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Political Advertising: Bullies, Trolls and Fake News

Written by Semcasting | Nov 7, 2017 8:46:36 PM

We’re back. The 2018 political cycle is starting to inch its way into our consciousness. The candidate committees are starting to gauge voter sentiment. The issue-based PACs are beginning to venture into early polling. Surrounded by the drumbeat of fake news stories, a deadlocked Congress, and the finger pointing at Facebook and Google – it is fair to wonder how ad-tech companies and digital political agencies should be approaching investments in the 2018 political process.

Website building is already in place. Programmatic display and video, combined with social media, will undoubtedly again take the lead as the venues of choice in digital outreach. Reach will still be a primary issue for candidates and PACs as they try to identify their target audience from the voter polls and do outreach either through onboarding to cookies or to IPs. Mobile will be key – most analysts place mobile at 70%+ as the preferred platform. Onboarding to IPs then becomes critical as unique user reach in mobile continues to be suppressed with cookies.

One of the changes in this cycle will be the introduction of website onboarding. Using universal IDs and tools such as UDX-Leads, identifying who is visiting your candidate’s website and screening them through voter data promises to be an effective tool for following up on fundraising targets and building mail and email lists. The ability to measure voter interest and turn that interest into names and addresses is something new.

UDX-Leads complements polling efforts beyond simple demographics. It can be a foundation tool for building your own high quality mailing and email lists for fundraising and getting out the vote. UDX-Leads provides insight as to how successful your advertising is working and (based on site visits) whether that speech at the Rotary Club or the campus visit is having the impact you expected.

UDX-Leads also can give you a heads up on the competition, candidate committees trolling your site, and even which policy statements on your site are attracting scrutiny that could lead to posts that misrepresent your candidate’s position.

UDX-Leads was developed as a foundational tool for the website owner that picks up where Google Analytics leaves off. Rather than just counts and summary statistics, you now get hard leads on donors, mailing lists, issue popularity and competitive behaviors to follow up on. At $495 for daily updates by email and $25 per thousand leads, UDX-Leads provides a lot of insight for short money.

For more information on how UDX-Leads can work for you and your candidate contact us today.