Politics and Wooden Shoes

Author's Note: Technological innovations can inform us on how outreach can be made more efficiently online.  The following article discusses the need for a new, more effective, voter targeting solution in this election. IP Zones allows campaigns to reach three times the number of unique qualified voters without using cookies or compromising privacy. Verification of voter's party alignment and identifying prospects for fundraising or GOTV activity at scale is important.  IP Zones changes the math of online and social outreach, and could change campaigns in 2012.

Some would claim that in the 2008 election, the rise of social media and the increased popularity of the Internet contributed heavily in resetting the equilibrium of politics back in favor of the common voter.  The machinery of politics had long been an insider’s game fueled by a system of mutual benefaction and big money interests.  The Obama campaign gave the political machines on both sides of the aisle the “wooden shoe” treatment, bypassing some of the traditional methods of campaigning and directly motivating and exciting voters.  They leveraged new technologies that increased awareness and secured more active participation, and raised more money from a broader base of voters than had ever been done in the past.

There can be no doubt that in 2012 the process of campaigning will change again.  Some of the change will come from technological advancements in voter outreach that have emerged since 2008, and some of it will be as a direct result of legislation.

In January 2010 the rules of campaign finance were redefined.  A landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court overturned the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.  Citizens United opened the gate for wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions to contribute unlimited funds in order to drive public opinion on issues they want their candidate to support.  What was cutting edge electioneering in 2008 with micro-targeting, predictive analytics, the Internet, Social Media could easily be swamped in this cycle by the unlimited funds that are being deployed by special interests.  We have already seen evidence of how this ruling has impacted the 2012 presidential race.  In the GOP primaries one candidate outspent all other his rivals by at least four to 1.  According to a report from Politico GOP aligned Crossroads GPS, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Americans For Prosperity alone are planning to spend roughly $1 billion this election cycle.  According to Politico these outside groups will spend more than the combined total of the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee.

An outgrowth of spending $1 billion on influence advertising is that a candidate’s position on an issue, and any falsehoods the opposing candidate comes up with in rebuttal, are going to be pre-packaged as hyperbole for maximum newsworthiness.  These sound-bites will resonate the loudest across the cable news shows, but also filter out on Twitter and Facebook as unverified and unsubstantiated factoids that can never be effectively attributed, challenged, or taken back.   At a Citizens United level of spending the only way to combat this kind of message war is to open up new channels that inform and engage voters at a different level.

The 2012 campaign could turn on whether the Obama team realizes that the 2008 version of the online playbook is not necessarily going to work against the Romney PAC contributions.  Citizens United will be a game-changer for certain media channels but the Internet and Social Media can serve as an effective counter-balance if executed in much more robust way than it was possible to do in 2008.

In their favor are certain core infrastructure advancements in technology that have taken hold, empowering more efficient outreach to a broader coalition of voters.  More voters, with different interests, hot-buttons, and agendas can now be segmented, targeted and engaged in conversations about what matters to them.
Engaging voters at scale will be the key.

The formula of scale requires that the “plumbing” be in place.  Facebook and Twitter have both grown up since 2008. In 2008 Facebook had an estimated 40 million U.S. users and in 2012 they have 172 million U.S. users. Twitter had less than 1 million in 2008 and in 2012 they now have 108 million. Neither Facebook nor Twitter had any established advertising or promotion model in 2008. Both platforms have added a number of engagement features for audiences including robust video and the endorsement of friends feature such as “Like”. In 2008 Facebook was a young voter phenomenon but today it is just as effective with the key constituencies of voters over 60 years old.

In 2008 the only way to reach a qualified audience in the “open” Internet was to advertise and sponsor select sites that were sometimes partisan or hopefully aligned with the segment of the voter population that you were trying to reach.  Campaigns could also “cookie” visitors to those sites and track them elsewhere on the internet.  The objective then was to generate enthusiasm among loyalists and bring them back to the candidate’s site.  Once at the site emails are gathered and the campaign message is relentlessly distributed – often multiple times a day with populist punch lines and $5 requests.  In effect the campaigns are still cherry picking loyalists online.  Good work for 2008 and even 2010.  It will be entirely insufficient for 2012.

In the words of the political commentator of the late 1950’s - Walter Lippman, “Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.”  At some point you have to talk to those who aren’t inclined to follow you if you are going to effect change.

Since the last presidential election occurred the ability to target qualified audiences regardless of which websites are visited has become the preferred technological approach for online advertising.  Called behavioral targeting, it is based on real-time bidding against pools of cookies.  A cookie is a tag placed on a user’s machine when they visit a site.  Ad networks try to qualify and categorize visitors by their interests and life-stage based on the content of sites they visited.

There are serious systemic shortcomings with cookies, or behavioral targeting, that is particularly relevant to the 2012 campaign.  The main issue is a lack of scale.  Cookies are set on the browser of the user but they typically designed to expire after a month.  Increasingly cookies are also actively blocked by end users who don’t want to be tracked online because of privacy concerns.  A recent count of available cookies on two top data management platforms topped out with national coverage of inferred registered Democrats at less than 11% and Republicans at less than 8%.  The limited reach for cookie-based inventory is an acknowledged industry issue – even for mainstream categories like finance. The number of active cookie available at any given time is less than one-third of the people online for national campaigns and often much less for local campaigns. Cookie-based targeting simply won’t provide the campaign with the necessary accuracy or reach they need to get to more voters at scale.

Privacy legislation also poses a potential problem for the 2012 candidates.   “Do Not Track” is gaining momentum both in Congress and within the industry. Microsoft recently announced its new browser IE10 will ship with Do Not Track set as the default.  These pending privacy issues may serve as a not-so-subtle reminder to candidates who actively employ behavioral targeting that they may be leaving themselves open to a public relations, if not, legal issue.

Recognizing that 2008 technologies and methods are likely to prove insufficient, emerging targeting technologies such as IP Zones apply historical voting patterns, contributions history and predictive modeling to locate concentrations of qualified voters as virtual online neighborhoods and groups them based on their alignment with the party and the key issues such as health care, jobs, and women’s rights. The key with IP Zones is scale.  The patent pending IP Zones offers nearly 100% reach to the qualified voter audience and does not place any cookies or track anyone online.

IP Zones breaks down online traffic in real-time into over 25 million demographic and socio-economic neighborhood level clusters.  It offers verified audiences of registered Democrats, Republicans, voters leaning to one candidate or another, issues voters, and high value or repeat contributors. IP Zones can also serve as the basis of building custom micro-targeting segments.  With this targeting approach crowdsourcing of potential voters based on their alignment on key issues and their demographic profile such as age, ethnicity, income, education and family composition is both possible and practical.

The improved maturity and scale of Social Media and Online Advertising is available to both sides.  According to the FEC through March, the Obama team had spent $19 million online while the Romney team had spent $5.2 million.  However, what we have seen so far is both campaigns playing by 2008 rules - reserving ad sponsorship positions on partisan sites and chasing “likes" and email registrations one click through at a time.  Unless the campaigns are able to deploy more advanced targeting techniques and reach many more voters online than they did in 2008, we'll suffer as the sound bites playing on MSNBC and Fox take over.

Innovation in the online marketplace is nothing new, but the technology of 2012 makes engaging voters on issues and ideas in a more personal and substantive way advantageous.   Reaching nearly 100% of your target voters with the right message is important.  Getting beyond the 2008 playbook could be the only way to throw a “wooden shoe” into this, the media-fueled, Citizens United version of the political machine.

Ray Kingman is the CEO of Semcasting, Inc. He can be reached at rkingman@semcasting.com. For more information visit: www.semcasting.com.