Ad race for 2012 Elections heats up in time for the holidays

This year, political candidates will have to compete with the usual seasonal flood of holiday advertisements from retailers trying to make the most of the festive season. Not including the races for hundreds of congressional and local candidates, campaign spending for the presidential race this cycle is expected to blow away the 2008 campaign cycle's record-breaking $1 billion in advertisements.

"Ads in the presidential race will be the single largest sector," Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, told Advertising Age Magazine. Goldstein predicts that political advertising will generate between $2.5 billion and $3.2 billion this political cycle. Online spending for all categories is expected to hit $5 billion this year, according to AdvertisingAge.

With many states electing to hold their primaries earlier than usual this year, there's been a lot of scrambling to get the advertising messages out to the public in time. Online ads are a great way to move a campaign forward quickly because they typically don't require the same amount of preparation that television ads require in order to get placement..They also serve as a cost-effective way to build one's brand and to solicit campaign donations. However, online ads should make up just one part of a well-planned, multi-channel campaign in order to attain the maximum outreach.

"The window has really opened up," Jack Poor, vice president of marketing at the Television Bureau of Advertising, told the news source. "The implication for advertising is that campaigns will have to be active many more weeks, which is going to make it more expensive."

With all of these impending campaigns cueing up, marketers need a way to ensure that they have the tools to deliver the right results to aspiring candidates and their campaigns. They need a way to target the voters who are most likely to support their candidacy while also targeting those sitting on the fence. Campaign organizers need to reach those who have demonstrated a particular affiliation but who may have, for whatever reason, been unable to make it to the polls in recent years. Independent voters, fence-sitters and disenfranchised party members are the voters who have the power to put the candidate over the top in a close election.

Semcasting provides the perfect solution for political marketers who are looking to engage in highly targeted multi-channel campaigns. Semcasting’s multi-channel targeting approach helps campaigners identify the most qualified prospects for a particular candidate or campaign across multiple mediums. With 12 years of voting and fund raising history and more than 750 different demographic variables, Semcasting can target voters based on party affiliation, donor value, ethnicity, affluence, life stage, and interests. You can also provide a list of your current supporters, and Semcasting will create a predictive model that identifies the specific types of voters that should be contacted. Digital "look-alike" models for your direct mail, email, online and Facebook campaigns help identify all the potential supporters for any candidate or issue that is driving the campaign. Using that information, political marketers can craft an optimized multi-channel campaign in order to reach the largest number of supporters with the right message.