Elections mean something when it comes to privacy

A recent Campaigns & Elections article about the use of online behavioral tracking during election cycles cited a Wall Street Journal survey that found 59 percent of online users thought it was "very alarming" that companies had access to extensive online behavioral information and could use it to focus their campaigns.

In the recent past, candidates were exempt from the "Do Not Call" registries created to protect citizens from intrusive telemarketing campaigns. According to Campaigns & Elections, stakeholders are divided over whether they'll get the same treatment if "Do Not Track" legislation were to be enacted as proposed by FTC Guideline and several of the bills currently in Congress.

On the one hand behavioral tracking is a technology that empowers advertisers and marketers with information they desperately need in order to drive performance from commercial and informational campaigns - such as a politics. The challenge is that behavioral targeting has limits in that only 30 percent to 40 percent of online users have an active tracking pixel on their browser at any given time. This severely limits commercial benefit, and significantly reduces the reach that is required for any political campaign.

A better solution for political candidates might be to circumvent this method altogether. Candidates can now look to leverage publicly available data that not only respects voter privacy, but provides the comprehensive reach and relevancy that all campaigns require.

Using Semcasting's IP Audience Zones, politicians can benefit from traditional voter history and contribution data that are mapped to IP zones. IP Audience Zones is up to 77 times more granular than zip code targeting for politicians thanks to its sub-zip code voter block identification abilities.

Relying on over twelve years of voter registration history and publicly available demographic data, campaigns can target nearly 100 percent of the electorate that is online, based on predictive modeling, microtargeting, and demographic and psychographic traits, that pinpoint the appropriate campaign audience without violating user privacy.