Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]
It’s been an odd presidential campaign, and this oddness has extended to the realm of political advertising. Here are three things to look out for as the primary season gives way to the general election. Is there enough TV inventory? There’s just too much money to push down the throat of linear TV, and it’s […]
When Reuters reported last month that the Koch brothers’ organization, Freedom Partners, would sit out the remainder of the primary, the reason given was a worry that “spending millions of dollars attacking Trump would be money wasted, since they had not yet seen any attack on Trump stick.” Political insiders now expect a change in […]
Despite the advantages of programmatic buying, political advertisers hoping to go beyond the giant walled gardens owned by Facebook and Google see real challenges with the system. Those challenges include inventory scarcity, placement transparency and auction dynamics that don’t match up with brand spenders. Publishers who are hankering for political ad spend don’t always have […]
Have you ever wondered why presidential candidates only “suspend” their campaigns, even when they’re dropping out? It isn’t pride, it’s just good business. When the candidate is gone, the campaign’s valuable tech and data assets remain. Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign, for instance, ended suddenly and in considerable debt, which it helped pay down by selling or renting its proprietary data. Mark […]
The extreme fragmentation of digital media is tougher on national political campaigns than on brand advertisers. Because political campaigns must fight for every vote (at least once the primaries are done), discrete audiences that a brand marketer might dismiss as too difficult or small are essential to the political advertiser. The 3% of American adults that still connect […]
Unlike earned digital media, which is reinventing political campaigns, presidential candidates tend to view digital video as support for their flashy TV advertising. “The hope for digital, in my opinion,” said John Randall, VP of digital at the right-leaning agency CRAFT, “is that by 2020 we don’t even see a difference between TV and online or mobile video ads. But […]
“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]
In campaign speeches, TV appearances and public statements, Donald Trump frequently boasts about his campaign’s low ad spending. “I’ve spent no money and I’m No. 1,” he said recently on the “Today” show. “Other people have spent tens of millions of dollars and they’re floundering and doing poorly.” Unfortunately for his opponents, this statement – […]
“AdExchanger Politics“ is a new weekly column tracking developments in the 2016 political campaign cycle. Today’s column is written by Eric Berry, CEO at TripleLift. The political season is upon us, for better or worse. Cue the typical debates, false controversies, real controversies and, of course, ads. But the 2016 presidential campaign is unique because […]
In 2012, President Obama’s campaign spent about $112 million on digital media, which was divided among many media companies and some ad platforms. According to Nate Lubin, who was the campaign’s digital director and earlier this year left his position as director of digital strategy at the White House, “We got pitched by I don’t […]
Republican presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson has been surging in the polls, by a strict reading the only current rival to Donald Trump. Carson has approached the election from a fundamentally different perspective, said Ken Dawson, president of Eleventy Marketing Group, which received more than $400,000 from the Carson campaign for “web services” in the […]
Online political spending – while still trailing far behind the budgets assigned to TV – is poised to match or exceed even the world’s largest brand advertisers. But with no established agency or ad tech model in place, agnostic tech providers are looking to blaze new trails in the hypercompetitive DC market. Rubicon Project and […]
Ted Gurley, a Univision VP specializing in digital sales to political and advocacy groups, compared the current state of the TV industry to retail half a decade ago. Back then, the existence of brick-and-mortars seemed to be on a precipice as ecommerce companies came to power. But traditional stores surged back by integrating digital into […]
In the insulated world of political tech, market forces are insignificant compared to the capricious political winds. Imagine, for instance, if Pepsi had to let go of a significant chunk of its engineering talent if it was outsold by Coke at the end of a four-year period. This is a practical concern for political tech […]
Of the presidential contenders, President Obama’s reelection campaign has adopted the more broad-based display ad strategy in the campaign’s final two months. In analysis shared with AdExchanger, analytics firm Moat finds Obama’s campaign placed 10x the volume of display ads that Romney’s did, an estimate that is consistent with FEC data on Obama’s digital ad […]
The two leading presidential campaigns are exposing website visitor data to third parties via URL and page title information, according to Jonathan Mayer, a privacy advocate and Stanford graduate student. Mayer examined the information made available on the two candidates’ campaign websites, and found “both leak.” What’s more, he says the information visible to third parties […]
