns, which are decided by relatively small groups of
voters. President Barack Obama's campaign in 2012 experimented with it
on a small scale, but too few homes were in broadcasting systems
equipped to handle house-by-house decisions.
But earlier this year, DirecTV and Dish Network announced a partnership
that would allow political clients to reach into about 20 million
households by matching up customers' identities with their satellite
receiver, much like a telephone number rings at a specific handset.
At the same time, NBC and parent company Comcast are opening the door
for advertisers to target specific households using video-on-demand
services in 20 million more households. The communications giant is not
yet ready to implement the targeting during live broadcasts, though.
And GroupM, which handles about one-third of the world's ad buys,
recently formed a division to handle such addressable advertising.
"We can send different commercials to different households based on what
we know about these people. Instead of one message per state, it could
be 12 messages per state," said Michael Bologna, GroupM's director of
emerging communications and president of the newly formed Modi Media.
The broadcast companies are expected to be able to charge more per
viewer than for other ad orders, but in exchange advertisers get a
greater confidence that their message is finding its target. For
instance, Allstate has used such an approach to weed out homeowners when
it is pitching rental insurance on some broadcast systems.
Such specific political outreach has been possible for years as
strategists buy, build and scour detailed data on each home to determine
whether it is worth the time to knock on a door, to register a voter or
to phone them to remind them to cast a ballot.
In recent years, Democrats have built an advantage on that data front.
The Republican National Committee has made catching up a priority,
saying it would focus on data this year and leave advertising to outside
groups. The RNC has announced one effort, branded Para Bellum Labs, to
help the party build its list of likely supporters for races up and down
the ballot.
The RNC has a lot of catching up to do. Obama's two presidential
campaigns had a better grasp of the data.
Last year, Democrats built on those abilities in Virginia's
gubernatorial contest. Strategists there used technology that pointed to
specific individuals for a knock on the door, a call on the phone or an
ad on their social networks.
It wasn't immediately clear to those Virginia voters that they were
getting more attention than their neighbors. But behind the scenes,
Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe's advisers were going after just a
few thousand voters. For instance, his strategists pinpointed 494,000
voters and flooded them with Facebook messages criticizing McAuliffe's
rival, Ken Cuccinelli.
"It's a shift from identifying groups to identifying people," said
Andrew Bleeker, president and CEO of Bully Pulpit Interactive, the main
firm advising McAuliffe on digital strategy.
But there are limits. Fewer than half of all households have a cable box
or satellite receiver that allows the broadcasters to splice in ads on
some televisions and not others.
The providers are limited to selling about two minutes of addressable
advertising per hour. An hourlong show on a broadcast network has about
14 minutes of commercials. Cable varies, but they generally have about
17 minutes of commercials in a 60-minute slot.
Building the list of targeted voters is tough and sometimes costly.
And there's no way of telling that the targeted viewer is the one who
sees the ad. All that can be known is that it made its way into the
households; federal laws prohibit the provider from telling the
campaigns any details about specific viewers or their individual habits.
Yet this option, reaching maturity in time for November's elections,
could help campaigns and candidates more efficiently spend the hundreds
of millions of dollars that are already being raised.
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