DSPolitical Tightens Relationship With Three Partisan Data Vendors

DSPolitical has unveiled a direct API integration that will allow clients to import custom audiences directly from Catalist, TargetSmart, and PDI.

Mark Jablonowski, DSPolitical’s CTO, called it the “easy button” for Democratic data imports, noting the integration will make data transfers faster and more secure.

“We’re in the most important part of the election season right now and data is moving all over the place and ad buys are going up with a lot of speed and we wanted to make sure we could facilitate that as smoothly as possible,” he said. “This has been a long effort over a long period of time.”

Looking ahead, Jablonowski noted that the company was focusing on data integrations with partisan providers and that criteria would be used when weighing additional tie-ups, which require significant work on both sides of the relationship in order to be successful. “These three data vendors really are utilized by a very large swath of the Democratic and progressive community and that’s why it was important to work with each of them,” he said.

Now, the integration of the three data companies with DSPolitical’s Inbound Audience API was based on an existing model the company had with NGP VAN and its down-ballot focused DemocraticAds.com platform. Previously, DSPolitical also maintained ready-to-use audience segments from Catalist for clients who didn’t have direct access to voter-file data.

According to a release, onboarding the syndicated audience data — with match rates “over” 90 percent — will take “less than 24 hours.” But Jablonowski told C&E that if the accounts were already synced, “it’ll show up in almost real time.”

Despite being released to clients during the busiest advertising period in the cycle, Jablonowski wasn’t concerned about possible glitches.

“We really wanted a product that was ready for primetime,” he said. “We’ve done the R&D and engineering and testing. We’ve been working on making this happen for a long period of time. This is when the work got done.”