2012 candidates turn to enhanced geo-targeting for the coming election

In 2008, Barak Obama was the first political candidate to employ the popular video streaming site Hulu.com for his campaign's online advertisements. Since then, a number of other candidates have followed, hoping to see the same success. According to ComScore data from September 2011, they might have the right idea, as 80 percent of eligible voters who log in to Hulu are likely to turn up at the polls come November.

Among users, Hulu is well-known for its Ad Tailor service, which allows viewers to choose which types of ads they'd like to view. The mechanism learns from prior choices and aims to deliver only the ads it considers most relevant to viewers. This year, however, political ads will take a different tack: zip-code targeting. Zip-code targeting involves tracking an online user's IP address to determine where they are in the United States. For political candidates, some ads are only relevant to a specific constituency, zip code level targeting is a start as otherwise a Congressman from Kansas could spend millions on ads that run outside of his district, effectively wasting a large portion of the ad buy.

"The idea of paying a really high CPM isn't that bad if in fact you're able to shave off that 90 [percent] inefficiency with zip-code targeting, which makes it very competitive [with TV], impression for impression," Josh Koster, managing partner of the Democratic agency Chong & Koster, told Advertising Age.

In politics, as in business, campaign managers are willing to spend as long as it will produce favorable, tangible results. Most feel that spending more for a larger CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is a worthwhile enterprise, so long as they are guaranteed that a high percentage of the viewers exposed to the ads will show up at the polls and support their cause. The issue, however, is that even with careful zip code level targeting there can be considerable waste. A single zip code is typically going to have voters who come from different ethnic groups, life stage, affluence and work history. They often align with and contribute to different candidates and different parties.

Getting below zip code level - down to the neighborhood - with targeting based on demographic profiles is the one way to assure that a candidate is reaching the right audience to introduce their platform and focus their message directly to the constituency that will be moved to vote on that position.

Semcasting has recently introduced IP Audience Zones providing politicians and parties with the ability to identify user audiences down to the sub zip-code level. By using high-quality, publicly available data along with patentedIP analytics, IP Audience Zones can be up to 77 times more granular and targeted than standard zip code geo-targeting methods. IP Zones also provides nearly 100 percent coverage of each location that is online and does this without placing tracking cookies.

Semcasting’s IP Zones gives candidates the ability to identify at a neighborhood level, voter blocks, of households aligned to their message and ideas. Candidates can effectively promote their overall brand online as well as do fund raising because the economics of online advertising changes when 100 percent of the right audience can be reached in a targeted way.