Marketing consumer products comes with plenty of challenges. But just try selling a political candidate in a hyper-polarized, 24-hour news environment.
That’s the world Mark Jablonowski has been operating in for most of this career. Jablonowski is the CEO of DSPolitical, a political ad platform specifically for Democrats and progressive causes that describes itself as a “meta DSP.”
DSPolitical onboards offline voter data, creates privacy-compliant audience segments, activates them through multiple bidders and then pulls the results back into a single reporting layer.
“It’s so jargony,” Jablonowski acknowledges wryly on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “What it really means is that we’re optimizing for potentially the most difficult-to-measure KPI on the planet, and that’s a secret ballot every other year.”
Because their KPI is the final election result – which is unknown until the ballots have been counted – political campaigns must stick very closely to first principles.
“Data has been the foundation of all political campaigning for the better part of 40 years,” Jablonowski says. “We’re optimized entirely around the outcome of [one] very high-stakes decision.”
For example, political advertisers are old hands at what Jablonowski calls “platinum-level CRM,” such as using voter files and modeled data to understand not just who people are but how likely they are to turn out or change their mind. Political advertisers are also adept at using exclusion rules to automatically scrub people who’ve already voted or returned an absentee ballot. No point in wasting impressions on those folks.
But the focus on data and efficiency doesn’t extend to connected TV, at least not yet.
CTV is growing fast and has become a major digital channel for political spending. But broadcast still commands a big share of budgets, in part because it’s familiar and easy to benchmark. Unfortunately, Jablonowski says, many campaigns are buying CTV with a broadcast mindset rather than taking full advantage of the underlying data, targeting and measurement options.
Old habits die hard.
“No political consultant has ever gotten fired for saying, ‘Let’s buy 1,000 points of TV,’” Jablonowski says. “[But], you know, maybe they will soon.”
Also in this episode: lessons that consumer brands can learn from political advertisers, what the launch of CNN in June 1980 has to do with today’s polarization, why political campaigns didn’t sweat all that third-party cookie deprecation drama and why Jablonowski is more worried about disinformation that spreads organically than he is about AI deepfakes.
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