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Aug 04
Political Digital Advertising

Political digital advertising: Strategies & best practices

Courthouse meet and greets aren’t enough to take home a win on election night anymore. As demographics in the electorate shift, political digital advertising campaigns need to be able to change the playbook and adapt to new technology that will propel them to victory.

Using programmatic advertising and tapping into exclusive ad inventory, digital campaigns are able to reach larger and far more diverse audiences than what has previously been possible in the advertising world.

Running political digital advertising campaigns
with Choozle

Connected TV advertising

Among the digital strategies we recommend for political campaigns, connected TV (CTV) advertising sits at the top of our list.

Connected TV, is content accessed via applications and streamed over internet-connected TVs, mobile, or over-the-top (OTT) devices, and CTV advertising allows you to serve ads on those devices and deliver a big-screen experience. Streaming services now command a greater share of viewers than cable, data published by Nielsen shows. That means apps like Netflix and other streaming platforms capture 38% of all television viewing, compared with 31% for traditional cable

Assuming that streaming services retain a significant percentage of these viewers through the 2024 election, working with Choozle will allow your organization to serve targeted ads to audiences in a much more effective manner than traditional television and with faster reporting.

Targeting capabilities

When launching a campaign during the political season it is important you are reaching your target audience with accuracy. The extensive voter data and geotargeting capabilities through Choozle can connect your campaigns with accurate voter files in combination with congressional maps to ensure you are reaching the right people for your campaign. 

Create detailed audiences that are matched with digital IDs based on the National Voter Registration File giving you access to all registered voters through the United States, our unique segments include swing voters, active military/veterans, and high-propensity voters. 

With access to data partners like Aristotle, TargetSmart, and approximately 235 million voter records you’ll be able to make smart decisions, communicate the right people, test your messages, and measure public opinion with accuracy—while maximizing your return on investment.

The changing privacy & compliance landscape

Staying on top of changes in legislation and industry regulations around digital advertising can be a daunting task. Our team is able to help you navigate these laws to ensure that your political digital advertising campaign is not in violation of any local, state, or federal regulations.

The 2020 election cycle brought to light some shortcomings of digital advertising platforms and exposed actors that used these platforms to mislead consumers and violate user privacy. To combat this and to maintain our place as a top platform in the digital advertising sphere, Choozle is committed to following all local, state, and federal laws pertaining to digital advertising, as well as policies put in place by our industry partners.

Because of this, political advertisers face constraints in their targeting practices that are not imposed on non-political advertisers. Some things to keep in mind:

  • Seed audiences need to be larger than 5,000 unique users (that includes both cookies and devices) for all elections.
  • Dynamic creative optimization, or changing the creative based on data available at the time of ad serving, is prohibited.
  • Third-party ad serving is restricted to ad servers that have been pre-approved for political advertising campaigns.

In addition to the above limitations, Choozle also requires a questionnaire to be completed by the advertiser. In this questionnaire, political campaign advertisers are required to supply the below information.

  • Election type (candidate, ballot measure/state, federal)
  • FEC ID or EIN
  • Treasure or Executive
  • Organization address and phone number
  • Payment method

Providing this information ensures that all advertisers wishing to engage in political activities are compliant with state or federal election laws, and also serves as a vetting method to confirm that no illegitimate campaigns or organizations are operating on the Choozle platform.

Optimizing political digital advertising campaigns

Brand safety & viewability

No one wants to pay for ads that can’t be seen or to have ads placed next to inappropriate content. Brand safety and viewability are two strategies that help mitigate these risks.

Brand safety refers to a set of tools and strategies that ensure your ads don’t appear in an inappropriate context or next to inappropriate content. Similar to how preferred lists and block lists let you filter sites, our brand safety solutions allow you to filter out specific categories of sensitive content.

Viewability is an online advertising metric that aims to track only impressions that can be seen by users and can help optimize a campaign in-flight.

Preferred lists & block lists

After identifying the sites that are driving traffic back to your website and the ones that aren’t, you can create preferred lists or block lists. A preferred list is an index of the sites where you want to serve ads, while block lists bar certain websites from serving your ads.

More on preferred lists and block lists here.

Ready to galvanize your political digital advertising? Partner with Choozle to programmatically launch your digital campaigns with accuracy, efficiency, and ease. We’ll help kick off your digital campaigns for the upcoming cycle. Reach out today to learn more about running digital marketing for political campaigning with Choozle.

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